> have a much stronger voice than the rest of us. Does it mean they get to define what is free software? Well, when we're talking about culture, word definitio

> have a much stronger voice than the rest of us. Does it mean they get to define what is free software? Well, when we're talking about culture, word definitions are descriptive of current usage, not prescriptive. So yes, absent rigorous technical definitions, the people with the strongest and most mainstream voices do get to define what words mean, because definitions describe usage. When we're talking about Open Source, both the rigorous technical definitions and the mainstream common understandings of the words reject NC licenses as Free/Libre. Is it possible that might change in the future? Sure. But it hasn't changed yet. > is more propaganda, than an attempt to argue in good faith. Let's be honest about what's happening here, both of us are making propaganda, because that's the only thing we can talk about. There is no natural law of the world that defines what any word should mean, when we have these conversations we are necessarily making moral/value arguments about what the definition of Free/Libre should be. Nevertheless, the "controversy" about Fields of Endeavor that you're highlighting is not as big of a deal or as big of a controversy as you're making it out to be -- in general the support for keeping Fields of Endeavor is a lot larger than the movement to remove it. Not that it would matter anyway, because NC licenses also violate clauses 1 (Free Redistribution) and 9 (License Must Not Restrict Other Software). So even if clause 6 did go away, it's still going to be a while before NC licenses can be considered valid under the OSI definitions. > The better philosophy should win What if we find out that the best way to fund Open Source is by restricting source access to approved people and by restricting people's ability to distribute modifications? Does that mean we should consider software that restricts that stuff to be Free/Libre? Saying the better philosophy should win is in some ways exactly what I mean by not understanding what the philosophies are -- it's predicated on this idea that the real definition of Free/Libre is "whatever works", rather than treating Free/Libre as a theory about what might work. "The better philosophy should win" is the kind of thing we properly say when discussing Free/Libre vs Proprietary software, or Communism vs Capitalism, or Veganism vs Vegetarianism, or any number of competing ideologies about the world. The effects of those philosophies in the real world are what we're trying to determine, not the definition of what those philosophies are. It may well be that the best way to guarantee free artefacts is by distributing Non-Free software. If that's the case, it doesn't make that software Free/Libre, it means that the proprietary model is better. It may well be that eating honey is better for the environment than abstaining from honey. That doesn't make honey Vegan. Free/Libre is a philosophy that (among other things) states that having a shared, collective commons of software that everyone uses and contributes to will be better than having a proprietary model in which people are forced to get permission before they're allowed to inspect/modify or distribute modifications to the programs that they build. That philosophy might be wrong, or it might be right. That's a different conversation than what the philosophy is. The idea that clauses like 1, 6, and 9 are just corporate quirks of the OSI definition of Free/Libre, rather than serious philosophical statements about what Free means -- that is what I mean by people not understanding the philosophy behind what they're critiquing. "Fields of Endeavor" doesn't exist just for corporate interests, it's intended to be a general prohibition against license restrictions like "don't be evil", "don't use for any cause I dislike", and "don't make money." People who argue against that clause ought to have better philosophical arguments than "corporations like it, so it must be evil." There's a very real effort to portray clause 6 as merely a quirk of history, and to avoid putting in the effort to dissect what the implications of clause 6 actually are, what purpose it serves, and what the implications of removing it actually would be and what removing it would change about the nature of Free/Libre software. But... again, clause 6 is not the only part of the OSI definition that NC licenses violate. NC licenses would have violated even most early definitions of Free/Libre before clause 6 had been added and before Open Source had become popular.