> ...large corporations claim to love “open source”. No, they do not care about the social movement, only the cost reduction achieved by taking advantage of per

> ...large corporations claim to love “open source”. No, they do not care about the social movement, only the cost reduction achieved by taking advantage of permissively licensed software. My job has me convincing and coaching large companies through their first open source steps. In my experience, the cost reduction is a nuanced issue in the boardroom. Mainenance and support costs (and availability), trust of strangers, loss of control, and the clash of openness in a highly secretive world, are strong motivators against the relatively tiny (perceived) expense of building it yourself. The argument that carries the most water in my experience, is the argument of interoperability. For reliability at modern scale, multi-cloud is an inevitable step. And open source technologies drastically reduce the complexity and cost. Why would you build on Azure's (excellent) CosmosDB and set yourself on a course for painful integration and migration, when you can build with Cassandra and avoid those issues? To the author's list of important areas impacted by software freedom, I would add diversity and inclusion. It's nice that a bunch of white guys with West US culture build great solutions to their problems that makes sense in their cultural context. But those off-the-shelf products don't help people operating in a different cultural context. With open licenses, it's possible to modify software to fit your own needs, like the users who got braille support into MuseScore, or the Swiss companies who built privacy-friendly email services to compete with gmail on Ux. However, I disagree with the overall article. These important issues (sustainability, privacy, copyright, outrage-for-profit, D&I, etc) are not components of freedom. They're areas that benefit from user freedom. Software can be "Free as in freedom", and still be Bad For You. It's OK to have open source gambling software, or video games, or bloated office suites. The point is that users get to choose. This is a nice argument for some kind of "software for good" label, like the kosher K on your food. We could certify that this software: - respects the 4 FLOSS Freedoms - does not leak or store _any_ information remotely - is (reasonably) free of unnecessary hardware requirements and bloat - does not try to manipulate you for "engagement" etc.