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[return to "Open Source is Not About You"]
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1. geofft+S8[view] [source] 2018-11-27 01:58:53
>>jashke+(OP)
This is an excellent depiction of the distinction between "free software" and "open source" as ideological frameworks. As licensing schemes, they're the same - but open source ends at the licensing scheme, as the author correctly points out. If you want to use it for a side project, great. If you want to use it to make money, great. If you want to use it to commoditize the operating system for your worldwide advertising infrastructure, great. If you want to embed it in your iOS app or in iOS itself (and the license permits doing so), great.

The free software movement, however, says things like this (from https://www.debian.org/social_contract ):

Our priorities are our users and free software.

We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities.

We will give back to the free software community.

In other words, free software is about you.

I would quibble with the claim that the open-source process is what produced Clojure in the first place. The open source movement has benefited from sailing in the same direction as the free software movement and using the same tailwinds. Without the free software ethos (which was behind GNU as well as a lot of the Lisp work at MIT), would Clojure have been able to stand on the same shoulders, and would it have attracted the community of users and the ecosystem of libraries it has?

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2. knocte+Ga[view] [source] 2018-11-27 02:20:47
>>geofft+S8
I disagree. Software projects that claim to be free-software instead of opensource (plus use a "contagious" license such as GPL) don't owe you more community management than the ones with an MIT license.
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3. dfox+mb[view] [source] 2018-11-27 02:29:54
>>knocte+Ga
Most high profile project that explicitly claim to be free software in fact do not do any kind of community management at all and do not tend to actively seek outside code contributions.

In fact the community involvement in development as exemplified by GitHub (and SourceForge before that) is to a large extent invention of the same group that started using the term open source (for what is otherwise mostly the same thing as free software).

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