[pgeorgi]

> While I'm not a huge FOSS-head, there is a distinct difference between "_free_ and open source" and just "open source". It's all in the licensing

"Free Software" and "Open Source" mean pretty much the same as far as the practices, motions and licenses are concerned (but people insist there are huge differences in terms of philosophy). "Free and Open Source Software" is just a new-ish term that includes either team to stop the whining.

"Open Source" was a mostly unused term in the software licensing field before 1998 or the people at OSI who drafted the Open Source Definition likely would have gone for something else.

"Shared source" was introduced by Microsoft a couple years later and is a pretty descriptive term for those less liberal licenses (where sharing code happens outside the criteria of the OSD).

Why not just go with that instead of arguing why people should use a term to mean something different? There was an effort to do just that, by Microsoft, to muddy the waters, before they settled on "shared source", which might be why you get those harsh responses.