> The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. I'm not so certain. There

> The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. I'm not so certain. There has been a strong pull away from GPL software towards weakly-licensed software, which is difficult to resist. Hell, _I_ have not been able to resist, and my publicly-available software is 3-BSD-licensed. So, I would say that advocacy for GPL-style licensing and virally-FOSS software is still very much necessary. The same goes for many of the principles RMS argues for. > What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat No. Since the software is free, we are not dependent on an organization maintaining it. Naturally, if the maintainer "drops" a piece of software, that is a problem and a challenge, but still. > Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image Unlike commercial software, free software is unusable if Joe User can't it figure out themselves. So, without documentation and relative consistence of functionality - it's of very little public use. > we've see the rise of the Patreon developer, No, we haven't. What fraction of FOSS developer can use that as a living? I'd be surprised if it's 1 in 5,000. > who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project. Again, very few projects are this bug. Most FOSS projects have a small number of users.