On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 05:46:05PM +0100, Andre Rodier wrote: > Dear Debian users, contributors, and enthusiasts,
[...] > Please, tell me what are your thoughts on this. Am I too pessimistic ? Are > you, like me, thinking these companies as open source "scroungers" ? Yes, they are. Arguably, the very term "open source" was promoted by scroungers. There are several possible interpretations of it -- the most common is that "free" connotates "zero price", but this seems to me more realistic: "Open source as a term emerged in the late 1990s by a group of people in the free software movement who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied in the term "free software" and sought to reframe the discourse to reflect a more commercially minded position." See, I'm into free software because of user freedom. A software "vendor" will balk at the idea of their users becoming "free", as much as a farmer won't be happy about their cows becoming free -- those are their means of production, as are the vendor's users. Much more extremely so in the age of surveillance capitalism [2]. The methods of user freedom's enemies are shifting quickly. They still have some GPL aversion (a bit quaint, makes one think of vampires and garlic), but it'll matter less and less. And with Copilot, Microsoft is running their Big Free License Dilution Experiment (note that they don't train Copilot on their in-house proprietary code: /their/ license seems still to matter to /them/). So if we care about user fredom, we'll have to come up with something new. Something fitting current times. Something as smart as the GPL was back then. So that's my take. Cheers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Open_source_as_a_term [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism -- t
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