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
I think you are reading too much into the term "free software" as GNU was historically[1] no less easier to contribute to than Clojure is today.

The GNU definition of free software (and the 4 freedoms) make it clear that it is about users, but only inasmuch as their private rights to do what they want on their own computers. There is no sense that openly welcoming community patches is something that is involved.

1: It's entirely possible that the community has opened up more recently, but Lucid shipped a fork of Emacs in the 80s for similar reasons to the complaints about clojure today.