Unpopular opinion: “Open Source”, spawned from Netscape spinning off Mozilla, laid out in definition by the OSI organization, and advocated for by AnCaps like Eric S. Raymond, was always fundamentally capitalist. Devs spending a lot of free time doing free work for companies was not an accident. Capitalists borrowing ideas from the left and twisting them for their own uses is not new, either.
Free Software is more rooted in communism. You’re doing this to help your community. RMS might have always denied it–probably because it wasn’t a good idea to advocate that way during the Cold War and after–but it’s a better philosophical fit.
Those discussions largely resulted in “FOSS”, and a basic peace treaty. The two tended to use the same techniques and licenses in practice, and nobody really wanted to have that fight.
I didn’t realize things had progressed to this point. I thought there were still some mainstream distros that would qualify as Free, but the only ones GNU endorses are ones I’ve never heard of. There do still seem to be some non-GNU projects with a freedom-first philosophy.
Unpopular opinion: “Open Source”, spawned from Netscape spinning off Mozilla, laid out in definition by the OSI organization, and advocated for by AnCaps like Eric S. Raymond, was always fundamentally capitalist. Devs spending a lot of free time doing free work for companies was not an accident. Capitalists borrowing ideas from the left and twisting them for their own uses is not new, either.
Free Software is more rooted in communism. You’re doing this to help your community. RMS might have always denied it–probably because it wasn’t a good idea to advocate that way during the Cold War and after–but it’s a better philosophical fit.
It’s past time to divorce the two.
There are discussions about open vs. free going back over 20 years, that I know of. The divorce happened long ago, but they’re still neighbors.
Those discussions largely resulted in “FOSS”, and a basic peace treaty. The two tended to use the same techniques and licenses in practice, and nobody really wanted to have that fight.
I didn’t realize things had progressed to this point. I thought there were still some mainstream distros that would qualify as Free, but the only ones GNU endorses are ones I’ve never heard of. There do still seem to be some non-GNU projects with a freedom-first philosophy.