The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement.[1] The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof. The Linux community is a subset of the free-software community.
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Some arguments take on the fervor of "religious wars", such as the technical disputes from the 80s and early 90s over which text editor is better, Emacs or Vi/Vim, or even what version of a text editor is superior, GNU Emacs vs XEmacs.
With the advent of free software such as Linux, Apache HTTP Server, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org, many companies such as IBM, Apple, Dell, HP, Google, Sun, Oracle and others too numerous to list, have begun interacting with the free-software community. Difficulties include the choice of free-software licences, and the selection of what software will be released as free software.
An example of an entry to the free-software community is Sun Microsystems' July 19, 2000 release of the Star Office source code under the GNU Lesser General Public License and the successive development of OpenOffice.org on this foundation.[2]
An example of another entry was that of Real Networks. Real Networks wrote its own licence, and released only parts of its software suite. The codec—the software needed to view Real Video files—was not released.