this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Free and Open Source Software
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Because many people are also fans of free software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
That just feels like communism: a nice, idealistic concept to achieve in its entirety but a good inspiration towards a better system. In the real world, both are ripe for exploitation. Communism is perfect for exploitation by power hungry humans, GNU software is perfect for exploitation by companies.
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Free software is very much like communism, the difference is that cloning something costs nothing, imagine if we could use a ray gun to clone any object, then communism would no longer be even remotely idealistic.
Both fail in certain areas once exposed to the real world. Communism fails because of human psychology and scale. Free software fails when competing against megacorps, those who don't follow the spirit nor the letter of free software licenses, and when infringements are not enforced.
Megacorps don't get to be megacorps by being nice. They will exploit anything to get ahead, and free software providing work for free is a benediction that they will happily exploit. People who get offended when free software providers defend themselves against such corps by changing their license to non-commercial or non-cloud compete are just victim blaming.
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I'd understand if you said that the FSF feels like communism, but how the heck is that specific philosophy in support of selling FOSS software communism?
GNU philosophy feels like communism. Also that standard of purity - no exceptions.
This leads to people conflating non-free and opensource or tightly coupling opensource to FLOSS - even though F and L are qualifiers for OSS. OSS isn't forcibly F and L. "X is not opensource because you can't use it commercially nor sell it".
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FOSS was created as a compromise between the FSF and the OSI, and the latter's Open Source Definition includes this:
Keep in mind that the OSI was made for the purposes of popularizing the term "open source", which was created because some wanted it to be more pragmatic than political. This is a consensus.
That's really great for people living in the 1990s. However for people and businesses in the now, with megacorps taking advantage of their dominant positions to sell an opensource product without contributing back and killing the business that provides the opensource product, hanging on to a lucid dream mean the death of the opensource product and loss of livelihoods.
Staying purist in the face of reality is one thing: delusional.
Maybe someday we'll have the alternative of "The morgue is full of people who had the right of way" for FLOSS purists who didn't want to give in to reality.
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Could you provide an example: Ideally a copyleft one
There are probably BSD derivatives that act that way.