Free and open-source software is computer software that can be classified as both free
software and open source software.
That is, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any
way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily
improve the design of the software.
This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright
and the source code is usually hidden from the users.
The benefits of using FOSS can include decreasing software costs, increasing security and stability,
protecting privacy, and giving users more control over their own hardware.
Free, open-source operating systems such as Linux and descendents of BSD are widely utilized
today, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones, and other devices.
Free software licences and open-source licenses are used by many software packages.
History
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it was far more common for computer users to have the
permission to observe the source code, modify and distribute software.
Software, including source code, was commonly shared by individuals who used computers.
Most companies had a business model based on hardware sales, and provided or bundled
the software free of charge.
Organizations of users and suppliers were formed to facilitate the exchange of software;
see, for example, SHARE and DECUS.
By the late 1960s, the prevailing business model around software was changing.
A growing and evolving software industry was competing with the hardware manufacturer's
bundled software products; rather than funding software development from hardware revenue,
these new companies were selling software directly.
Leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and
some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of software bundled
with hardware product costs.
In United States vs. IBM, filed 17 January 1969, the government charged that bundled
software was anticompetitive.
While some software might always be free, there would be a growing amount of software
that was for sale only.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, some parts of the software industry began using technical
measures to prevent computer users from being able to use reverse engineering techniques
to study and customize software they had paid for.
In 1980, the copyright law was extended to computer programs in the United States
In 1983, Richard Stallman, longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, announced the GNU project, saying that he had become frustrated
with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users.
Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free
Software Foundation was founded in October 1985.
An article outlining the project and its goals was published in March 1985 titled the GNU
Manifesto.
The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, Free Software Definition
and "copyleft" ideas.
The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code
in 1991.
The first licence wasn't a free or open-source software licence.
However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General
Public License.
Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers.
FreeBSD and NetBSD were released as free software when the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out
of court in 1993.
OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995.
Also in 1995, The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache, was released under
the Apache License 1.0.
In 1997, Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a reflective analysis of the
hacker community and free software principles.
The paper received significant attention in early 1998, and was one factor in motivating
Netscape Communications Corporation to release their popular Netscape Communicator Internet
suite as free software.
This code is today better known as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.
Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the FSF's free software
ideas and perceived benefits to the commercial software industry.
They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape,
and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential
of sharing and collaborating on software source code.
The new name they chose was "open source", and quickly Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly,
Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding.
The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage use of the new
term and evangelize open-source principles.
While the Open Source Initiative sought to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize
the principles it adhered to, commercial software vendors found themselves increasingly threatened
by the concept of freely distributed software and universal access to an application's source
code.
A Microsoft executive publicly stated in 2001 that "open source is an intellectual property
destroyer.
I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the
intellectual-property business."
This view perfectly summarizes the initial response to FOSS by some software corporations.
However, while FOSS has historically played a role outside of the mainstream of private
software development, companies as large as Microsoft have begun to develop official open-source
presences on the Internet.
IBM, Oracle, Google and State Farm are just a few of the companies with a serious public
stake in today's competitive open-source market.
There has been a significant shift in the corporate philosophy concerning the development
of free and open-source software.
Controversy While copyright is the primary legal mechanism
that FOSS authors use to ensure license compliance for their software, other mechanisms such
as legislation, patents, and trademarks have implications as well.
In response to legal issues with patents and the DMCA, the Free Software Foundation released
version 3 of its GNU Public License in 2007 that explicitly addressed the DMCA and patent
rights.
After the development of the GNU GPLv3, as copyright holder of many pieces of the GNU
system, such as the GCC compiler software, the FSF updated most of the GNU programs'
licenses from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
Apple a user of GCC, and a heavy user of both DRM and patents decided to switch the compiler
in its Xcode IDE from GCC to Clang, another FOSS compiler, but which is under a permissive
license.
LWN speculated that Apple was motivated partly by a desire to avoid GPLv3.
The Samba project also switched to GPLv3, which Apple replaced in their software suite
with a closed-source, proprietary software alternative.
Mergers have affected major open-source software.
Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB, owner of the popular open-source MySQL database,
in 2008.
Oracle in turn purchased Sun in January, 2010, acquiring their copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
This made Oracle the owner of the most popular proprietary database and the most popular
open-source database.
Oracle's attempts to commercialize the open-source MySQL database have raised concerns in the
FOSS community.
Partly in response to uncertainty about the future of MySQL, the FOSS community forked
the project into new database systems outside of Oracle's control.
These include MariaDB, Percona, and Drizzle.
All of these have distinct names; they are distinct projects and can not use the trademarked
name MySQL.
In August, 2010, Oracle sued Google claiming that its use of Java in Android infringed
on Oracle's copyrights and patents.
The Oracle v. Google case ended In May 2012, with the finding that Google did not infringe
on Oracle's patents, and the trial judge ruled that the structure of the Java APIs used by
Google was not copyrightable.
The jury found that Google infringed a small number of copied files, but the parties stipulated
that Google would pay no damages.
Oracle has appealed to the Federal Circuit, and Google has filed a cross-appeal on the
literal copying claim.
FOSS and Benkler's new economy According to Yochai Benkler, Jack N. and Lillian
R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, free software
is the most visible part of a new economy of commons-based peer production of information,
knowledge, and culture.
As examples, he cites a variety of FOSS projects, including both free software and open source.
This new economy is already under development.
In order to commercialize FOSS, many companies, Google being the most successful, are moving
towards an economic model of advertising-supported software.
In such a model, the only way to increase revenue is to make the advertising more valuable.
Facebook has recently come under fire for using novel user tracking methods to accomplish
this.
This new economy is not without alternatives.
Apple's App Stores have proven very popular with both users and developers.
The Free Software Foundation considers Apple's App Stores to be incompatible with its GPL
and complained that Apple was infringing on the GPL with its iTunes terms of use.
Rather than change those terms to comply with the GPL, Apple removed the GPL-licensed products
from its App Stores.
The authors of VLC, one of the GPL-licensed programs at the center of those complaints,
now bi-licensed VLC for iOS under the Mozilla Public License Version 2 as well as the GNU
General Public License Version 2 or later.
VLC authors stated that "The MPLv2 is applicable for distribution on the App Store" and so
VLC for iOS was reintroduced in the App Store.
Naming
Free software Richard Stallman's Free Software Definition,
adopted by the Free Software Foundation, defines free software as a matter of liberty, not
price.
The earliest known publication of the definition of his free software idea was in the February
1986 edition of the FSF's now-discontinued GNU's Bulletin publication.
The canonical source for the document is in the philosophy section of the GNU Project
website.
As of April 2008, it is published there in 39 languages.
Open source The Open Source Definition is used by the
Open Source Initiative to determine whether a software license qualifies for the organization's
insignia for open source software.
The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily
by Bruce Perens.
Perens did not base his writing on the four freedoms of free software from the Free Software
Foundation, which were only later available on the web.
FOSS The first known use of the phrase free open
source software on Usenet was in a posting on 18 March 1998, just a month after the term
open source itself was coined.
In February 2002, F/OSS appeared on a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to Amiga computer games.
In early 2002, MITRE used the term FOSS in what would later be their 2003 report Use
of Free and Open Source Software in the U.S. Department of Defense.
FLOSS The acronym FLOSS was coined in 2001 by Rishab
Aiyer Ghosh for freeopen-source software.
Later that year, the European Commission used the phrase when they funded a study on the
topic.
Unlike libre software, which aimed to solve the ambiguity problem, FLOSS aimed to avoid
taking sides in the debate over whether it was better to say "free software" or to say
"open-source software".
Proponents of the term point out that parts of the FLOSS acronym can be translated into
other languages, with for example the F representing free or frei, and the L representing libre,
livre, or libero, liber and so on.
However, this term is not often used in official, non-English, documents, since the words in
these languages for free as in freedom do not have the ambiguity problem of free in
English.
By the end of 2004, the FLOSS acronym had been used in official English documents issued
by South Africa, Spain, and Brazil.
The terms "FLOSS" and "FOSS" have come under some criticism for being counterproductive
and sounding silly.
For instance, Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has stated:
"Near as I can figure ... people think they’d be making an ideological commitment ... if
they pick 'open source' or 'free software'.
Well, speaking as the guy who promulgated 'open source' to abolish the colossal marketing
blunders that were associated with the term 'free software', I think 'free software' is
less bad than 'FLOSS'.
Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery."
Raymond quotes programmer Rick Moen as stating:
"I continue to find it difficult to take seriously anyone who adopts an excruciatingly bad, haplessly
obscure acronym associated with dental hygiene aids" and "neither term can be understood
without first understanding both free software and open source, as prerequisite study."
Copyleft vs permissive Licenses that restrict mixing of works licensed
under them with proprietary works, like GNU GPL 3, are called copyleft licenses.
Licenses considered to have minimum restrictions of that kind, like Apache license, are called
permissive software licenses.
Dualism of FOSS The primary license difference between free
software and open source is one of philosophy.
According to the Free Software Foundation, "Nearly all open source software is free software.
The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based
on fundamentally different values."
Thus, the Open Source Initiative considers many free software licenses to also be open
source.
These include the latest versions of the FSF's three main licenses, the GPL, the Lesser General
Public License, and the GNU Affero General Public License.
Adoption by governments
The Government of Kerala, India, announced its official support for free/open-source
software in its State IT Policy of 2001, which was formulated after the first-ever free software
conference in India, "Freedom First!", held in July 2001 in Trivandrum, the capital of
Kerala, where Richard Stallman inaugurated the Free Software Foundation of India.
In the German City of Munich, conversion of 15.000 PCs and laptops from Microsoft Windows-based
operating systems to an Debian-based Linux environment took ten years; after successful
completion of the project, over 80% of all computers were running Linux.
In 2004, a law in Venezuela went into effect, mandating a two year transition to open source
in all public agencies.
As of June 2009 this ambitious transition is still under way.
Malaysia launched the "Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software Program", saving millions
on proprietary software licences until 2008.
In 2005 the Government of Peru voted to adopt open source across all its bodies.
The 2002 response to Microsoft's critique is available online.
In the preamble to the bill, the Peruvian government stressed that the choice was made
to ensure that key pillars of democracy were safeguarded: "The basic principles which inspire
the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law."
In September, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced its formal adoption of the OpenDocument
standard for all Commonwealth entities.
In 2006, the Brazilian government has simultaneously encouraged the distribution of cheap computers
running Linux throughout its poorer communities by subsidizing their purchase with tax breaks.
In April, Ecuador passed a similar law, Decree 1014, designed to migrate the public sector
to Libre Software.
In February 2009, the United States White House moved its website to Linux servers using
Drupal for content management.
In March, the French Gendarmerie Nationale announced it will totally switch to Ubuntu
by 2015.
In January 2010, the Government of Jordan announced that it has formed a partnership
with Ingres Corporation, a leading open source database management company based in the United
States that is now known as Actian Corporation, to promote the use of open-source software
starting with university systems in Jordan.
See also
References
External links FOSSBazaar: community for free and open source
software governance FLOSSworld: FreeOpen Source Software: Worldwide
impact study Free / Open Source Research Community
FreeOpenSourceSoftware.org: Wiki on FOSS history, organizations, licenses, people, software.
International Free and Open Source Software Foundation