Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on March 12, 2007 10:09 PM
To clarify only one point for symantic accuracy; Free Software and Open Source are two different groups within F/OSS representing the two major coltural poles (also why it's often written with the slash).
Free Software is specifically the Free Software Foundation and political goals it embodies; all software should be free on principal, closed source is the devil, binary blobs are not exceptable, patents and copywrite should be abolished entirely. While even Richard Stalman says that closed source should be used only when no free alternative is available, this is where you get the extremist Zealots from usually. Free Software is a political goal.
Open Source focuses on the technical advantages of peer review, bug reporting and patch submission; every bug is shallow to someone, source available for in-house security auditing or further development, software evolves quicker when developers share and build off each other's code. Steriotipical examples are Linus Torvalds and Eric S Raymond who present technical arguments to technical problems; example, Linus and the GNOME project where Linus simply wrote and submitted a bunch of patches as his reply to there personal attacks. Further examples are the popularity and stability of Apache, Linux (the kernel), K3B (one of the better disk burning suites).
Free Software and Open Source are two seporate cultures within Free/Libre and Open Source Software. Don't discount the engineers who let there technically stronger software speek for them just because the politically motivated zealots make more noise.
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Free Software vs Open Source
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 12, 2007 10:09 PMFree Software is specifically the Free Software Foundation and political goals it embodies; all software should be free on principal, closed source is the devil, binary blobs are not exceptable, patents and copywrite should be abolished entirely. While even Richard Stalman says that closed source should be used only when no free alternative is available, this is where you get the extremist Zealots from usually. Free Software is a political goal.
Open Source focuses on the technical advantages of peer review, bug reporting and patch submission; every bug is shallow to someone, source available for in-house security auditing or further development, software evolves quicker when developers share and build off each other's code. Steriotipical examples are Linus Torvalds and Eric S Raymond who present technical arguments to technical problems; example, Linus and the GNOME project where Linus simply wrote and submitted a bunch of patches as his reply to there personal attacks. Further examples are the popularity and stability of Apache, Linux (the kernel), K3B (one of the better disk burning suites).
Free Software and Open Source are two seporate cultures within Free/Libre and Open Source Software. Don't discount the engineers who let there technically stronger software speek for them just because the politically motivated zealots make more noise.
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