> The hypothetical LibreOffice fork, with their private modifications on their own private computer, is entirely within the bounds of reason to keep those modif

> The hypothetical LibreOffice fork, with their private modifications on their own private computer, is entirely within the bounds of reason to keep those modifications private and generate revenue with it, if people want to pay them for the services they provide with it. I think you're getting caught up in the "on their own private computer" part. There is a clear distinction between using a piece of software and providing a service by which other users make use of the software by proxy. In the first case, you are not acting as a proxy for other users to run the software. > It's no different than me using LibreOffice to produce private documents, which I then use to generate revenue for my business. My customers have no right to access my private documents that I use to provide that service: It is incredibly different, so much so that I'm not sure you've understood my hypothetical. > source code is no different. If you were using it purely for yourself, yes. But in the hypothetical the business is providing the ability for other users to use the software by proxy. They aren't using the software themselves and then As a final point, consider that these days a regular user might not know whether the software they run is actually locally running on their computer or is a SaaS application where the code happens to reside on a different machine. How they use the software is no different in either case -- so why should they have different concepts of what freedoms they have? For an ordinary user there is no practical distinction between software they use on their computer versus software which is provided over the internet -- hence why I said that the only real difference is that the "display protocol" for the application is HTTP not X.