Is open source software free?
Free and open-source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that can be classified as both free software and open-source software.[lower-alpha 1] That is, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.[3] This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users.
Linspire
Linspire has drawn some criticism from the free software community. This has included criticism for including proprietary software, with GNU founder Richard Stallman commenting: "No other GNU/Linux distribution has backslided so far away from freedom. Switching from MS Windows to Linspire does not bring you to freedom, it just gets you a different master." In addition, following the initial Freespire announcement Pamela Jones of the Groklaw website published an article entitled "Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn't Care Less About Freedom;" that was highly critical of Linspire, Inc., and the Freespire project, for including closed-source components and advertising them as a favourable point—an action she classed as ignoring free and open-source software (FOSS) community values in a "community-driven" distribution, asserting that "Free Software isn't about proprietary drivers" and that "proprietary codecs, drivers and applications are not Open Source or open in any way." In response, Linspire, Inc. CEO Kevin Carmony stated via a journalist on the Linspire website that in ten years of holding out, the FOSS community has made relatively few gains, that many users are already using proprietary software and, although some would hold out, most would prefer to have something that works rather than nothing. He also asserted that the company believed in open source software, but also in the freedom of individuals to choose whatever software they want.