The methodologies of Open Source are not owned or guided by any one person. The closest thing we have are the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The OSI certifies what qualifies as an open source license.

Hearing the terms "free software" or "open source," you might imagine that they referred to a single school of thought. Even "free and open source software" (FOSS) suggests only two different outlooks: Free software, which values political and philosophical freedom, and open source, whose main interest is enhanced software quality.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --

Open source has a lot of advantages. For starters, the license is free, which means you take a huge part of the expense out of the equation, but just because the license is free doesn't mean the entire implementation is. You still have to learn about it, set it up, possibly customize it, roll it out, train your users and so forth, just as with any enterprise software.

"A common misconception is that only programmers can contribute to free software. The first significant reference I recall to this was in a presentation by Pia Waugh [1] where she mentioned that she felt that the way words such as “coder” and “hacker” are used in the community as synonyms for “contributor” are denigrating to people such as herself who aren’t coders..."

Yesterday marked a big step in copyright protection of open source licensed software, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that an open source software developer can claim copyright infringement, even if the work is released under a free software license.

RMS: «...Their stated definition for the term “open source” is somewhat broader than free software, and thus includes my work. But describing the GNU GPL as an “open source license,” as Microsoft did, is more than half misleading. The GNU GPL embodies the firm philosophy of the free software movement; it doesn't come from the open source movement.

How can anyone make a living writing Free software? Why should a coder work for free? These questions, and others, are answered in this two-part series. Today we learn why Free and Open Source software are very important even to end users who are not coders.

There are many ways to license open source software. Given the attention paid recently to the General Public License (GPL) and its latest version (GPLv3), you may be interested to know that there are other licenses that satisfy the principles of free and open source software without the confusion and polemics that surround the GPL.