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Open Source Software Trivia Questions

How much do you really know about Open Source Software? Below are 8 true or false statements. Click each one to reveal the answer and explanation.

1.

The term 'open source software' was first coined in 1998.

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Easy
✓ TRUE

The term 'open source' was coined in 1998 by Christine Peterson and others to make free software more appealing to businesses.

2.

Open source software always requires users to pay for commercial use.

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Easy
✗ FALSE

Most open source licenses allow free commercial use; payment is only needed for support or additional features.

3.

The Apache HTTP Server has been the most popular web server since 1996.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

Apache dominated from 1996 until the mid-2010s, but Nginx and others have since overtaken it, so it is no longer the most popular.

4.

Open source software can be sold for profit, as long as the source code remains freely available.

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Medium
✓ TRUE

Licenses like the GPL allow selling copies, but you must also distribute the source code under the same license.

5.

The GNU General Public License, an open source license, was created in 1989.

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Medium
✓ TRUE

Version 1 of the GNU GPL was published by Richard Stallman in 1989, establishing a key copyleft license for free software.

6.

The term 'open source' was coined by Netscape in 1998 to describe their browser release.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

The term was actually coined by a group of developers at a strategy session in Palo Alto, not by Netscape alone.

7.

All open source projects must use a license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

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Hard
✗ FALSE

Projects can call themselves open source without OSI approval, but to meet the official definition, an OSI-approved license is required.

8.

Linus Torvalds originally released Linux under a proprietary license before switching to GPL.

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Hard
✓ TRUE

The first version of Linux (0.01) had a restrictive license; Torvalds switched to the GNU GPL in 1992.

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