I'm not the one who created this community, but I highly suspect that this community was named after the r/opensource sub on Reddit, like many other communites here. r/opensource has (or had) 200k users whereas r/foss only had 8k users, so I guess it was a natural choice to pick the more popular sub out of the two.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
-10 points (39.1% liked)
Open Source
31359 readers
304 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Who gives a shit. Read the sidebar.
I don't have a definitive answer to your first question, but why would we want to limit a sub to FOSS-only discussion? It's a more restrictive designation. By calling the sub "open source" we're keeping it open to software that isn't technically FOSS.
I think a lot of people here actually mean foss when they say open source. Calling it foss might impart the right message and the importance of libre software to new folks. I am little conflicted about non-libre open source software as might be evident by now, maybe my bias is unjustified.
Yeah the distinction is pretty small, and usually people are just talking about FOSS software....but I'd rather avoid the semantics so just calling the community "open source" makes sense to me.
Incorporate? Meh. People just can discuss all types of open source software here, not only free of charge, fully libre, etc..
Opensource is a more used term compared to foss. So popularity wise it was chosen is my guess.
Wait until you see what the GNU/Linux sublemmy (lem?) is called.
It is called community.
Magazine /s
Found the kbin user
Linuxmasterrace?
As @[email protected] commented, the official definitions of free software and Open Source actually overlap quite heavily; the concerns made by many - including Stallman/the FSF and even Bruce Perens (author of the Open Source Definition) - involve the belief that Open Source has detached from the values associated with the free software movement.
If you are in fact specifically addressing the fairly small subset of open-source-but-not-free software, I would guess that the overlap is great enough for it to not detract from discussions, and "open source" is simply more commonly used.
Just a note, I'm also pretty sure some people in the comments have mixed up free-as-in-libre software for free-as-in-beer software, which is why I prefer to say "libre" instead.