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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

> When software is open-source, it is open-source, not necessarily free and open-source (FOSS), and even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive licence.

I strongly dislike this obviously controversial bit being snuck into an otherwise reasonable argument. The term FOSS is meant to unify "free software" and "open source software" and there is absolutely no reason to accept GNU's definition of "free software" and not OSI's arguably more successful definition of "open source" software. After all, "free" software, to this day, just sounds like freeware to the layperson, and meanwhile, there is other industry jargon you can use for when the source code is available but the copyright license doesn't meet these criteria.

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> and there is absolutely no reason to accept GNU's definition of "free software" and not OSI's arguably more successful definition of "open source" software

The reason was to not dilute the politcal agenda of the original movement, and this dilution is exactly why "open-source" was created.

> The term FOSS is meant to unify "free software" and "open source software"

I have always assumed it to mean the intersection of the two contexts. As in, necessarily copyleft.

A layperson doesn't know what copyleft is anyway; they hardly seem worth tailoring communicating for if you're not also going to explain the difference the terms encapsulate and why people might care. Just use "open source" at that point.

As far as I'm concerned the OSI doesn't have any weight and there's little reason to think we share values sufficiently for me to start caring. Do I look like a corporation trying to slap some sense of community on a product?

> I have always assumed it to mean the intersection of the two contexts. As in, necessarily copyleft.

The definitions are very, very similar. Neither imply copyleft; almost all open source licenses are free software licenses and vice versa.

> As far as I'm concerned the OSI doesn't have any weight and there's little reason to think we share values sufficiently for me to start caring. Do I look like a corporation trying to slap some sense of community on a product?

All I'm saying is that if we accept "free" as implying the GNU free software definition, then we should accept "open source" as implying the OSI definition. There is no logical reason for why GNU's jargon is somehow better than OSI's.

> Neither imply copyleft

The "free software" part necessarily implies copyleft.

> There is no logical reason for why GNU's jargon is somehow better than OSI's.

There's no logical reason to conflate them, either. I'm free to mock the term as I see fit.

“Free software” does not imply copyleft, not even to the FSF. The MIT license is a free software license even by their definition.

> I have always assumed it to mean the intersection of the two contexts. As in, necessarily copyleft.

It's the union.

Actually it's harder than that: it's the union, but I challenge you to find a license that is open source and not free, or that is free and not open source :-).

I think there is a difference in philosophy between two parts of the movement, but in practice, what we call "open source software" is the same as "free software" (in terms of licences).

There is no Open Source software that is not free, if we are using the OSI definition of Open Source. FOSS just adds a certain emphasis for reasons of the historic tension between the FSF/GNU "free software" advocates and the "open source" advocates. FOSS doesn't mean that OSS is not free without the F.

There are a few twits out there who believe (or at least troll) that proprietary software whose source code is available is "open source". So FOSS provides the minor and largely unnecessary benefit of making it clear that it's not that.

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