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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...)

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DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003.

Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked. Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together, sharing bug fixes, driver updates, and other improvements. Dillon named the project after photographing a dragonfly in his yard, while he was still working on FreeBSD.

Intended as the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series, DragonFly has diverged significantly from FreeBSD, implementing lightweight kernel threads (LWKT), an in-kernel message passing system, and the HAMMER file system. Many design concepts were influenced by AmigaOS. (Full article...)

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Terminology

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...)

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Operating systems

The following operating systems are released under free software licenses:

Mobile operating systems:


Desktop and server operating systems:


Linux systems focusing on free software:

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Topics
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

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