Some perceived constraint of choice is always there in any simulated world in that there are always choices that are impossible to physically perform or clearly undesirable, but where you cross the line to railroad is when these things are obviously being imposed by the GM/metagame (usually in the name of "The Story" or "The Plot"). Railroading, the antonym of sandbox, is simply extreme constraint of choice.
Adventure paths, being a series of adventures, can try to be sandboxy but generally try to provide enough story to get PCs from one chapter to another, but event timelines and things like that can serve that purpose without being railroads (though people often complain and call things like that railroading, just because they feel pressured to do something). Sandbox is a different approach from story-driven - a "story of what happened" may emerge from a sandbox session but a preconception of story, or what "the GM wants to happen," is never applied to the game. More recently, Paizo did a sandbox-style adventure path called Kingmaker for Pathfinder. Here's a place, there's fell monsters and treasure there, go do what you want. Some of the early modules, most notably Keep on the Borderlands, were extremely sandboxy, as were many of the early dungeons (Castle Greyhawk, etc.). Sandbox is not an antonym for adventure module. If a thief is sneaking into a mansion, in a sandbox game he is able to avoid guards and traps, and not have predetermined plot points presented to him regardless of his actions.
A super hardcore sandboxer places a dungeon (or whatever) in the game world and that's where it is, for the PCs to come across or not (and for NPCs to come across before them or not). Pure sandbox play is purely simulation driven. As with anything, usage varies, but usually when people say "sandbox" today they mean a campaign that does not have a specific prescribed storyline, but one where the GM sets up a world (or at least a small section of one) and the PCs are free to wander where they will and find adventure where they will.
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