As I understand it, "Free Software" is the term the FSF and general hacker community settled on for licenses that preserve user's freedom to modify and redistribute source code.
From there, I see "Open source" being slightly more often associated with companies or younger developers, and "free software" more often being associated with the GNU project, copyleft projects, etc.
I'm curious if you have references or more explanation about the difference you're trying to draw, since it's one I haven't seen before.
> I'm curious if you have references or more explanation about the difference you're trying to draw, since it's one I haven't seen before.
My distinction between the two is whether outside contributions make it back into the original project. Free Software is about the rights of end users to inspect the code and make and distribute their own modifications, but then Open Source takes it a bit further by explicitly soliciting contributions with the ostensible aim of building a better project through cooperative labor than an individual programmer could build alone.
In practice though "Open Source" has turned into unpaid project management work for billion-dollar corporations, bitter disputes between contributors over conflicting standards of morality, technical visions in constant flux as contributors come and go, and endless bikeshedding about semantic version numbers / code style guides / other things that don't matter. For years I thought I was totally burned out on Free Software and walked away from all of it, but what I was actually burned out on is Open Source and have been able to love programming again by working on things that are explicitly "Free Software but not Open Source".
The `actix-web` drama a few years ago is a perfect example, when a huge crowd of onlookers felt morally justified excoriating a popular project's creator / maintainer for not managing their project to the crowd's standards: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust
Can you link to a reference?
As I understand it, "Free Software" is the term the FSF and general hacker community settled on for licenses that preserve user's freedom to modify and redistribute source code.
O'Reilly etc shifted to the term Open Source as part of making the idea less associated with "hacker culture", and more associated with businesses (as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#End_of_19... )
From there, I see "Open source" being slightly more often associated with companies or younger developers, and "free software" more often being associated with the GNU project, copyleft projects, etc.
I'm curious if you have references or more explanation about the difference you're trying to draw, since it's one I haven't seen before.