[4] The canonical source for the document is in the philosophy section[5] of the GNU Project website, where it is published in many languages.
[10] In a 1998 strategy session in California, "open-source software" was selected by Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Christine Peterson, and Eric S.
[12] The session was arranged in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator (as Mozilla).
Those at the meeting described "open source" as a "replacement label" for free software,[13] and the Open Source Initiative was soon-after founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens to promote the term as part of "a marketing program for free software".
The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily by Bruce Perens.
Around 2000, the success of "Open source" led several journalists to report that the earlier "Free software" term, movement, and its leader Stallman were becoming "forgotten".
[23][24] Due to the rejection of the term "open source software" by Stallman and FSF, the ecosystem is divided in its terminology.
For example, a 2002 European Union survey revealed that 32.6% of FOSS developers associate themselves with OSS, 48% with free software, and only 19.4% are undecided or in between.
The first known use of the phrase free open-source software (in short FOSS or seldom F/OSS) on Usenet was in a posting on March 18, 1998, just a month after the term open source itself was coined.
[citation needed] By the end of 2004, the FLOSS acronym had been used in official English documents issued by South Africa,[35] Spain,[36] and Brazil.
[41] Raymond quotes programmer Rick Moen as stating: "I continue to find it difficult to take seriously anyone who adopts an excruciatingly bad, haplessly obscure acronym associated with dental hygiene aids" and "neither term can be understood without first understanding both free software and open source, as prerequisite study."
The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values.
[53] In addition, the Fedora Project does provide a list of approved licences (for Fedora) based on approval of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and consultation with Red Hat Legal.
[54] Also, the copyfree movement, the various BSDs, the Apache, and the Mozilla Foundation all have their own points of views on licenses.
Thus even without a licence, a written note about lack of copyright and other exclusive rights often still exists (a waiver or anti-copyright notice), which can be seen as license substitute.
The free software community in some parts of India sometimes uses the term "Swatantra software" since the term "Swatantra" means free in Sanskrit, which is the ancestor of all Indo-European Languages of India, including Hindi, despite English being the lingua franca.