Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
FOSS stands for "Free and Open Source Software". There is no one universally agreed-upon definition of FOSS software and various groups maintain approved lists of licenses. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is one such organization keeping a list of open-source licenses. [1] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintains a list of what it ...
In the 90s, the term "open source" was coined as an alternative label for free software, and specific criteria were laid out to determine which licenses covered free and open-source software. [15] [16] Two active members of the free software community, Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI). [17]
Gitea is an open-source software tool funded on Open Collective that is designed for self-hosting, but also provides a free first-party instance. GForge: The GForge Group, Inc. [8] 2006 Partial Yes Cloud version – free up to 5 users. On-premises version – free up to 5 users. GForge is free for open source projects. GitHub: GitHub, Inc.
"Free and open-source software" (FOSS) is an umbrella term for software that is considered free software and/or open-source software. [1] The precise definition of the terms "free software" and "open-source software" applies them to any software distributed under terms that allow users to use, modify, and redistribute said software in any manner they see fit, without requiring that they pay ...
The Free Software Foundation prefers copyleft (share-alike) free-software licensing rather than permissive free-software licensing for most purposes. Its list distinguishes between free-software licenses that are compatible or incompatible with the FSF's copyleft GNU General Public License .
An early example of an open-source project that did successfully re-license for license compatibility reasons is the Mozilla project and their Firefox browser. The source code of Netscape's Communicator 4.0 browser was originally released in 1998 under the Netscape Public License/Mozilla Public License [6] but was criticised by the FSF and OSI for being incompatible.
Another variant of the approach above, mainly use for data-intensive, data-centric software programs, is the keeping of all versions of the software under a free and open-source software license, but refraining from providing update scripts from a n to an n+1 version. Users can still deploy and run the open source software.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program.