this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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There is no world in which crossing one of those terms out to replace it with the other is valid and not disinformation.
"Free Software" is defined by GNU. "Open Source" is defined by the Open Source Initiative. Those are the only valid definitions of those terms of art.
They may differ in tone and emphasis, but they are compatible: every piece of code that can validly be described as "Free Software" can also be described as "Open Source," and vice-versa. The notion that there exists code which is "Open Source" but not "Free Software" is false, and anyone pretending that there is such a distinction (e.g. Microsoft's past attempt at promoting "shared source") is either misled himself or trying to mislead.
I'm not trying to accuse you of anything, but I just want to make sure we're all clear on that point.
I’m a bit confused here.
I used to work for a company that published the source code for one of their products. I.e. made it publicly available.
But many of the build tools and build infrastructure were proprietary and internal (not published publicly.)
So I’d say that was open source but not free, since you can’t really build and run it.
Richard Stallman begs to differ