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I could use a little help. Are 'Free' in the sense that Stallman means and 'Open Source' synonymous? Indeed there are many engineers who earn a living by maint

I could use a little help. Are 'Free' in the sense that Stallman means and 'Open Source' synonymous? Indeed there are many engineers who earn a living by maintaining an open source code base. To their employer, the software is free to modify and customize and free from licensing, but there is still a cost (the developer's salary, etc.) to maintain it, so not free in the sense of cost. Others develop and distribute software and rely on voluntary payment. But if there were no volunteers, would they still be able to produce and maintain that code? Some would, purely as a hobby, labor of love or mission. They'd still need a day job where they get paid for writing code...

Ace17 9y ago
The word "free" has shown to be very confusing, especially to people wanting to discuss funding or business model. Richard Stallman tried to attenuate the confusion with the following slogan: "Think 'free' as in 'free speech', not 'free beer'." When we're talking about software, "Open Source" and "Free Software" are mostly synonymous. However: The Free Software movement concerns itself with preventing software users to be at the mercy of software vendors/providers (on things where it's technically not needed). This requires, amongst other things, (unobfuscated) source code access. The Open Source movement has different goals, mostly non-ethics oriented, about a collaborative model of development. It happens that these different goals meet similar requirements, and that both movements were started by hackers initially wanting source code access.