> and is largely absent in truly free software contexts I curious about what you mean by "truely free software"? My impression is there's a divide in "non-pro

> and is largely absent in truly free software contexts I curious about what you mean by "truely free software"? My impression is there's a divide in "non-proprietary" software philosophies, with Stallman out one end of the bellcurve on the "free as in speech" side, and perhaps ESR out toward the other end closer to "free as in beer". That's also close to the divide between "free software" and "open source software" in my head. There re people who are perfectly happy to give huge codebases away with almost no restrictions (for me the champion of this would be Larry Wall and the Artistic Licence/GPL dual licensing he uses for perl), while there are other people who are more politically or "freedom" motivated (like Stallman, who champions AGPL like viralality because he believes its "right" and "socially good"). Trying desperately to escape either of those outcomes are organisations (for whom I have a lot of sympathy) like MondoDB and RedisLabs, who are trying to build business models around large/expensive codebases and getting undercut by "the cloud industry" who've found legal but probably unintended holes in the licenses they released under. I don't know if RedisLabs' RASL or MongoDB's SSPL will work out long term. I kinda hope they do, because I think it'll allow a new kind of OpenSource/FreeSoftware to exist - projects the require a team of engineers getting salaries paid to do the engineering - allowing software to be created on a scale that loosely connected groups of individuals are unlikely to be able to achieve. (I know the Linux kernel is an obvious counter-example to that claim, but it's an outlier in the vast sea of open source and free software projects out there.) (And, regardless of the implications of works like "rhetoric" and "entitlement", I can't see how _anybody_ could argue against a code/project author being able to use whatever licensing they choose - including whatever restrictions that places on people who want to use that code. Copyright law allows them to refuse you to use their code at all. Any further rights they grant you in a license are not something almost any other creative industry grants. Nobody realistically complains about the burden LucasFilm is imposing on them by the choice of what rights they grant you to use StarWars copyrighted story/theme/images/whatever - you can't show StarWars to people for free just because you're a volunteer or non profit organisation. Why should someone else's C/Python/Java/Rust code be any different?)