Open source

ops culture

Software under a license meeting the Open Source Initiative's ten criteria: free redistribution, available source code, permission for derived works, and no discrimination against people or fields of use. The term was coined in 1998 (Christine Peterson) as a business-friendlier name for what the four freedoms already described.

Open source and free software describe almost exactly the same set of licenses with different emphases: a practical argument about the development model versus a moral argument about user freedom. The umbrella acronyms FOSS and FLOSS name the shared territory. Source-available is not the same thing: readable code whose license withholds modification or redistribution fails both definitions.

Also known as: oss, open source software, osi

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