Their stance has moderated over the decades. Also, it's not only what I've read from them online, I'm also referring to direct person to person interactions. Again, it's not the intellectual underpinnings, it's the stuff around it. If they're cleaning up their act in terms of outreach, then power to them. I would love to see a more politically effective FSF.
* Software freedom is important because it produces quality software.
* Software freedom is important because it protects the user from mistreatment.
Open Source is important because it gives both users and developers control. Open Source is the ability to fork.
And the irony of the situation is that these ideals where also embodied in Free Software, however the FSF has forgotten them, at least judging by their current behavior.
For example AGPL should not be considered either an open-source or a free software license, because it redefines what redistribution is, effectively placing limits on usage. Up until GCC version 4.5 it didn't support plugins, being a monolithic thing, out of fear that proprietary tools could make use of it; you can thank LLVM for the positive changes in that area. And here's a recent fuckup of the FSF, that's very close to my heart, because I'm an Emacs user - apparently Emacs must hate MacOS, even though many Emacs contributors and plugins authors are using it: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE...
Which meant that as soon as you distributed GPL licensed software you also had to adhere to the license of sharing your improvements in source code.
Then when the internet through the web became popular you could use GPL software without distributing it and many use cases which didn't exist previously for the distribution options in GPL just didn't create the intended effect where users who changed the software and distributed it should also share their changes.
I would argue that AGPL didn't redefine what distribution is, but the capabilities and the use of the web redefined what distribution is, through software as a service. AGPL was an attempt to align the license with the original intent of GPL, which was to say that if you redistributed the software and change it, share your changes.
I'd largely disagree with that. I see "Open source" described (and describe it myself) as something that has many advantages as a way of developing software and developing communities (users and developers) around that software. But, at the same time, it's absolutely about letting users maintain control and being able to directly influence the direction of development.
> The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.
No mention of user freedoms or why this is important to users, just some nebulous claim that this is related to "evolution" and "experimentation".
The entire OSD is written like this, with claims that the 10 completely-arbitrary-with-no-real-logic-behind-them tennants of "open source" will somehow make your software better. How? They don't say. The four software freedoms make sense if you discuss them from the context of freedom, but the 10 "open source" rights don't make sense outside the context of freedom.
"Open source" was meant to be a way to frame the discussion in different terms. Yet by saying that it was "for the explicit purpose of de-emphasizing user freedom" you sneakily imply motives to the people who coined and promoted the term. Once parsed out, rhetorically it's about as sensible as post-9/11 "they hate us for our freedom" discourse in the US.
Yes, and the free software movement's main "terms" are user freedom. So by your own admission, "open source" was coined to de-emphasising user freedom (or rather, framing the discussion around "terms" different than user freedom). It's a matter of public record where the term "Open Source" came from.
"Open source", as a term, is about emphasizing a different set of benefits that come from license terms that let anyone run, modify and distribute code for any purpose they choose. The careful way you word your comments to highlight negatives and avoid positives makes it seem obvious that you don't like that and want to make it sound sinister when it isn't. My advice to you would be, if you're going to lie, at least be honest about it!
Because such an argument would be incorrect (not just a "re-framing", it would be a fundamentally flawed argument). Aside from the naming, free software fundamentally gives users the right to sell software as well.
> The careful way you word your comments to highlight negatives and avoid positives makes it seem obvious that you don't like that and want to make it sound sinister when it isn't.
The positives of "open source" are the same positives as free software. The only difference is the framing, which is a negative IMO. I'm not sure how you'd like me to discuss my issues with "open source" -- should I list the benefits (that are identical to free software) while doing a comparison to free software? Such a comparison would be redundant.
The only tangible benefit of the term "open source" is that it is more friendly to corporations because "free" has two meanings in English. But since it only takes a minute or two to clarify the meaning, I don't see why that should be a priority when the downside is that you don't educate users about the importance of user freedom.
I have no idea who first put the words "open source" together, and neither do you. I think it's much more likely someone grabbed the term and added their own agenda to it after it was already popular. Regardless, assuming the original intention was as you claim, that doesn't mean everyone who uses that term now shares that view.
Perhaps you should read the site in question rather than guessing.
https://opensource.org/history
> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. [..] The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label "free software." Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term "open source", originally suggested by Christine Peterson.
Wrong.
"Revision 1.29 February 9 1998 esr Changed ``free software'' to ``open source''. "
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
https://archive.org/stream/CathedralAndTheBazaar/cathedral-bazaar_djvu.txt
Anything else I said still stands though - including that it's foolish to try and paint everyone with the same brush.
You can be sure I would have done that with MS Office and OneDrive in the File menu, or reboots without permission on Windows 10 if I could.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
With a bit less animosity further down: "The official definition of “open source software” (which is published by the Open Source Initiative and is too long to include here) was derived indirectly from our criteria for free software. It is not the same; it is a little looser in some respects. Nonetheless, their definition agrees with our definition in most cases."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...
"We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."