Cyaneus

I have found Reis2003 and certainly he will be a great bibliographic source in this work.

His Free Software Project definition (free translation: the original is in Portuguese):

"Organization with a group of people using and developing one single free software, contributing for a common source-code and knowledge base. This group will have tools for communication and collaborative work, and one set of experience and technical opinions, used for to discuss the project road."

He says too that "free software project" can define:

• Meta-project: one project aggregation grouping related projects. It's like in KDE, GNOME, Mozilla and Apache, for example. Generally, it's organized by project leaders of the strongly included projects.
• Distribution: one package set, grouping packages with equivalent use terms. Meta-projects are developer/team driven; distributions are end-user driven.
• Usergroup: generally made with geographical connection, it goals to help new users, promote software usage in this region and to give basic support for users.

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Append 1

A Free Software is, in most ways, available in some revision control system, so anybody can change it. But only autorized users (maintainers) can really approve and apply changes, using patches.