Whats the difference between free software and open source software?
Except for a few rare situations, these terms are interchangeable. “Free software” is the term used by Richard Stallman since 1983 to refer to software which comes with permission to study, share, modify, and redistribute either without or without your modifications. “Open source software” is a term popularised by Open Source Initiative (OSI) in 1998, hoping to be a more marketable name for free software. Unfortunately, OSI is less firm in it’s criteria and it’s interpretation. There are some projects which are open source software but do not qualify as free software. In practice, these projects are rarely widely. GNU software is free software, and it is open source software, and the same is true for the Linux kernel, Mozilla, OpenOffice, GNOME, KDE, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, ViM, Perl, Python, etc. The Open Source advocacy line is that “software is developed better when the code is open”. This is often true, but it tells people that convenience is the reasonf for choosing the software. Thus,
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