[sjansen]

The two terms imply fundamentally different motivations.

Free Software came first, with the motivation being maximizing user freedom.

The term Open Source was created as a marketing hack in response to the observation that open collaboration lead to higher quality software but Free Software was being misunderstood as "cheap software".

While many Open Source advocates appreciate the freedom it provides, in the early days the focus was almost entirely on quality as they tried to increase awareness. Richard Stallman's reaction at the time made it very clear he felt that Open Source was trying to hijack his mission to provide user freedom and replace it with corporate value as the new goal.

(I suspect rms still does, but I stopped watching him tilt at windmills about a decade ago. We owe him a lot for laying the foundations that made F/OSS possible, but we owe just as much to many other early contributors, including Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond for the Open Source marketing hack that built on that foundation. Not to mention Netscape, Mozilla, & IBM for demonstrating that F/OSS was for more than just "long haired hippies".)

[kqr]

Free software is not strictly about maximising user (singular) freedom -- it's about maximising freedom for the transitive closure of users. Not just me, but my users, and my users users, and so on.

For me considered as the end user, free software constrains my freedoms. Free software goes beyond individual users, for the bettering of mankind