The split between “free software” and “open source” began with a single event and a deliberate choice of words. On February 3, 1998, a small group met in Palo Alto, California, days after Netscape announced it would release the source code of its web browser. The Open Source Initiative records that the participants wanted a label that would distinguish their collaborative development methodology from what they saw as the ideologically charged term “free software.” Christine Peterson suggested the phrase “open source,” and it became the consensus choice. Later that month Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the Open Source Initiative, with Raymond as its first president, to steward the term and the Open Source Definition.
The motivation was strategic and pragmatic. Raymond and his allies argued that the word “free” confused businesses, who heard “no cost” or feared a political crusade, and that emphasizing the practical engineering benefits of shared source code - reliability, speed, lower cost, the “many eyes” effect - would win corporate adoption far faster than appeals to ethics. The new framing worked: within months the term was endorsed by figures such as Linus Torvalds and adopted at an April 1998 summit of leaders from Apache, Perl, Python, and other projects. “Open source” quickly became the language of industry.
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation declined to follow. In the essay “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software,” Stallman lays out the objection directly: the free software movement is, in his words, “a movement for freedom and justice,” campaigning for the freedom of computer users, while the open source idea “values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles.” For Stallman the two terms describe roughly the same set of programs but rest on incompatible foundations. Free software is about the user’s right to control their own computing - the four essential freedoms to run, study, modify, and share software. Open source, in his analysis, reduces that moral claim to a development-efficiency argument and so quietly drops the very point that matters most to him.
Stallman also catalogs the practical consequences of the rebrand. The phrase “open source” invites the misreading that it merely means source code you can look at, which has let companies apply it to programs that do not actually grant the freedoms the Free Software Foundation requires. By foregrounding convenience over liberty, he argues, the open source framing leaves users with no language to object when a program is technically open but practically restrictive. This is why the FSF continues to say “free software” - or the more explicit “free/libre” - and treats “open source” as a related but distinct philosophy rather than a synonym.
The 1998 schism never resolved into a single vocabulary, and that is part of its significance. The two camps still cooperate constantly on shared licenses and shared codebases, yet they describe their work in different moral registers: one emphasizing freedom as an end in itself, the other emphasizing the superior software that open collaboration produces. The umbrella term “FOSS” (free and open source software) exists precisely because neither side would concede the other’s name. The disagreement is small in its practical effect on which programs count and large in what it says they are for.