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Comment by NoTeslaThrow | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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> 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.

> 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).

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

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