FOSS is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the data and software world, but what does it mean and why should people who create, consume, and manage data care about it?

FOSS is an acronym that stands for Free Open-Source Software. The Free doesn’t necessarily mean withou t cost, it means that the software is freely licensed to let people do what they want with it. As the software community likes to say: it’s “free as in speech” rather than “free as in beer.” The Open Source means that the source code is openly made available.

Why Free is important

If you’re not using free software to manage your data, it means that you’re using software that someone else has encumbered with limitations. These limitations could be in applications of usage, ownership of data that flow through it, or acceptance of monitoring and data scraping. It’s all there in those huge walls of legalese we’re totally expected to read before clicking “Accept.”

The first listed aspect of Free Software by the GNU project https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html is:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

This is particularly important when the data you’re generating and analyzing contains PII that is owned by the country you’re operating in and you have multiple agreements in place with partner organizations around data custody and responsibility.

When you’re not using free software, it makes it difficult to agree to the “perpetual, irrevocable, and world-wide data use license” that your proprietary tool wants you to agree to before using it.

Avoid vendor lock-in

Another hazard of non-free software is vendor lock-in. If you build a program around using software to drive your process or data, then you’ve made sure that you have to continue to use that software or redesign or adjust your program. If that software is not free, then you have to continue to use the vendor who supplies it. Changing software can be very expensive, so the vendor becomes vital to the project even if the program no longer wishes to use them.

With free software, you are not limited to one vendor. As a matter of fact, if you have the skills internally you can always run or host the software yourself!

Why open source?

Okay, so it’s important that software is free, why is open source important too? The most common argument is that software is higher quality when multiple people are observing, contributing to, and auditing it. That’s true, but the real advantage is its ensurance of freedom. Once the source code is made freely available, the software is truly free. Even if a maintainer or author decides to make a future version of free software not free, once the source code is freely available the past versions can never be revoked.

At Bastion Data, we specialize in deploying Free Open Source Software solutions for our customers. If you need custom software developed, we can either open source those solutions or not. Regardless, you own the code we write.

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