Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?
> My interest in free or open source software has never been either political or industrial. My interest has always been educational. That is, access to the source code provided the opportunity to learn from it. So, in the same spirit as the Open Source / Free Software distinction, I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.<p>As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.