I've seen a lot of posts recently about FOSS. I'm not a programmer, so I don't know anything about it. What is FOSS and does it have a big advantage over other software designs?

[+] cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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[–] liara@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

it doesn't cost money and you can use it for anything you like.

This is misrepresenting FOSS quite a bit. A lot of open source software is indeed this permissive, but not all of it. It's important to refer to the license of each individual project because various licenses have different terms.

Some open source software may be free for personal use, but that license may not extend to other companies seeking to profit off their open source and good will. ZeroTier comes to mind as an example of this.

Further, other licenses like GPL only requires that you make your sources available upon request but you can require that your customers pay you to receive the product: i.e. RHEL. At the end of the day, FOSS means free as in speech, not free as in beer

[–] Rossel@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Free as in speech, not necessarily free as in no money exchanged. The GPLv3 explicitly allows commercial use to both the creator and third parties.

[–] PiercingAppreciator@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

FOSS means Free and Open Source Software. Since English has two meanings for 'free' (one as in no cost, the other as in freedom) you'll also see it called libre software because Latin languages differentiate between no cost (gratis) and freedom (libre).

Open source means the source code is available and required to be accessible. The Free part is you have the right to take that code and use it in other programs. Copyleft licenses like the GPL will require any program you use that code in to ALSO be licensed under the same license, giving everyone access to your code under the same conditions. Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like the BSD licenses do not require that, and allow the incorporation of the code in closed source software.

To give an example of the differences let's use Apple. Much of OS X userspace is derived from BSD Unix, so Apple can use it and not release code. But KHTML, the KDE HTML Rendering engine they took to make WebKit, was GPL so they had to release their changes and allow others to do the same, which is how you ended up with Chrome and Edge also using and extending WebKit and now it's basically the standard browser rendering engine.

[–] runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago

FOSS = Free and Open Source Software

Basically it means anyone can view the code and tinker with it/look for security failures/add features for themselves, etc.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

Free and Open Source Software

It means that the source code is released and available and you can even build the code yourself. You can inspect it to make sure it's not doing anything malicious or stupid (but more likely you can hope other people that are smarter than you will do it).

The only advantages it has really for regular end users are it's free, and if it's popular other developers will make apps that use it.