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Comment by unsungNovelty | Hacker News Reader

> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations

I beg to differ here. OSS and Free Software movement was conceived for the freedom to change the software to the user's needs. The entire meaning of free as is freedom means as long as I abide by the license properly, I can do whatever I want with it. Whether you like it or not, this means Microsoft can make money out of curl project if they want to. This is the same way we used to burn Ubuntu cd's and resell it back in the early 2000s. It's allowed and IIRC Ubuntu cd cover used to proudly advocate burning, sharing those cds.

This big tech and money in OSS is a new phenomenon. I am neither against them or with them. But just that it is not the reason why OSS or Free Software movement happened.

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> the freedom to change the software to the user's needs.

How is this not exactly helping end-users? Corporations are producers, not users. And no one is complaining about MSFT or any other corporation using OSS as users, but only about co-opting it as a producer.

The license discussed above explicitly tries to prevent Microsoft from using the software.

The corporations _are_ end-users. They're just using a project to make adoption of their platform easier. Just because a user passes on the benefit of their usage to more than a single human doesn't mean they're not a user.

Sometimes corporations are end-users. When someone creates a fork of a project, they are no longer an end-user; they have become a producer.

OK. But that is allowed right? "Sharing" and "redistribute" are words you should have heard if you know what OSS. You are missing the whole point of Open Sourcing code. What you want is source available or proprietary software if you are bothered by this. And at that point, this has nothing to do with OSS.

This is literally why when a company stops open sourcing something, community or other company continues the fork. When a product fails as business and when open sourced, the software itself thrives.

Let me re-iterate, Open Source is purely about the software and the capability to share and make changes. IT IS NOT ABOUT MONEY, BUSINESS, CAPITALISM etc etc etc.

It is not even about collaboration. That is something that came out of Linux development which is one of the most famous Open Source project. All that is necessary is to make the software licensed under an OSS license. And I don't have to get PR from you, I don't need to accept outside collaboration etc etc.

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