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I used to be a Copyleft zealot. But eventually I realized that an absolutist insistence on “Free as in Freedom” has become outdated: when the GNU project was st

I used to be a Copyleft zealot. But eventually I realized that an absolutist insistence on “Free as in Freedom” has become outdated: when the GNU project was started, it was not easy to distribute copies of large programs. That is no longer the case (you can now serve complete photo editors, IDEs, etc. over the web). The FSF thinks it’s OK to “sell” your program, but if it’s under a “true” FOSS license, how do you get compensated for the value your program provides to those who get their copies from the person/company who initially paid you? And what’s to prevent a group of people/companies from pooling their money and pretending there’s only one customer willing to pay for your product? Zealotry makes it impossible to have a middle ground between “Four Freedoms” and “all rights reserved”, and insisting there’s only one true way to do FOSS will lead to 100% proprietary software dominating end-users (which is who the Four Freedoms were about in the first place). I think an approach that preserves some of the Four Freedoms, while restricting distribution of the core program, would still be in agreement with the spirit of FOSS. For example, what’s wrong with a license that lets anyone study the program, modify it, etc. but empowers the Copyright owner to collect money from those who run it in production? If selling your program is OK, but modern technology makes it impossible to be compensated fairly by users of your software (and even worse, competitors with deep pockets can out-scale you and put you out of business), this seems like a reasonable middle ground.

orlandohill 6y ago
Putting certain restrictions on The Four Freedoms for the sake of building a sustainable business sounds very reasonable. Some licenses put restrictions on freedom 0, the right to run the program. That's the approach taken by Prosperity and the Polyform licenses. https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ The Parity Public License takes a different approach, and expands the concept of copy-left to require developers to release the source code for all of the software that they develop with the program, not just software that they distribute to others. https://paritylicense.com/ https://paritylicense.com/
pjmlp 6y ago
Same here, that is why you see my rants about developers not paying for their tools and only enterprises being valuable customers. I eventually switched to hard GPL + commercial licenses for anything else. Incidently this also to blame for the rise of SaaS, people only pay if the software runs in someone's else computer.
jabl 6y ago
> “Free as in Freedom” has become outdated Not sure if it's outdated, but what is clear is that the world has largely rejected it (maybe we'll come to regret it later). On the smaller end of the spectrum, the rejection of GPLv3 by most critical projects (in particular, the Linux kernel) has meant that locked down devices powered by ostensibly free software have become increasingly common. On the other end of the spectrum, the wholesale rejection of AGPL by, well, more or less everybody, has enabled the SAAS providers to "proprietarize" free software. And on top of that, we have the general shift towards more permissive licensing in the FOSS world. Nowadays I'm more hopeful about right-to-repair and data portability style legislation as means to give individuals back some of the power over their own lives. > The FSF thinks it’s OK to “sell” your program I think originally it was because adding some "non-commercial only" clause would have made it difficult to cover costs of distribution. To an extent it applies even today, consider distributing free software from a (partly) ad-funded website etc. But as you say yourself, this is not per se a business model that covers the cost of developing the software, as you're giving the same distribution rights to the downstream user as the upstream developer. Then again, the "four freedoms" always were a set of moral principles, not a business model recipe.

orlandohill 6y ago

Putting certain restrictions on The Four Freedoms for the sake of building a sustainable business sounds very reasonable. Some licenses put restrictions on freedom 0, the right to run the program. That's the approach taken by Prosperity and the Polyform licenses. https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ The Parity Public License takes a different approach, and expands the concept of copy-left to require developers to release the source code for all of the software that they develop with the program, not just software that they distribute to others. https://paritylicense.com/ https://paritylicense.com/

pjmlp 6y ago

Same here, that is why you see my rants about developers not paying for their tools and only enterprises being valuable customers. I eventually switched to hard GPL + commercial licenses for anything else. Incidently this also to blame for the rise of SaaS, people only pay if the software runs in someone's else computer.

jabl 6y ago

> “Free as in Freedom” has become outdated Not sure if it's outdated, but what is clear is that the world has largely rejected it (maybe we'll come to regret it later). On the smaller end of the spectrum, the rejection of GPLv3 by most critical projects (in particular, the Linux kernel) has meant that locked down devices powered by ostensibly free software have become increasingly common. On the other end of the spectrum, the wholesale rejection of AGPL by, well, more or less everybody, has enabled the SAAS providers to "proprietarize" free software. And on top of that, we have the general shift towards more permissive licensing in the FOSS world. Nowadays I'm more hopeful about right-to-repair and data portability style legislation as means to give individuals back some of the power over their own lives. > The FSF thinks it’s OK to “sell” your program I think originally it was because adding some "non-commercial only" clause would have made it difficult to cover costs of distribution. To an extent it applies even today, consider distributing free software from a (partly) ad-funded website etc. But as you say yourself, this is not per se a business model that covers the cost of developing the software, as you're giving the same distribution rights to the downstream user as the upstream developer. Then again, the "four freedoms" always were a set of moral principles, not a business model recipe.