this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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FOSS isn't about "corpo hate". It's about freedom. There's a philosophy behind it. You can, of course, disagree with it, but I think you should know what you're disagreeing with.
I'm talking about the community. A large part of the community absolutely is about gate-keeping and hating on corporations... and now devs too apparently.
I haven't seen that at all. Hate doesn't bring you far.
I have and it's good and cool.
Well maybe not gatekeeping. But hating corporations...
In general I strongly prefer open source, because lots of propertiary software will try to vendor lock you and then extract money from you, when it's hard to escape for you.
In this case however I can change back to Connect or other any second, so amount of control this program has is extremely minimal and experience in exchange is better.
Informed choice is better than picking and following dogma, because dogma doesn't work in some cases.
Yeah F locked ecosystems. Anyone can walk away from Sync if they don't like it.
The philosophy of FOSS is very cool but for one dev Sync is way too much work to be doing for free. It has my support.
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.