FOSS vs FLOSS

by Patryk Kocielnik

Some programs, like NewPipe from the F-Droid, call themselves "FLOSS"; others call themselves "FOSS". What does that mean exactly?

FOSS means Free and Open-Source Software, while FLOSS stands for Free/Libre Open-Source Software.

The difference is in the cause - in the first example, the software is open-source in order to provide it to the users for free. In the other case - in order to grant the users full freedom to use, modify and redistribute the probram.

In a greater extent, this has been described on the pages of the Free Software Foundation [1].

  1. GNU. ↩︎