It's also problematic for educational institutions even if they happen to be tolerant of a little bit of colorful language here and there. Ardour is the usual example of software that's the former without being the latter (you can download the source code for free if you have the know-how to compile it yourself, but a donation is required to download the pre-built direclty-installable binary). That aside, you seem to be conflating "free as in speech" (FOSS) with "free as in beer" (freeware, or how most people treat WinRAR) in some parts of that writeup. Permissive BSD/MIT family licenses just give it up. Stallman at least swapped commercial viability out for the infectious nature of copyleft, intended to keep as much software free and shareable as possible. Compare the market caps of Oracle and Microsoft to Red Hat for an illustration of the comparative effectiveness of these models. ![]() The only business model that's viable is selling support. The problem, of course, is not that the source is available and people are free to tweak and understand what's happening on their own machines, but that the licenses which open-source programs grew up under made serious commercial sales effectively impossible. Commercial vendors have improperly conflated the distribution of source code with the complete inability to make any money from it. I personally think the unlimited redistribution clauses that are mandatory for "Open Source" licenses have caused some serious problems. I understand that in practice, ESR successfully muscled others out and claimed effective cultural ownership of the phrase, but that doesn't mean that no one else is allowed to try to stake their claim and see if it sticks. This is so natural that the intelligence community has a parallel definition of "open source" that refers to non-secret/publicly available intelligence sources. ![]() It's the natural phrase for software that doesn't keep its source secret (or "closed", a common synonym for secret).
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