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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

"I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately."

it's open source vs. free software

open source = free labor for private profits.

I think the term "free software" is a marketing failure because you'd always have to add "as in free speech, not free beer".

In German you can differentiate that, "frei" vs. "gratis".

I'd go as far as saying that the term "free software" is a complete an utter fail. In my mind "free speech" is speech that is entirely unrestricted. Almost all FOSS licenses come with "restrictions", such as you must leave the copyright notice in place, you must add the "PROVIDED AS IS" spiel somewhere the end user can read it, you must release your derivative work's source code under the same license etc., so it is by definition no longer "free".

WTFPL is probably the only real "free" license.

the freedom part is not for the software developer, it is for the end user running the software.

I've obviously missed something here, what are the freedoms the end user is afforded?

0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.

1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.

3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

It's as if open source was invented to make part of free software more palatable to corporations.

Even in 1998 it didn't take a genius to see what a Faustian bargain that Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond were leading us to sign.

Now we have SaaS, PaaS, and AWS. L-O-L. Bigly L-O-L. MySQL and PHP alone probably contributed to half of Zuckerface and Bezos billions.

Imagine writing an npm package that the FAANGs install as a dependency of their giant website and not being able to pass the leetcode gatecheck to even get a job there. Dystopias aren't much fun when you live in one.

Like which npm package? This would be a great tale to hear :p

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