Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the Free Software Foundation's free software ideas and perceived benefits to the commercial software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code.[9] The new term they chose was "open source", which was soon adopted by Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage use of the new term and evangelize open-source principles.[10]
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While the Open Source Initiative sought to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize the principles it adhered to, commercial software vendors found themselves increasingly threatened by the concept of freely distributed software and universal access to an application's source code. Microsoft executive Jim Allchin publicly stated in 2001 that "open source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business."[11] However, while free and open-source software has historically played a role outside of the mainstream of private software development, companies as large as Microsoft have begun to develop official open-source presences on the Internet. IBM, Oracle, Google, and State Farm are just a few of the companies with a serious public stake in today's competitive open-source market. There has been a significant shift in the corporate philosophy concerning the development of FOSS.[12]
The Open Source Definition presents an open-source philosophy and further defines the terms of use, modification and redistribution of open-source software. Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be reserved by copyright law to the copyright holder. Several open-source software licenses have qualified within the boundaries of the Open Source Definition. The most prominent and popular example is the GNU General Public License (GPL), which "allows free distribution under the condition that further developments and applications are put under the same licence", thus also free.[18]
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), started in 1985, intended the word "free" to mean freedom to distribute (or "free as in free speech") and not freedom from cost (or "free as in free beer"). Since a great deal of free software already was (and still is) free of charge, such free software became associated with zero cost, which seemed anti-commercial.[9]
OSI uses The Open Source Definition to determine whether it considers a software license open source. The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily by Perens.[27][28][29] Perens did not base his writing on the "four freedoms" from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which were only widely available later.[30]
Despite initially accepting it,[32] Richard Stallman of the FSF now flatly opposes the term "Open Source" being applied to what they refer to as "free software". Although he agrees that the two terms describe "almost the same category of software", Stallman considers equating the terms incorrect and misleading.[33] Stallman also opposes the professed pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative, as he fears that the free software ideals of freedom and community are threatened by compromising on the FSF's idealistic standards for software freedom.[34] The FSF considers free software to be a subset of open-source software, and Richard Stallman explained that DRM software, for example, can be developed as open source, despite that it does not give its users freedom (it restricts them), and thus doesn't qualify as free software.[35]
Examples of free software license / open-source licenses include Apache License, BSD license, GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License, MIT License, Eclipse Public License and Mozilla Public License.
An important legal milestone for the open source / free software movement was passed in 2008, when the US federal appeals court ruled that free software licenses definitely do set legally binding conditions on the use of copyrighted work, and they are therefore enforceable under existing copyright law. As a result, if end-users violate the licensing conditions, their license disappears, meaning they are infringing copyright.[38]Despite this licensing risk, most commercial software vendors are using open-source software in commercial products while fulfilling the license terms, e.g. leveraging the Apache license.[39]
Moreover, lower costs of marketing and logistical services are needed for OSS. It is a good tool to promote a company's image, including its commercial products.[47] The OSS development approach has helped produce reliable, high quality software quickly and inexpensively.[48]
Open-source development offers the potential to quicken innovation and the creation of innovation and social value. In France for instance, a policy that incentivized government to favor free open-source software increased to nearly 600,000 OSS contributions per year, generating social value by increasing the quantity and quality of open-source software. This policy also led to an estimated increase of up to 18% of tech startups and a 14% increase in the number of people employed in the IT sector.[49]
Moreover, free software can be developed in accordance with purely technical requirements. It does not require thinking about commercial pressure that often degrades the quality of the software. Commercial pressures make traditional software developers pay more attention to customers' requirements than to security requirements, since such features are somewhat invisible to the customer.[51]
Revision control systems such as Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and later Subversion (SVN) and Git are examples of tools, often themselves open source, help manage the source code files and the changes to those files for a software project.[53] The projects are frequently stored in "repositories" that are hosted and published on source-code-hosting facilities such as Launchpad, GitHub, GitLab, and SourceForge.[54]
Companies whose business centers on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of how to make money providing software that is by definition licensed free of charge. Each of these business strategies rests on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees (often via a service-level agreement) to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection (e.g., indemnification from copyright or patent infringement), or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.
According to the free software movement's leader, Richard Stallman, the main difference is that by choosing one term over the other (i.e. either "open source" or "free software") one lets others know about what one's goals are: "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement."[34] Nevertheless, there is significant overlap between open source software and free software.[35]
The FSF[70] said that the term "open source" fosters an ambiguity of a different kind such that it confuses the mere availability of the source with the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it. On the other hand, the "free software" term was criticized for the ambiguity of the word "free" as "available at no cost", which was seen as discouraging for business adoption,[71] and for the historical ambiguous usage of the term.[9][72][73]
Developers have used the alternative terms Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), or Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), consequently, to describe open-source software that is also free software.[74] While the definition of open source software is very similar to the FSF's Free Software Definition[75] it was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily by Bruce Perens with input from Eric S. Raymond and others.[76]
Open-sourcing is the act of propagating the open source movement, most often referring to releasing previously proprietary software under an open source/free software license,[82] but it may also refer programming Open Source software or installing Open Source software.
Open-source software projects are built and maintained by a network of volunteer programmers and are widely used in free as well as commercial products.[39] Prime examples of open-source products are the Apache HTTP Server, the e-commerce platform osCommerce, internet browsers Mozilla Firefox and Chromium (the project where the vast majority of development of the freeware Google Chrome is done) and the full office suite LibreOffice. One of the most successful open-source products is the Linux operating system, an open-source Unix-like operating system, and its derivative Android, an operating system for mobile devices.[85][86] In some industries, open-source software is the norm.[87]
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