~tErm FREE in OpEn SoUrcE SoftwarE~

>>> Free and open source software (F/OSS, FOSS) or free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporations.


>>> In the context of free and open-source software, free refers to the freedom to copy and re-use the software. rather than to the price of the software. The Free Software Foundation, an organization that advocates the free software model, suggest that, to understand the concept, one should "think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer".


>>> FOSS is an inclusive term that covers both free software and open source software, which despite describing similar development models, have differing cultures and philosophies. Free software focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users, where as open source software focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model. FOSS is a term that can be used without particular bias towards either political approach.


>>> Free software licenses and open source licenses are used by many software package. While the licenses themselves are in most cases the same, the two terms grew out of different philosophies and are often used to signify different distribution methodologies.



Naming

a) Free Software

      ===> The Free Software Definition, written by Richard Stallman and published by Free Software Foundation (FSF), defines free software as a matter of liberty, not price. The earliest known publication of the definition was in February 1986 edition of the now-discountinued GNU's Bulletin publication of FSF. 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 languanges.

b) Open Source

     ===> The Open Source Definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to determine whether a software license can be considered open source. 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 widely available later.

c) 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 computers games. In early 2002, MITRE used the term FOSS in what would later be their 2003 report Use of Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) in the U.S Department of Defense.

d) FLOSS

    ===> The acronym FLOSS was coined in 2001 by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh for free/libre/open source software. Later thet year, the European Commission(EC) used the phrase when they funded a study on the topic.
   ===> Unlike libre software, which aimed to solve the ambigiuty problem, FLOSS aimed to avoid taking sides in the debate over whether it was better to sat "free software" or to say "open source software".
  ===> Proponents of the term point out that parts of the FLOSS acronym can be translated into their languanges, with for example the F representing free (English) or frei (German), and the Lrepresenting libre (Spanish of French), livre (Portuguese), or libero (Italian), and so on. However, this term is not often used in official non-English, documents, since the words in these languange for free as in freedom do not have the ambigiuty 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.

Criticism of "FLOSS" and "FOSS"

~~~>>  The term "FLOSS" and "FOSS" have come unde rsome 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".