this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
1660 points (76.1% liked)
Memes
45741 readers
1671 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's about a very narrowly and specifically defined version of freedom, which somewhat ironically restricts people's ability to define freedom for themselves.
I personally find Apache2, MIT, or the WTFPL a lot more free-feeling than all the restrictions GPL imposes in the name of freedom.
I used to agree until I saw corporations starting to fork open source projects to run them internally like the "I made this" meme.
If I spend months or years of my life toiling over a project and license it permissively with MIT or such, they can just swoop in one day and take it for free and be like "thanks, we're going to make mega bucks off your code and give you nothing" (and yes this does happen https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws).
No, screw that! I'm gonna make my stuff AGPL and those guys can damn well pay me for my time of they want to use my stuff or more cynically, do it anyway or go and reimplement it themselves in-house knowing damn well I can't afford an army of lawyers to actually do anything about it.
Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose. Your freedom to do whatever you want with my code ends when you want to bind other users with it.
Yes, the "free" in free software specifically refers to the freedom to read and modify the source code.
That's the specific freedom we are talking about when we say "free as in freedom".
Also, under the philosophy, permissive licenses (like MIT or BSD) is still considered free since you can see and modify the source code. The only thing the GPL strive to ensure is that this freedom will be awarded all others who interact with the fruits of your labour.