"Free Software": An idea whose time has passed
r0ml.medium.com
r0ml.medium.com
> I would prefer software insurance to “software freedom”.
This is commonly referred to as an SLA and this is orthogonal to whether the software is free or not. You can have an SLA with both Microsoft and with SUSE, whether the software is free is completely unrelated to that fact.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26573425
The top thread discusses how the claim that the L in FLOSS stands for "Liberal" is highly dubious.
The word matches his intent of "Free Software" without English's ambiguity around gratuity vs. freedom.
If anything, the difference between "free software" and "open source" is more significant today than ever before.
Free Software being developed primarily by user/developers, who then share the s/w with other users, who may also be developers who contribute. Whereas Open Source being primarily developed by an organization that intends to profit from the s/w, but uses a public license to facilitate getting other people to contribute to the development of their product.
The two continue to diverge, in spite of using similar licensing. Thus continuing to emphasize when a project is actually Free Software, not just Open Source is more relevant and important today than ever.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
Some people seem to have gravitated toward saying that only copyleft licenses are "free software" (because FSF promotes both concepts?), but this is contrary to historical usage, where copyleft and permissive licenses were both considered both "free" and "open source".
With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software (at least in the United States) of the rights afforded them by Congress under Article I, Section VIII, Clause VIII. [..] The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want, and the freedoms that they wish to restrict for software producers are freedoms that most software producers would rather retain.
He tries to trick the reader into thinking of "software producers" as if they were a single entity. He finds room to talk about IBM's software distribution practices in the 1970s, but "forgets" to mention any case where free software prevented, or could have prevented (or simply never included), user-hostile practices (such as the now-pervasive DRM and spyware/telemetry, or anti-competitive moves [1]).
To use a car analogy - I don't want Volkswagen preventing me from picking my own mechanic. Yet the article tries to frame it as if this is some kind of burden on the user, and an infringement of Volkswagen's rights.
Of course the article is never that direct or honest - it exhausts the reader with irrelevant stories, skirts around the real issues, obfuscates and never states its thesis in plain language: that it is somehow to the user's benefit to be prevented from examining, modifying, or sharing software.
More than wrong, this article is dishonest. This is the kind of prose that is used to deceive, not explain.
Users who want the maximum freedom should logically prefer that no such restrictions exist and failing that should prefer the restrictions imposed by free software to that which is imposed by closed source software not least because it imposes not at all on usage.