The freedoms were about freedom for the user not a non user developer.
Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".
>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:
```
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.
```
In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.
Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.
There has been some revision over time, but there's an argument to be made that small revisions are inadequate to keep up with the sea change in how computing works that's happened since the turn of the century. The elephant in the room here is that SaaS, and especially cloud computing, has pretty well undermined the practical foundation for how the Free Software model was supposed to work for people who are trying to make a living selling Free Software.
Back in RMS days, he advocated, for example, a RedHat-style business model where you sell Free Software with services. But when AWS takes your project and releases it as their service, good luck competing with them. This is a very real problem.
Put out a restricted license if you don’t want hyperscalers to offer it as a service. Although they have enough software engineering talent to use the old version to create and maintain a fork (e.g. valkey, opensearch, etc.).
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
The original 1986 definition, which I see you referring to elsewhere, came from a news letter that's available here: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
The news letter itself cost $1. And it also includes an order form charging $150 for Emacs ($443.40 in 2025 dollars). The tape and the manual come to $487.74 in 2025 dollars.
The issue with SaaS is loss of the freedoms, not that vendors charge money. Free Software was never about forcing organizations to break even or operate at a loss. If you believe that's inherent to the original definition then I think you'd have to present a clearer argument for that position.
Free Software Foundation Order Form
February 6, 1986
Quantity Price Item
________ $150 GNU Emacs source code, on a 1600bpi industry standard mag tape in tar format. The tape also contains MIT Scheme (a dialect of Lisp), hack (a rogue-like game) and bison (a compatible replacement for yacc).
________ $15 GNU Emacs manual. This includes a reference card.
Thus, a tape and one manual come to $165.
________ $60 Box of six GNU Emacs manuals, shipped book rate.
________ $1 GNU Emacs reference card. Or:
________ $6 One dozen GNU Emacs reference cards.
Shipping outside North America is normally by surface mail. For air mail delivery, please add $15 per tape or manual, $1 for an individual reference card, or 50 cents per card in quantity twelve or more.
Prices are subject to change without notice. Massachusetts residents please add 5% sales tax to all prices.
There are really two issues here: one is what counts as copyleft (i.e. the ideal FSF license) and what counts as compatible with copyleft. The so-called permissive licenses like MIT and BSD are compatible with copyleft licenses in a way that licenses that restrict commercial access aren't. That's because these licenses don't add new restrictions but the non-commercial one does.
The abstract idea of copyleft is that it's a chain of rights grants A > B > C > D... where entities on the right have exactly the same rights as the entities on the left. In other words, copyleft preserves downstream freedoms, or ">" is a freedom preserving operator for copyleft software.
A permissive licensed piece of software X can be incorporated into copyleft software, say, B because X does not restrict any freedom required to be free software. However once incorporated, the chain becomes absorbed, you can't un-free the free software. So X >' B where >' is a sort of injection operation, but then everything downstream of B uses the ">" operator. X can also spin off proprietary copies of itself. Those are not compatible with free software, but they exist on a different branch of the rights grant tree and so aren't relevant to free software.
On the other hand a license with a non-commercial clause includes a restriction already. It's not a hypothetical restriction that someone else can add to a fork (as in permissive licenses). You can't take a license with a non-commercial clause M and map it into free software because, as you granted, free software includes the right to sell and the license doesn't grant the right to remove the non-commercial restriction. If it did grant the right to remove that restriction, then a fork that removed the restriction would possibly be compatible with free software.
What your argument amounts to in this framing is that even though A has the right to sell copies of the software, ">" doesn't have to preserve that right. This would require a stronger argument IMO, since (1) the freedom to charge is explicitly mentioned early even if it's not explicitly enumerated as one of the four freedoms yet, and (2) we have no examples where the FSF allows an entity on the left of ">" to terminate rights on the right of ">". That would break ">" as an operator.
These tenets are core to Free Software. Without freedom for users _and_ developers, there is no true freedom.
The original creators of the free software movement would disagree.
You are trying to co-opt the free software movement for your own ideals.
This comment might as well just be "nah."
"You're wrong."
"No I'm not."
"Yeah you are."
"Nuh uh"
"Yuh huh"