The Free Software philosophy is founded in the ideals of freedom, openness, and sharing. Educational institutions support the same ideals within academic freedom and the open dissemination of knowledge and information common in academia.

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.

"Many of us in the Free Software community have a certain level of “activist” within us, pushing those around us towards the ideals that we cherish. Ideals such as freedom. Freedom of communication, freedom of data, freedom of choice. This March 26th is Document Freedom Day, another occasion where we can band together and help promote Open Document Standards..."

If 2008 had a buzzword, it was probably community. More and more companies are looking to tap into communities for contributions to open source projects. But following the open-source trend just because everyone is doing it isn't good enough.

For Louis Landry, a member of the core team for the Joomla!

FOSS is an abbreviation for Free and Open Source Software. In other words, FOSS is software whose source code is openly available. People can install and even modify FOSS as they please, so long as they follow a few basic requirements listed in the license.

Over the years, I came to appreciate a number of organizations that although not directly linked to free software and open source are of interest to the FOSS community. Pretty much everybody knows the free software foundation, the software freedom law center, the Linux foundation, The GNU project, the open source initiative, Creative Commons or Groklaw.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --

"There are lots of resources available online to learn about Free and Open Source Software. If you want to understand the essence and ideals of this movement, a great start would be to read the following 4 books..."