Chapter 1The Foundations and Philosophies of Free and Open Source
When we think or talk about free and open source software, there’s a strong tendency to focus on that last bit: the software. Software, as we all know, is just made out of code, right? So isn’t free and open source software, therefore, all about the code? It’s all programming, but it’s programming that anyone can use, like, for FREE, man. After all, that’s what the free means in “free and open source”, right? You can use it, but there’s no cost. Yup, that’s open source. Book done. We can all move along.
You’ve probably already guessed that the previous paragraph was a steaming pile of misinformation. Unfortunately, it’s based on a lot of the common misconceptions about free ...
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