Someone posted to the list about the reason for the term Open Source. The term Open Source was coined by Eric S. Raymond. He founded the Open Source Initiative. (www.opensource.org). The reason he chose this term was because of his own perceived confusion with the word Free. He figured that if Free Software was to be promoted to the business community it needed a more business friendly name. He figured, rightly, that ,ost business people would associate free with dollars and not liberty. Hence the term Open Source. The Open Source Initiative promotes Open Source Software mostly because of pragmatic ideals. Eg, OSS is cheaper, higher quality, easier to adapt, etc etc. The Free Software Foundation however still uses the term Free (as in Liberty) Software. RMS founded the FSF and remains its most vocal and well known personality. The GNU System (GCC, Bash, binutils, fileutils, GNOME, etc etc) is all copyright the FSF. The FSF is a much more idealistic organisation. RMS often makes the distinction that Free Software and Open Source Software are different and that he does not endorse Open Source. This is true. Something can fall under the Open Source definition but not be 'Free Software'. Generally in the FSF's view only software covered by the GPL is really Free Software. Though there are probably some other licenses that are very similar to the GPL that could be classed as Free Software Licenses too. The Open Source Definition is more relaxed. Stuff with BSD and MIT licenses are Open Source but probably not 'Free Software' as the FSF would define it. Anyway to really educate yourself about the difference between OSS and FS you should read up about the topic on www.opensource.org and www.gnu.org. Regards -- Oliver Jones > Senior Software Engineer > Deeper Design Limited. oliver(a)deeper.co.nz > www.deeperdesign.com > +64 (21) 41-2238