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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s a way of explicitly remarking the free part. Before OSI’s definition Open Source referred to permissive licences. In most cases it still refers to permissive licences, thus the clear distinction is relevant.

    Unless people starts to refer to BSD, Apache and similar as open source permissive in order to differenciate with open source copyleft (or similar).

    Otherwise I feel is completely relevant to refer to copyleft software as Free Software. It helps both to show that there’s differences between both and also makes new people realize that there are different alternatives.


  • Putting GPL (copyleft) licences in the same bag as BSD-like (Open source and similar, permissive) licences is prejudicial for the FOSS environment.

    While Open Source licencea are better than privative ones, they still do not defend the software freedom. Thus making them equivalent to GPL-like licences is misleading.

    Users that do not have much knowledge about software freedom may think that Open Source projects are as free as GPL-like ones. This could mean that users end trusting this software as much as GPL-like one.

    Open Source does not respect software freedom which in turn means that it also does not defend user freedom.

    Putting Free software and Open Source as the same concept is dangerous. Companies prefer Open Source licences because they are able to not respect the software freedom.

    If Free Software and Open Source is treated as equal, then those companies can disguise themselves as something they aren’t.

    In internet different people reads what you post. Talking with property is important in order to not fool possible new users.

    You could for example know the difference between both licences but someone reading you could not.


  • Swapping concepts of projects that explicitly are Free Software and advertising them as Open Source is a quite disrespectful statement against the creators of those projects.

    It’s like confusing left from right. It completely negates the intentions they had when opting for a Free Software licence.

    If you are not able to distinguish them at least refer them as FOSS as some kind of respectful attempt.