• TheInsane42@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Open Source: The source is available to inspect for security issues and can be improved upon by anybody who wants to participate. Most of the times the software development is financed by donations in cash from users or in time from developers.

    Free software: Software you get for free, usually paid for by siphoning off data, running ads (which include trackers), … sometimes open source, most of the times closed source.

    • buckykat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      No, that’s free software, small f. Free Software, capital F, is software which respects your four fundamental software freedoms: to run, study, redistribute, and modify the software.

      Open Source is a capitalist trick to make the source code available without necessarily preserving those freedoms.

      • usrsbin@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Open-source preserves these freedoms. Source-available is the term for software that doesn’t respect user freedoms, but allows to access the source code.

        • TheInsane42@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Indeed, most open source software is available under licenses like GPL, which enforces the preservation of those freedoms.