this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Will I regret asking why?
I usually write FOSS since I like acronyms, but when I speak I'd say open-source. I don't see how open-source is any more confusing than free software, considering most people would immediately think "free as in beer".
Free software tells you "do whatever you want, you're free" but open source completely misses the point: it means you can read the code, but not necessarily recompile, modify and redistribute. Plus the term was invented for the confusion that would come from it. For example, a lot of AI models like LLM's claim they are "open-source", which basically means nothing: it's far easier to say that than to claim it's a free model, because that would imply freedoms to modify, reuse, redistribute the training data, weight etc. (no AI model allows that for now, and there will probably never be one that does).