With the last few posts dedicated to discussion on general management, let me take a detour to another area of my interest, Technology.
As a technology professional, I have been most influenced by the Open Source movement and have participated in multiple open source projects both through my employer and on my own.
Till recently, I used to write exclusively on open source for a tech start-up; for some reason, the start-up has gone into hibernation and my blog entries at the said site have gone into hiding :)
Here, I reproduce some of those blog entries, to keep them alive!
Free Software, Open Source and FLOSS
For the uninitiated, the three terms, 'Free Software', 'Open Source' and 'FLOSS' can create a lot of confusion and if I may say, Headache; throw-in few more terms like 'Freeware', 'Shared-source' etc. and you have a perfect motley of terms which seem very difficult to distinguish and understand. Further, in many cases, certain products would qualify under one or more of the these terms, making matters far more difficult.
Here, we make an attempt to make sense of these terms and their application. There is lot of history behind each of these terms and we would touch upon important aspects as we go along.
Well, the story begins with the advent of 'Free Software'. The Free Software Movement was launched in 1983 with the GNU Project. Richard Stallman is widely credited with the launch of this movement. So, what does Free Software stand for?
Free Software refers to a category of software which provides users the freedom to run it, to study and change it, to re-distribute copies with or without changes. At the same-time, Free Software does not mean without price. The oft-quoted line for Free Software is to think of it as akin to 'Free Speech' and not 'Free Beer'. Thus, developers of Free Software may charge for the software and still provide all the above choices. And this is what makes it different from Freeware.
Okay, now where does Open Source fit in here? The story took a twist is 1998 when, a group of individuals including Eric S. Raymond advocated that the term Free Software be replaced by Open Source Software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable with the corporate world. For this group of individuals, Open Source was akin to superior development methodology where a product evolution is faster since it is distributed across countless users and is open to scrutiny. However, Free Software was developed as a 'Social Philosophy' against proprietary software and was not comfortable with this approach suggested for open source.
And thus, came into being, two software categories with similar basic tenets but different philosophies. At the core, Open source software and free software are different terms for software which comes with certain rights, or freedoms, for the user. They describe two approaches and philosophies towards free software. Open source and free software both describe software which is free from onerous licensing restrictions. It may be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction.
The difference in the terms is where they place the emphasis. “Free software” is defined in terms of giving the user freedom. This reflects the goal of the free software movement. “Open source” highlights that the source code is viewable to all and proponents of the term usually emphasize the quality of the software and how this is caused by the development models which are possible and popular among free and open source software projects. There are very few cases of software that is free software but is not open source software and vice-versa.
Finally, we come to 'FLOSS' which stands for 'Free/Libre Open Source Software". FLOSS is a term which has emerged to explain common ideas of Free Software and Open Source to the end-user. For an end user, both the terms are almost identical with same licenses thus; a combined term would mean less of a hassle.
All of the above three terms have extensive literature available around them; some of it is reference below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FLOSS_Concept_Booklet
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
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