Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

The Free Software Movement is Barking Up the Wrong Tree

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the interesting-viewpoints dept.

canopic jug writes:

Joseph Graham has written a very short blog post about software freedom and the direction we might take to achieve it.

The free software movement, founded in the 80s by Richard Stallman and supported by the Free Software Foundations 1, 2, 3, 4, preaches that we need software that gives us access to the code and the copyright permissions to study, modify and redistribute. While I feel this is entirely true, I think it's not the best way to explain Free Software to people.

I think the problem we have is better explained more like this:

"Computer technology is complicated and new. Education about computers is extremely poor among all age groups. Technology companies have taken advantage of this lack of education to brainwash people into accepting absurd abuses of their rights."

Source : The Free Software movement is Barking up the wrong tree

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Free Software Movement is Barking Up the Wrong Tree | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 73 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:07PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:07PM (#614766) Journal

    There's no good definition of "open source" which is why RMS hates the term.

    There is one pretty widely known definition that I've never seen or heard anyone dispute:
    https://opensource.org/osd [opensource.org]

    even Microsoft refers to a lot of their software as "open source" even though they only let certain people look at it, don't let them make any changes, and would sue them if they ever distributed it.

    They do have some open source code, yes. And anyone is free to view it and fork it and do what they want with it. The few I checked were released under MIT and BSD licenses, both of which are specifically named as meeting the above definition.
    https://github.com/Microsoft [github.com]

    I can't find anything that they call "open source" that is restricted like what you describe. In fact, Microsoft representatives have stated in interviews that "open source is more than just releasing the source code", so they definitely know that just releasing source code snippets to a partner under NDA does not at all qualify. Maybe some sales monkey is doing that, but that's definitely not an official corporate statement as far as I can tell.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2