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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Free Software Foundation has a well-written overview of how the superset to Free Software, referred to collectively as Open Source, cannot save us from loss of liberty [opensourcemissesthepoint.com] in the context of computing. A lead-in using conventional rhetoric is followed by a concise conclusion using logic.

The FSF and the OSI both spend their days talking about licenses, which makes them easy to mix up. Follow the money instead. The OSI runs on corporate sponsorship, and its sponsors are some of the largest companies on earth. The FSF runs on membership dues from individuals.

FSF est. 1983
• Campaigns for the freedom of computer users. That’s the whole mission statement.
• Wrote the GPL, “designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program,” and defends it.
• No corporate members. Funded by individual dues and limited donations that buy no vote and no seat.
• Says “freedom” in meetings, unprompted, since 1983.

OSI est. 1998
• Approves licenses. (§05 covers the quality control.)
• Maintains a definition that never grants you the right to run the program. (§04.)
• Founded to make free software palatable to business, with the ethics filed off.
• Corporate sponsors include: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Cisco, Salesforce, Bloomberg, Intel. The famous grassroots.

Microsoft and Google do not sponsor things out of sentiment. Money at that scale steers, whatever the org chart says. The FSF is structurally incapable of being bought the same way: there is no corporate membership to buy. A company can donate, within limits, and what the donation purchases is nothing. One of these organizations exists to defend you from corporations. The other one sends corporations a welcome basket.

And when a license is actually violated, only one of them shows up. The FSF runs a licensing and compliance lab, answers license questions for free, and holds the copyrights that make enforcement possible. When Cisco shipped GPL code in Linksys routers without offering source, the FSF took them to federal court in 2008 and settled on its terms: source code published, a free-software compliance officer appointed, money paid. GPL violators can expect a courtroom. The OSI offers nothing comparable. It holds no copyrights, runs no compliance program, and has never enforced a license in its life; it stamps them and walks away. If anything, the institution leans the other way: its co-founder spent years arguing that open source “doesn’t need the GPL anymore.” Certifying dozens of alternatives to copyleft while defending none of them is not neutrality. It is a way of hobbling the one license built to fight back.

[...] Since F⊆OF⊆O is true and O⊆FO⊆F is false, by definition FF is a proper subset of OO:
F⊆O  ∧  F≠O

Even from the big launch of the term Open Source in 1998, the idea was only ever meant as a stepping stone to lead developers fully over to Free Software. Unfortunately some have gotten stuck along the way. And in the direction of software freedom, it is important to remember that software freedom is not the end goal in and of itself, it is merely the start of and prerequisite to greater things [oliva.nom.br] which only become possible from that foundation.

Previously:
(2025) Forty Years of Commitment to Software Freedom [soylentnews.org]
(2024) Achieving Software Freedom in the Age of Platform Decay [soylentnews.org]
(2023) The Four Freedoms and The One Obligation of Free Software [soylentnews.org]
(2022) Conflicts of Interest in OSI Election [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Has FOSS Traded its Shared Values for Success in the Marketplace? [soylentnews.org]
... and many more.

Original Submission