In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States.

NXS has provided the relevant excerpts from the IIPA's Special 301 Report and it's clear: if a country opts to use free software, the BSA wants them labeled criminals.

A powerful US lobby group is trying to have pro-open source countries listed as being "anti-capitalism". Open source software is anti-capitalism and undermines intellectual property.

Contrary to what you may have heard, free and open source software (FOSS) is not anti-business. But neither is it pro-business. More accurately, FOSS is focused on concerns outside of traditional business, such as user freedom and code quality. For this reason, making the two work together successfully requires special efforts and resources, as well as careful study of the various options.

In his note, Stallman made clear the difference between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and open source as conceived by Eric Raymond and supporters in the business community. FOSS is not just "free as in free beer". Under FOSS software is free, not just for the user. The software itself has liberties.

Since 1989, the USTR has used the Special 301 Report to intimidate other countries into adopting more stringent copyright and patent laws by singling out particular countries for their "bad" intellectual property policies, naming them on a tiered set of "watch lists,"

No user of free and open source software (FOSS) can escape having an opinion about Microsoft. Microsoft products and technologies represent what FOSS users have left behind. Some consider it increasingly irrelevant, and others a shadowy figure comparable to Satan in the Middle Ages or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

By definition, free and open source software (FOSS) is opposed to proprietary companies. But, as Jim Zemlin and Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols have pointed out recently, the FOSS community does not regard all proprietary companies with equal disdain.

A FOSS Hut is an area dedicated to a specific focus area in FOSS, be it a project like KDE, community like SMC, user groups, special interest groups like mappers or start ups depending on FOSS.