Alternative terms for free software

Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a controversial issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices. Free software In the 1950s to the 1990s software culture, the "free software" concept combined the nowadays differentiated software classes of public domain software, Freeware, Shareware and FOSS and was created in academia and by hobbyists and hackers. When the term "free software" was adopted by Richard Stallman in 1983, it was still ambiguously used to describe several kinds of software. In February 1986 Richard Stallman formally defined "free software" with the publication of The Free Software Definition in the FSF's now-discontinued GNU's Bulletin as software which can be used, studied, modified, and redistributed with little or no restriction, his four essential software freedoms. Richard Stallman's Free Software Definition, adopted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), defines free software as a matter of liberty, not price, and is inspired by the previous public domain software ecosystem. The canonical source for the document is in the philosophy section of the GNU Project website, where it is published in many languages. Open-source software In 1998 the term "open-source software" (abbreviated "OSS") was coined as an alternative to "free software". There were several reasons for the proposal of a new term. On the one hand a group from the free software ecosystem perceived the Free Software Foundation's attitude toward propagandizing the "free software" concept as "moralising and confrontational", which was also associated with the term. In addition, the "available at no cost" ambiguity of the word "free" was seen as discouraging business adoption, as also the historical ambiguous usage of the term "free software". In a 1998 strategy session in California, "open-source software" was selected by Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Christine Peterson, and Eric S.