Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?

The position that others should have the freedom to read, use, and adapt source code is inherently a political one. It was never not political.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people within the FOSS movement have political disagreements about precisely what that freedom should entail.

want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned

I personally haven’t run into this, though I have seen people immediately hop into a conversation to say, “You shouldn’t use X! It’s proprietary!” Worst-case scenario, I’ve seen social shaming for using proprietary software. Which I think is to some degree OK? Encouraging and advertising proprietary software is unethical, and I think it’s fine to annoy people into not advertising things like Discord. That’s not censorship, it’s just how relationships work, it’s how people associate.

don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

Again, I haven’t run into this. I have seen people defend even garbage libre software on the basis that half-broken free code is better (ethically) than wonderful non-free code — which is true!

My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

It only hurts the people that use the proprietary software that was made; now they don’t have control over their PC, and are at the mercy of the developer. Really, all they can do is cross their fingers and hope the dev is friendly and not up to anything unscrupulous. Speaking of which…

I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy

Not inherently, obviously! No one actually thinks that free software is a magical silver bullet that vanquishes any possibility of malware, spyware, or anything of the sort. The argument is that these sorts of things are, compared to proprietary software, significantly easier to identify and remedy.

For instance, let’s say you find through some network analysis that a program phones home with suspiciously large payloads. You can’t actually see the contents of the packets as they’re encrypted in some weird format you can’t make heads or tails of. With a proprietary program, you’ve hit a brick wall that’s very hard to climb — you can’t find out what the program is sending, not easily. Your only hope is some back-breaking reverse-engineering work, which probably isn’t feasible unless you’re a professional security researcher. With a libre program, though, you could snoop through the code for anything net-related, and discover much more easily that it’s sending your private keys to the project’s server. Heck, with the libre program you could even remove the malware code and use the program again!

One is leaps and bounds more amicable to privacy and security.

I’ve noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

I mean, proprietary software isn’t popular with people who strongly advocate for free and open source software. At the same time, lots of companies criticize FOSS. Shall we talk about that too? Either way, they have no obligation to cater to you.

I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

It may or may not harm you, it depends. It will probably harm the user. Namely; some software is inherently monopolistic. For example, operating systems are monopolistic because targeting more than one is hard for many applications and so we target the few most popular. If you create an OS with a permissive license and it becomes popular, whoever manages to create the most popular fork of it has the power to close the source, drop compatibility and form a monopoly because application developers want to target the most popular fork and users want to run those applications so will use the most popular fork. Whether the owner of the fork did most of the work on the OS or not, they get to reap the rewards of the monopoly. How is that fair or beneficial to anyone in this situation except the owner of the monopolistic fork? How are people supposed to reliably share a standard with each other if the draw bridge can be raised any time major popularity is achieved? The problem here is, only proprietary forks have the ability to do this. You have to actively deny or limit proprietary forks to stop this situation. It depends on the application but the choice of license can have huge implications.

I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy.

Yes there are examples of this and we fork those projects to not include tracking for those who care enough about it. Can you do that with proprietary software?

On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.

How does the existence of FOSS infringe on your right to create proprietary software? If you mean that people at the FSF disagree with you, that’s just a disagreement. Maybe their personal view is extreme and against your personal liberties but that’s not the same as software freedom.

It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way.

As is their right. I mean, it only gets difficult if someone exclusively uses FOSS and you only accept contact via iMessage. Though, if you disagree that much, maybe you shouldn’t be in contact.

Maybe you’ve just found the folks at the FSF have some extreme views? Please consider, what would it say if Richard Stallman waltzed into a presentation holding an iPad? They kind of have to take the most extreme view, they’d be pretty shoddy advocates otherwise.

Everything is political, all is opinion.

I think Free Software philosophy is polarising because advocates understand proprietary software mistreats the user and there is too much risk or temptation by developers or their corporate interests for profit. If you follow that train of thought you should be able to see why it would be inappropriate to recommend proprietary software in FOSS spaces.

I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

  -Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

 -Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

 -When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.

I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.

So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).

This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

It gives a good short history of how we got here.

In the end it is all about user freedom. So you can do what you want. But if you develop closed software I do not want to have to use it. This consideration is less importent when the FOSS options are considerable. On the otherhand I have lived in times where it was not like that. This is always the fear.

What people do as a group matters… and people are always doing stupid things in terms of user freedom. Great example is Firefox and Chrome. People are idiots for using Chrome based browsers from an ad company. This affects me becase now websites prioritize Chrome compatibility. Essentially this makes the web an arm of Google.

if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

In my opinion, the point of many open source licensing models is not to protect the author, it’s to ensure that useful modifications to the code are able to be incorporated back into the original software. The licenses accomplish this by requiring those who fork/modify the original code to make their code/modifications public.

This improves the source code and makes it better for everyone.

You can’t take an open source project protected by a GPL license, make improvements, pretend that you did all the work yourself (i.e. not acknowledge the source project on which yours is based), and then attempt to monetize the original code + your improvement.

For example, take Truth Social. Not understand (and/or caring) about the license attached to the Mastodon project, they forked the code, made changes, and then did not acknowledge that they did so. Mastodon had to threaten to sue before they acknowledged that they’d built their platform on open source software.

It’s not about protection of a single developer or even a group. It’s about cooperation to build on the work of others in a fair way.

Open source licensing is responsible for a lot of really useful things that are integral to the daily lives of billions of people. The Linux kernel alone is a massive example. Without that license, there would be no Android, or SteamDeck. Without the BSD license, they would be no OSX/macOS. Without GPL, there would be no AdBlock, no uBlock Origin, no Git, no MySQL, no Ansible, no ProtonMail, and millions of other projects. Most internet servers would probably still be running Windows.

Most of these licenses explicitly say that you can even sell products based on the code - all you have to do is acknowledge the source project, and make your own source code public and available under the same license.

Here’s what Linus Torvalds said about people making money from Linux back in 1993:

The fact that others make money by selling Linux is something that I find mostly amusing, and something which does my ego no end of good. Frankly, I wouldnt want to bother personally, so if somebody else does it, it doesnt hurt me. Its also quite legal by the copyright, and so far I havent seen any major developer stand up and say he doesnt like his code being sold, so I dont see the problem.

I mean, free software is somewhat political by nature. Of course there’s those who refuse to use anything nonfree, but I can’t imagine any movement in general that doesn’t end up with some vocal extremists. I do find some of the attempts at stuff like fully foss hardware neat though.

I do think GPL makes it a bit more feasible to dual license your project as commercial and open source though, which makes a bit more sense to me for anything you still want to make money off of (especially considering some of the horror stories of popular open source libraries that get next to nothing in funding). I don’t really care what other people license their stuff as though.

Not really answering your question, but FSF’s criteria here are straight up insane to me. Apparently, just mentioning “open source” is unethical, as well as ever letting anyone write “Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux”.

I will gladly admit that I don’t use BSD nearly as much as Linux and know far less about it but I think Apple forking and close-sourcing a version of BSD is a pretty good example of what you said doesn’t happen in BSD.

With all that being said, that’s what the BSD license allows for and so there’s no issue with anyone doing so.

Interestingly, Apple as well as the 2 others I mentioned that ship BSD based operating systems sell hardware meant to cooperate nicely with the software that they “give away”. Red Hat and other commercial Linucies? Linuxes? Linnii? often have a support or software license agreement that makes them money.