Richard M. Stallman (RMS) Debunks Misconceptions About What Free Software Means and Explains How It Works
Make fun of the person all you want (by cherry-picking 40+ years of video archives and articles, short quips etc.), but he has a point about Software Freedom
Free software means people (including users and developers) exercise control over the program, not the programmers. "It's disturbing how many people don't understand FOSS," an associate says, linking to "Yaak Is Now Open Source" (not Yacc). "Just because someone provides a patch, there is no obligation to push it into the code base. That should be obvious, but some just don't get it."
Remember how 12 years ago Linus Torvalds pushed back against Microsofters with Trojan horses ('secure' boot) and was attacked for doing so.
As our associate put it: "Microsoft has been able to confuse lots of people to think that Free software means control over the programmers and forced redistribution. That's another point from RMS latest talk, that the redistribution is optional but IF it is done then the recipients of the redistributed software retain the same rights as the original authors. It is not like that in non-reciprocal licenses."
We've therefore decided to reproduce bits from the RMS latest talk (weeks ago), repeating portions of the complete transcript.
Here are the relevant bits from the opening remarks:
I'd like to point out that Free Software is a morally stronger idea and Open Source was an attempt later to co-opt the ... work of the community and de-politicize the philosophy. So that's why I have never supported Open Source in any way. I still support the Free Software Movement, that software should respect users' freedom. So, first of all, I'd like to say more about the difference between Free Software and open source because it's a topic of great confusion. I founded the Free Software movement in 1983 with the announcement. The term Open Source was coined fourteen years later in 1998 when Free Software was becoming widely used and starting to be something people knew about. But not everyone who worked on or used or promoted Free Software agreed with the philosophy of freedom behind it. And the people who didn't agree wanted to get out of connection with it by and many of them were working for businesses or with businesses that didn't care about freedom at all. So, they found a new term, Open Source, which they defined differently but it overlapped a lot. Most Free programs are Open Source. At the time it seemed all Free programs were open source, and most open source programs were Free. So, it is easy to get confused and think of these two as identical, but they are not. But the biggest difference is that the term Open Source has never had any implications about right and wrong. It was, that idea was launched that way by people who didn't see it as a matter of right and wrong. So that's why I decided I would not start using that term. They asked me to and I said, "no". Because Freedom, in my view, is what it's all about and I want the idea of Freedom to reach everybody who comes in contact with it. So what this means to you is that you have a choice. If you talk about Free/Libre software you will be saying I'm talking about Freedom. Freedom is what this is about.And if you use that term consistently you will spread that message. If you use the term Open Source you'll spread a different message. Well, what you say is up to you. But if you care about Freedom, please find opportunities to show that you care because we are competing with a different idea which has a lot of businesses promoting it. In order for use to keep the idea of Free Software alive, it helps if we work at it. So that's why you'll never hear me use the term Open Source. I mention it in order to criticize it, but I don't describe software that way.
And from Q & A session bits:
[Reading audience question] Can't we just call it Free and Open Software? [Responding to it] Well, if that's what you want to say, I can't stop you but I think it's misleading. First of all do you mean the set that includes free programs and open source programs. Or does it mean programs that are at once both free and open source. You can see one of these is a conjunction one of these is a disjunction. Free or you could take that as meaning Free is synonymous with open source but they are not synonymous. They're very different. I recommend reading gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html which explains thoroughly every aspect of the relationship between Free Software and Open Source Software.
These remarks are more relevant than ever. Openwashing has become highly problematic. Here are examples from this morning. █