What??? It’s literally just a group distinguishing itself from another. Both Open Source and Free Software work together against a common enemy.

It’s good to distinguish different groups that have different methodologies, motives and goals to avoid friction. This essay is actively trying to avoid hostility.

you get to tell anyone who uses your product what they can do with it.

Horseshoe theory but for copyleft and copyright. What a fucking joke. I thought you had good intentions but now I know you’re unwilling to see another perspective.

We in the free software movement don’t think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters. What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” To make this clear, we avoid using those terms.

Your own citation disproves the hostility claim. To answer your question, yes I was a student associate member of the FSF. Nowhere did I learn to treat non copyleft licenses as “hostile.” In fact, they are so prevalent that considering it hostile/harmful would be fruitless. They are still free licenses at the end of the day (at least the ones that dont violate the four freedoms)

Edit: actually we are hostile to some open source licenses, like the ones that prohibit commercial use to any group or individual! That’s a huge no-no.

Surprised that most hardware companies aren’t on the list. AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom all are hostile to reverse engineering or in Nvidias case, not even bothering to do the bare minimum for an ultra lenient Torvalds.

FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.

Citations please? Using a pushover license instead of copyleft is not hostility but a missed opportunity. Copyleft is about a community safeguarding itself and making sure the software can’t be used in proprietary applications as much as possible.

A lotta words to describe what’s inevitable under a capitalist model of software creation and distribution and an ideology that limits itself inherently.

It seems like Perens is discovering what RMS already predicted a long time ago (ironic considering he quotes him), that Open Source will fail its users in terms of freedom (i am not speaking about Open Source as a development model but a political movement and collective who use the term to define itself).

The Open Source community has shown itself to be unreliable in defending our freedom. The lax attitude toward nonfree tooling like Github and copyleft licenses has shown itself to create issues like the ones mentioned by Perens. It’s a bad look when hackers are forced to use nonfree software to participate in open source development when libre solutions either exist already or can be spearheaded by these same hackers (source hut comes to mind).

The GPL enforces itself and hunting companies that violate the GPL was never the goal (when they are sued by the FSF, it is only so that they publish the source code by the license terms). The purpose of the GPL was to create a community of hackers to build software under a protected copyleft domain. These problems that perens mentioned are applicable to the pushover MIT/X11 license which unfortunately has lured hackers into believing that the current capitalist tech field would respect them (EEE and enshittification debunk this). Pushover licenses were a specific strategy for certain pieces of software (miniscule libraries, open file formats to replace closed/patented ones) but have been overused to the point of meaningless.

TL;DR a movement that appeals to capitalist corporate interests rather than emphasizing freedom on ethical/civil grounds will be limited by that same system.

The goal of the hacktivist struggle was always to create software that protects the users freedom as nonfree software is inherently unjust. With enough free software we can kick out the dirty contracts, patents, and licenses used to control us.

Of course those who identifty with Open Source can have their own set of strategies and beliefs, but the dominant culture and attitude are accurate to what I mentioned above. Open Source has always been a sister movement to the Free Software Movement in terms of ideology. It’s why FOSS is such a controversial term, it would be unfair to awkwardly (FOSS only excacerbates the confusion about “Free”) group these two communties together who differ in many key ways.

It’s also against the very idea of software freedoms in the first place. This is just reinventing proprietary licenses.

business source license

This is nonsense, Business source is not a free license. It is useless to try to invent new and clever licenses if they don’t even follow the basic standards for Free software. The solution to helping hackers/devs in their work is not to suddenly reinvent proprietary licenses.

You might be discouraged to know that CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is a non-free/proprietary license since it restricts commercial use.

There is no crude “fucking over.” Creating software is a difficult task, and creating software that respects the user’s freedom means giving up the temptation to use your abilities for harm and personal benefit.

If companies are required to pay, then the software is not libre. I understand your intent, but this isn’t a solution (even if it was, it would just mean that it would just be a tax for small companies, Meta and Alphabet aren’t worrying about a tax), building a stronger community is.

Commercial software is not mutually exclusive with libre software, and things like copyleft exist to prevent companies from using libre software to create proprietary software.