Free Software vs Open Source vs Freeware: What's the Difference?

[♥JcMagpie]

So what is osCommerce? well it's this "osCommerce, Open Source E-Commerce Solutions,    Copyright (c) 2010 osCommerce,   Released under the GNU General Public License"

What is GNU?

Well in plain english it is

" You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to or software including (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made available under the GPL along with build & install instructions. "

more info here https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

 

In simple terms osCommerce is :-

1) Free to download and install.

2) Free to use as you wish.

3) Free to be modified by you as you wish.

4) You are free to use it as many times as you like on 1 website or 100 websites.

5) You get free support on the forum.

6) Add-on's from the  Apps Marketplace are free to download and use.

 

This artical cover this quite well if you need more info. by Dr. Michael Garbade Aug. 20, 18 · Open Source Zone · Analysis

extract,

Free Software

Let me make this clear beforehand: the word 'free' in 'free software' emphasizes freedom, not price. That’s why, to avoid the ambiguity in the English language, sometimes free software is called libre software.

According to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization that supports the development of free software, “free software is the software that grants the user the freedom to share, study, and modify it.” The FSF coined the term in the 1980s.

This type of software allows you to do anything you want with it, even improving the version and profiting from it.

The FSF asserts that a free software must adhere to the following four pillars of freedom (which are rights and not obligations):

• The freedom to deploy the software for any use case without any restrictions. For example, saying that the license of a program expires after 30 days makes it non-free.
• The freedom to study how the software works and modify it according to your needs and preferences.
• The freedom to freely re-distribute the software to assist someone in need. The redistribution can be done at a cost or at no cost.
• The freedom to enhance the performance of the software and release your enhancements for the community to benefit—both programmers and non-programmers. You can do this at a cost or at no cost.

The FSF emphasizes that free software is not limited to non-commercial use. A commercial program can allow users to indirectly access the above freedoms.

Additionally, as opposed to freeware, free software allows users to access the source code (because of the freedom to modify).

Any free software license should give users the ability to benefit from the four pillars of freedom. These licenses can either be protective (copyleft) licenses or non-protective licenses. Whereas the former upholds the rights to use, study, distribute, and modify the software, the latter allows for distribution with those rights scrapped off.

Here are three of the most popular type of licenses that define free software:

• The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) License: This is a permissive license that places limited restrictions on software reuse.
• The GNU General Public License v2: This copyleft license gives users the freedom to run, study, and make improvements to the software.
• The Apache License v2: This is a permissive license that mandates preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer.
• The BSD Licenses: They are a set of non-copyleft licenses that gives minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of the software.

A popular example of a free software that is completely freedom-respecting is the Linux operating system. An example of a distribution of a Linux package is Debian.

Open Source Software

Open source software has a close meaning to free software, although the two terms are not identical. Although both terminologies refer to a similar group of licenses and software, each term alludes to different underlying ideologies.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the non-profit organization that supports the development of open source software, asserts that any open source software must adhere to the following criteria:

• Free redistribution of the software.
• The source code should be publicly available.
• The software can be modified and distributed in a different format from the original software.
• The software should not discriminate against persons or groups.
• The software should not restrict the usage of other software.

Historically, the term free software came before open source. Although both terms have roots in supporting the idea of free software (right to use, study, share, and modify), their objectives and philosophies are different.

The term open source was introduced in the late 1990s in response to the limitations of free software. In fact, the OSI says that it coined the term to “educate and advocate for the superiority of an open development process.”

The organization adds that the term provides “a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community.”

Therefore, the term open source emphasizes on the practical benefits of “free software”: supporting collaboration on software development projects.

In other words, while open source is a development philosophy that is more business oriented, free software is a social and moral philosophy. That’s why the term open source is more palatable to the corporate world because it places less emphasis on freedom.

For example, while the Android mobile operating system is an open source software, it cannot be referred to as a free software because it does not respect all four pillars of freedom.

To minimize misunderstandings and avoid the terminology debate between free software and open source software, other terms such as FOSS (free and open source software) and FLOSS (free, libre, and open source software) may be used to describe the concepts.

Freeware

Typically, freeware refers to a software that you can use without incurring any costs. Unlike open source software and free software, freeware offers minimal freedom to the end user.

Whereas it can be used free of charge, often modification, redistribution, or other improvements cannot be done without getting permission from the author.

As such, freeware is often shared without including its source code, which is atypical to open source software or free software.

Two of the most common types of freeware are Skype and Adobe Acrobat Reader. While both programs are free to use, their source codes are unavailable to the public.

Most developers usually market freeware as freemium or shareware with the intention of encouraging users to buy a more capable version.

Freemium refers to a program that is offered at no cost, but money (premium) is paid for extra, more capable features.

Shareware refers to a program that is initially available without any costs attached, and users are encouraged to distribute copies. However, that cost-free period usually lasts for a certain period; thereafter, a user is required to pay for continued use.

 

[MrPhil]

1 hour ago, JcMagpie said:

What is GNU?

To be more specific, it stands for "GNU's Not Unix", and was originally a 1980's open/free/libre effort to write a work-alike to the proprietary (ATT) Unix OS. They came up with a lot of tools and utilities, but before they could complete their open/free/libre kernel, Linux appeared and occupied that ecological niche. Sometimes you will see "Linux" system referred to as GNU/Linux, because most of the stuff surrounding the Linux kernel comes from the GNU effort.

GNU today is best known for its various open source licenses (GPL and LGPL), but historically it was much more than just licenses.

As discussed before, "free" software can be a number of different animals. You can give away software ("free as in free beer" freeware), but retain the source and/or all rights to it. That's not the GNU GPL idea. You can charge for software, but make the source available (for no additional fee) for inspection, modification, and even redistribution -- the GPL allows a reasonable copying and handling fee, which dates back to the days of running off a copy on a reel of 9-track tape. In this age of websites, a fee for copying and handling is a little hard to justify, unless the recipient needs hardcopy media. You can license your software in any way you want, but to call it open/free/libre source means that you provide the full source for no additional fee, and permit modification and/or redistribution under no more restrictive license than what you received it under.

[♥JcMagpie]

The Philosophy of Open Source

The GNU General Public License grew out of a philosophy that software should be free, and derivatives of that software should be free as well. It was a contrast to the industry standard of commercial software, shareware, demoware and crippleware at the time. But today there are many products that pay lip services to the open source concepts; having both open and enterprise versions very similar to the demoware/shareware concepts of the past. Some use GNU GPL software as a base for an entirely commercial ecosystem. The original philosophies behind the Free Software Foundation have been commandeered by those who seek to profit from open source while returning only marginal or symbolic contributions to the community as they enter patent lawsuit wars amongst each others.

There have been significant contributions to underlying technology stacks used to build many of the compiling, web, testing and data storage frameworks by commercial entities. It’s important to note that many of these contributions have been released on permissive licenses that are more accessible for commercial use. Rather than embrace the GNU GPL, today most libraries and programming languages are released under licenses such as MIT, Apache, BSD and others. Even as I was writing this article, Android’s Native Development Kit (NDK) just changed their default compiler from the GNU C Compiler (GCC) to Clang, noting in their changelog that GCC is now deprecated²⁵. Clang was contributed to by Apple, Microsoft, Google, ARM, Sony and Intel. It is, of course, under a permissive license known as the University of Illinois NSCA License.

What we’re essentially seeing more of in the industry today, is open sourcing central technologies and reusable components without open sourcing the software it produces. This can help startups and small developers to create large, scalable products. However, those products are often locked into the ecosystems of the larger players. It’s beneficial for Facebook, Twitter and Amazon to help others create applications that feed people into their user base, because it’s more likely those products would depend on connections to the big networks rather than compete with them.

Even thought there is considerably more open source software deployed in the wild today compared to the previous decade, making its way into everything from server clusters to consumer electronics, it is a far departure from the world originally envisioned by some of the most vocal open source advocates and anti-commercial zealots of the late 1990s. The original idea behind the Free Software Foundation’s concept of open source was an ecosystem where every new development resulted in more open and free code. We’re talking about people who truly believed in getting away from commercial software entirely. There were people who felt that one day, Linux desktops could replace Windows and even high end tools like Photoshop and Final Cut would have great open source replacements.

This never happened. Although Linux, FreeBSD and other open source operating systems are great for developers, we never truly had the year of the Linux desktop. No matter how many people try to claim that Gimp is just as good as Photoshop, that any lack of feature is simply not being familiar with Gimp’s interface, is either in a state of denial or they haven’t had to truly do any intense graphics related work other than cropping images or adjusting levels. Today, Illustrator is still far easier to learn than Inkscape, and LibreOffice Writer, while an excellent program, still lacks many of the advanced features of Microsoft Word. Most video editing applications for Linux suffer continual crashes, leaving Blender, a 3D modeling tool not originally designed for video editing, to be the only stable video editing platform. Although Steam and Humble Bundle have brought a plethora of independent and main stream games to Linux, those games are closed source, commercial and, in the case of Steam, under Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Rather that the computer utopia of all software being free and hardware being what people pay for, much of the software we use today is being moved out of the realm of pay-once desktop software, and into subscription based offerings. Where one could once simply keep using an older version of a piece of software and not pay for an upgrade if it wasn’t necessary, now people must pay continual subscriptions for software that can never be owned, only rented, for their entire lives.

Although companies like IntelliJ provide fall-back licenses to allow people to use previous version if they stop subscribing²⁶, other companies like Adobe will simply cut off access to the current product, even if you’ve been a subscriber for years²⁷. Furthermore, a lot of software is moving entirely to the web. These web applications are often based on open source components while creating closed, wall-gardened systems. People who then develop applications based against those web services, say using the Dropbox or Facebook public APIs, are now locked in to those systems.

Open source software is alive and well, backing most of the systems we take for granted every day. Communities like Github have paved the way for more open collaboration and increased contributions. More software today is branded with the marketing gimmick of being moved “into the cloud”, and into subscription models were people perpetually rent software rather than purchase it. Many of the websites we use are walled gardens of free services that are not open, and which make it intentionally difficult to move your data should you become unsatisfied with the service provider. Much of the opens source software being released today is backend technology or developer tools. We are still a far cry away from having the day to day software we use being truly free, not only in cost, but being able to modify it to our needs and run it anywhere we want.

Aug 16, 2016 • Sumit Khanna

https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/

[DannisF]

Thanks! This is very helpful and comprehensive material that contains everything one need to know about osCommerce and open source systems.

[Allen Solly]

Hi, everyone

@JcMagpie thnku for this material....i usually have a confusion among these....but by reading your content today now all my doubts are clear about the oscmmerce and open software....really this information is so helpful for me to understand the difference between them.

[DannisF]

Thanks, this is a rather extensive explanation of the Free Software and Open Source and Freeware essence and differences between them. We personally prefer to use open source systems, because they are very customizable and, in most cases, are available to be downloaded for free