Portal:Free and open-source software

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software – modified or not – to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free software and open-source software. The rights guaranteed by FOSS originate from the "Four Essential Freedoms" of The Free Software Definition and the criteria of The Open Source Definition. All FOSS must have publicly available source code, but not all source-available software is FOSS. FOSS is the opposite of proprietary software, which is licensed restrictively or has undisclosed source code.

The historical precursor to FOSS was the hobbyist and academic public domain software ecosystem of the 1960s to 1980s. Free and open-source operating systems such as Linux distributions and descendants of BSD are widely used, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones, and other devices. Free-software licenses and open-source licenses have been adopted by many software packages. Reasons for using FOSS include decreased software costs, increased security against malware, stability, privacy, opportunities for educational usage, and giving users more control over their own hardware.

The free software movement and the open-source software movement are online social movements behind widespread production, adoption and promotion of FOSS, with the former preferring to use the equivalent term free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS). FOSS is supported by a loosely associated movement of multiple organizations, foundations, communities and individuals who share basic philosophical perspectives and collaborate practically, but may diverge in detail questions. (More about free and open-source software...)

Rust is a general-purpose programming language emphasizing performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety, meaning that all references point to valid memory. It does so without a traditional garbage collector; instead, memory safety errors and data races are prevented by the "borrow checker", which tracks the object lifetime of references at compile time.

Rust does not enforce a programming paradigm, but was influenced by ideas from functional programming, including immutability, higher-order functions, algebraic data types, and pattern matching. It also supports object-oriented programming via structs, enums, traits, and methods. It is popular for systems programming.

Software developer Graydon Hoare created Rust as a personal project while working at Mozilla Research in 2006. Mozilla officially sponsored the project in 2009. In the years following the first stable release in May 2015, Rust was adopted by companies including Amazon, Discord, Dropbox, Google (Alphabet), Meta, and Microsoft. In December 2022, it became the first language other than C and assembly to be supported in the development of the Linux kernel.

Rust has been noted for its rapid adoption, and has been studied in programming language theory research. (Full article...)

Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a recurring issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices.

In 1983 Richard Stallman launched the free software movement and founded the Free Software Foundation to promote the movement and to publish its own definition. Others have published alternative definitions of free software, notably the Debian Free Software Guidelines. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond began a campaign to market open-source software and founded the Open Source Initiative, which espoused different goals and a different philosophy from Stallman's. (Full article...)

The following operating systems are released under free software licenses:

Impediments and challenges

Digital Millennium Copyright Act · Digital rights management · Tivoization · Software patents and free software · Trusted Computing · Proprietary software · SCO-Linux controversies · Binary blobs

Adoption issues

OpenDocument format · Vendor lock-in · GLX · Free standards · Free software adoption cases

About licences

Free software licences · Copyleft · List of FSF-approved software licenses

Common licences

GNU General Public License · GNU Lesser General Public License · GNU Affero General Public License · IBM Public License · Mozilla Public License · Permissive free software licences

History

...of free software · Free software movement · Timeline of free and open-source software

Groupings of software

Comparison of free software for audio · List of open-source video games

Naming issues

GNU/Linux naming controversy · Alternative terms for free software · Naming conflict between Debian and Mozilla

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

• Project selected articles archive
• Wikipedia free and open-source software task force