The Difference: FSF & OSI

So I said we were going to go deeper down the rabbit hole… food aside, here we go…

When dealing with open source, you’ll find that two main companies keep cropping up – the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. Most people would not know the difference between the two.

From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project (a free software mass-collaboration project where the founding goal was to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free").

The FSF has extremely strict rules on what constitutes ‘free software’. Their main objective is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us. Its all about the freedom to the end user aspect.

The Open Source initiative instead focuses on the convenience and the advantages of developing very good software by releasing the source code of the software under one of the "Open Source" compliant licenses. It focuses on the practical benefits of "Open Source" while the FSF instead focuses on the philosophical benefits and their software is only used on their computers.

By choosing either one or the other, it lets you know where you stand and what your goals are: “open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.”

Open source stresses the source code, while free software stresses that the user has freedom to use the software.

It is important to know the difference, because although they are both promoting free software, they have very different underlying philosophies.

I will be going in-depth about Creative Commons and open source in my next blog post.