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Comment by throwaway936482 | Hacker News Reader

Can I ask why it is that the "foss community" is so hell bent on restricting the freedom of creators to call their software open source if the source is open, or choose licenses that might help them actually support themselves financially? As far as I can tell the "freedom" pushed by Foss evangelists only goes one way - to benefit often corporate consumers. I genuinely don't think I've ever seen a "community" that is so intent on policing language and action than that which exists around Foss.

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I think the FOSS community cares a lot about the freedom of the end-user, not so much about the freedom of original creators. That is, the freedom of everyone to become a creator, not the freedom of one particular creator to control their creation or profit from it in some way. This applies both to the GPL camp, which cares about the end-user of the binary; as well as the BSD/MIT camp, which cares about the end-user of the source.

Hence, their dislike of any kind of licenses which impose restrictions on consumers of the code/binary.

I'm not saying I agree, just presenting what I believe is the thinking behind this kind of policing.

I think my issue is that a nobleish idea that supported the freedom of everyone to be a creator has morphed into something (an ideology, a secular religion) that demands that creators not be able to make a living off their creation even if (or especially if) they are providing tooling for corporations that give nothing, or at least very little proportionally, back.

Sure, that is a valid position, and I mostly believe the same that you do.

To me, the OSS movement seems to be split between a minority of extreme idealism (Richard Stallman's position on the importance of software Freedom), and a majority of mostly big corporate pragmatists, which have realized that is far more lucrative to share the burden of developing common infrastructure between themselves than the previous status quo; and who greatly dislike anyone who tries to co-opt the OSS movement into something which does not serve this purpose. There is also a 3rd camp of companies that want to sell proprietary software, but who have noticed that open source variants of their software are a better marketing strategy than the shareware and freeware of old.

I believe that this third group is the biggest annoyance to both of the traditional OSS communities, but also the only ones who can actually make money by selling software whe also showing users exactly what code they are actually running.

If you dual-license your work under the AGPL and a paid non-copyleft license, then your product will be 100% FOSS, and you'll still be able to make a living from it instead of the Amazons of the world selling your product and giving nothing back.

That's what Mongo thought as well, and it turned out not to be true in their case (well, s/make a living/turn the profit your investors expect/g).

Open source has a specific common meaning. Other ideas have other common names like source available.

It means you can read the source. It doesn't mean it has to be free. That would be FOSS. And nothing has more convoluted multi-meanings than FREE, so your argument about "common meaning" is dead wrong. Also, trying to enforce universal meaning, like enforcing universal ideals, is patently retarding. FOH!

Free software has 2 common meanings. That says nothing about open source.

FOSS is also written F/OSS. It reflects that the common meaning of open source and the less common meaning of free software are almost identical. GNU says "...we know of only a few cases of source code that is open source but not free. In principle it could happen that some free programs are rejected as open source, but we don't know if that has ever happened."[1]

Source available is an unambiguous and more descriptive name for the kind of software that matters to you. Nobody can force you to call it that. But don't expect other people to change their definition of open source.

That says nothing about their ideals. Microsoft coined shared source the same year Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer.[2][3]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html.en

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20011108013601/http://www.suntim...

Open Source really became a religion, and every acolyte believes in their heart that non-FOSS is evil. Total newb flavored koolaid. It's not like I am advocating against FOSS, or open source, I am simply drawing a line where it matters and where it doesn't, for me.

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