Why is the word free associated with open source?
Free in the case of open source does not mean something that you don’t pay for (gratis). But, it means free from restriction (liberty); you are free to modify and share the code. When you say open source, do you mean Linux? Linux is not all that there is to open source. Of course, there is the Linux OS, but there are other OSs, too, such as Free BSD. Then there are apps and software (from office suites, databases, Web and server-side apps and development environments to scientific and engineering apps) that run on these. Apache, PERL, Tomcat, MySQL and Sendmail are some well-known open-source projects. Is open source software only available on Linux? No. In fact, there’s tons of open-source software that runs on Windows. There’s open source software available for just about every application category in Windows, be it office suites, e-mail, multimedia or the Internet. There’s Mozilla Web browser, Filezilla FTP client, VirtualDub video-capturing software and a plethora of instant messen
