Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, despite the philosophical differences. The issue here is against the copyleft (GPL and AGPL).
No ... no they are not
>>despite the philosophical differences.
And those differences are HUGE and make them incompatible
Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences (thus open source).
It was like this at least 20 years ago.
Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much control as you can on what you buy, but why would you ever say: "I don't want those weird licenses that give me more access to the stuff I buy, I want the other ones that make it completely proprietary and inaccessible".
Of course as a company, you want permissive licenses, such that you can use it for free, but keep it proprietary (because companies like to think that this one bugfix they made is very strategic IP).
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License
Permissive licenses are "free" in the sense that they allow to distribute free software (e.g. I can distribute a binary together with its sources even if they are MIT-licensed, and that would be free), but they also allow to distribute non-free software (e.g. I can take MIT code and distribute a proprietary binary).
Copyleft licenses enforce the freedom downstream.
I guess my original point is that I don't understand why people don't like copyleft, because copyleft enforces free binaries.
Does that make sense? Thanks for the correction.
To answer your underlying question: I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.
But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.
And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.
> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
This Venn diagram is FSF's view of the taxonomy:
Permissive licenses are free in the sense that they allow making free software (but they also allow making non-free software).
GPLv3 enforces the complete derived work to be free. LGPLv3 says that the particular library should stay free.
GPLv2, LGPLv2 and MPLv2 say that the source code (either of the whole derived work or just the library) should stay free, but tivoization allows making the product non-free.
Is that about right?
That was what I meant initially: in HN there's a strong opinion against copyleft, not necessarily free software.
To me, writing software in my free time and open sourcing it under a permissive license is shooting myself in the foot. I did the work for free, it may as well benefit me as a user. At minimum it should be MPLv2.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
I wonder if this is a point of disagreement between FSF and SFC -- I know they now have several disagreements.
In a similar time frame, I criticized attestation features in trusted computing because they would allow (in fact one of their main purposes was to allow) network services to allow only certain software configurations to interact with them. And I thought I was talking about a similar concept!
Thanks for sharing those links.
Attestation is indeed a big problem today, especially around Android devices and proprietary apps that won't run on libre Android distributions. The attestation feature of WebAuthn could also become a problem, but that is somewhat mitigated by the Apple passkeys not being attestable.
(that doesn't mean the difference isn't important though)
I don't really get why people are for non-copyleft licenses. LGPL is fine license.
Yes they are, according to people who use both terms. All “free software” licenses are also “open source” licenses and vice versa.
In practice, pretty much every Open Source license is also Free Software license and vice versa (there are some very nitpicky exceptions, but I guarantee they're not where you'd expect them to be).
* the term "open source" predates the term "free software" in the FSF sense
* "open source" was proposed as a synonym for "free software" in the late 90s
* liguistically, the term "free software" emphasizes freedom, while "open source" emphasizes source-available * there is no law mandating everyone use OSI's definition of "open source"
* consequently, there is ambiguity in the term "open source", ambiguity exploitable by those who want the social cachet of free software but are not philosophically aligned with it
* there is ambiguity in the term "free software" as well but don't worry, if they mean it in the FSF sense they will certainly take the time to explain
I humbly submit therefore that the GP framing is essentially correct, that RMS was right not to endorse the term "open source", and that whatever OSI says the term is philosophically compromised and should be "considered harmful".
What if i love and use the AGPL, but also won't involve myself with the FSF because I think they are runining the movement and also definitely want no direct association with RMS.
I think RMS is an active harm to the cause of Free Software.
GPL, only enforces redistribution of software you distribute, "to" the people you desteibute it to, aka customers.
Most other licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc) don't require any code redistribution (though some require attribution).
GPL ~= redistribution to customers Other ~= no redistribution
Red Hat is complying with the GPL requirements even for BSD, Apache, and BSD licensed code, which I think is good.
I think a more sinister trend forming is around open core, and essentially proprietary code mixed with no code redistribution at all. This makes open core essentially closed source for all intents and purposes. Companies are using open core simply for free marketing and to drive technology adoption in the sales/marketing funnels.
This has been happening on HN too. The vilification of GPL and AGPL as ”not free in the truest sense of the word”, the usage of RMS and his personal image to label the free software movement outdated/fanatical/toxic is a testament to how corporate rebranding efforts have succeeded in replacing free software with open-source — software that is conveniently licensed so that corporations can bake it into their product without a single concern for the longevity or well-being of the developer or the software itself.