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Comment by dleary | Hacker News Reader

That is a pretty cynical take. FSF good, OSI bad.

> ”Open Source" was created to be corporate-friendly as it was predated by Free software, which is rigidly committed to users freedom.

Rigidly committed to a certain interpretation of users freedom. And that interpretation happens to involve removing a number of freedoms “for your own good”.

It is more correct to say that the GPL was created to be anti-corporate, as it was predated by both the MIT and BSD licenses, which are more free, both for users and corporations, which the FSF finds intolerable.

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> That is a pretty cynical take. FSF good, OSI bad.

I ascribed no moral value judgement on which is better. However , Tim O'Reilly isn't exactly shy about who the target of those early Open Source conferences (OSCON) were, and what they were attempting to achieve - which they succeeded at.

Free software isn't great either. Stallman is fine with proprietary software as long as it's baked in ROM, which is even worse than making it distributable but without providing source.

He’s pragmatic on that. He would prefer free ROM but knows getting hardware companies to do that is quite the uphill battle.

ROM is generally hardware specific anyway so there is less benefit to it being free. Where else would you run it?

ROM is generally firmware for an embedded processor, and being able to modify that opens up new possibilities for the device i.e. more freedom. For example it might be possible to implement new offload features on a network card - the fact that no one bothers to do so doesn't mean the possibility shouldn't be there. I'd rather have the vendor put it in public domain or thereabouts, and make it editable. They're making money by selling the hardware anyway.

It’s like the paradox of tolerance. If you are tolerant of the intolerant than intolerance wins.

If open source maximizes freedom for those that want to take freedom away from the end user, you get open source as it exists today: a free labor pool and shared toolbox for surveillanceware and closed SaaS plays.

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