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I subscribe to neither of those philosophies you mention and it shows that this point of view is one that has been projected by the FSF. Open Source is importa

I subscribe to neither of those philosophies you mention and it shows that this point of view is one that has been projected by the FSF. 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/NEWS#L1723 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE...

bjelkeman-again 10y ago
The way I think of it is that GPL (and the precursor the GNU emacs license) was created when distribution was primarily via magnetic media or downloads and hardly anyone ran software which wasn't local (BBS software excluded?). 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.

bjelkeman-again 10y ago

The way I think of it is that GPL (and the precursor the GNU emacs license) was created when distribution was primarily via magnetic media or downloads and hardly anyone ran software which wasn't local (BBS software excluded?). 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.