Free Software and Open Source

Within the early academic hacker culture, it was already granted that it should be an open source software and to share their improvements with other programmers. The hacker community and the intellectual climate surrounding the “AI” host at MIT inspired the instrumental creation of the GNU project, followed by the establishment of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit foundation, which since the mid – 1980s has served the promotion and development of GNU and free software.

Free Software is a social movement, which sees free software as a social problem. Where “free” is not “free” means “Free software” is not the same as “freeware”, but the freedom for the company offers a licensed (or commercial) product. In the eyes of the FSF, the decision for or against free software, therefore, primarily is an ethical and social decision.

In contrast, the later founded Open Source Initiative (OSI) in the late 1990s, seeing an open source software as a simple model of development, with the question of whether software should be an open source, is purely practical and not an ethical question.

The FSF criticizes the OSI, therefore, as a distraction from the essential points. The hacker Eric S. Raymond had the notion of open source being introduced in the assumption that the unpopular subject of “freedom” could deter donors for such projects.

Although it is now two different movements with different views and goals, it connects the shared appreciation for the open source code, which ends in numerous projects in which they work.