4 ms·
I'm just going off of what I hear vocal "FOSS" advocates screaming at me on online forums. They tell anyone and everyone, loudly, that licenses are terrible, bu
by b4ux1t3 9y ago
I'm just going off of what I hear vocal "FOSS" advocates screaming at me on online forums. They tell anyone and everyone, loudly, that licenses are terrible, but at least some are decent, and that if I can't do what I want, it's not free software, even if it's open source.
Turns out opensource.org disagrees with them. But it doesn't seem like FSF (or rather, RMS, and the FSF by proxy) agrees[1].
In the end, I don't really have a horse in this race. I just write code. I don't care how my company's legal department chooses to protect it.
Frankly, I find it kind of tiresome that there's such a big argument over this stuff.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
- mikegerwitz 9y agoHere's an illustration: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-open-overlap.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-open-overlap.en.html I manually went through each of the OSI licenses and compared them to the FSF's list a while back, and there were only a couple differences. I don't have time to dig them up right now, but they're largely the same. We reject the term "open source" not because of the licensing, but because of the philosophy: it was created to explicitly ignore the ethical concerns (users' freedoms) and focus instead on a development methodology.