zlacker

>>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?

>>geofft+S8
Or I would rather say... Yes, "free software" has an ideological intention, that is, to make the software free for all its users, to protect it from exploitation using a strong license, and eventually leads to some forms of social change in the software world, as in "when we have enough free software, we'll kick out those dirty licenses, ever more, hackers, ever more".

But "free software" itself is only the means to an end, it's a technical and legal tool to accomplish these ideological intentions, and as a tool, it's a collection of code published under a license scheme. When the developers served their duties by providing the source to the users, the work is done. The developers have no responsibilities to implement anything for its users.

On the other hand, if someone writes free software because they wants some forms of social change, in this sense, the intention is not solely developing free software, but to pursuit an ideology though the development of free software. And this is done by a group of people in a community, like Debian, then they must be doing whatever is needed for this goal, i.e. be guided by the needs of the users.

In conclusion, "free software" is not about you, a free software community can be, and often is about you. But it is also legitimate if it's not, in the end, it depends on the community. Some people only care about themselves, some projects just want mainly the software, but may also care about users freedom, some projects want social changes, while others focused on improving the current status of a specific technology. There are overlaps, but there are priorities as well.