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zombie_berkman wrote (edited )

Lol this was my shitty crop job in gimp from a while ago.

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quadrungle wrote (edited )

This is so obviously blind partisanship. There's a long history here that has real problems, but TODAY most of the OSI board and everyone involved are sincere, supportive FSF members. In fact, one of the OSI board members is an FSF employee. The original anti-ethics OSI folks are long gone.

The OSI today is more pro-freedom and FSF leaning than most of the "open source" big players today like GitHub or the anti-copyleft develop-focused JavaScript communities etc.

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libre_dev OP wrote

Perhaps a variant of this meme is in order then. "Open source" in the past usually meant pro-corporate folks who would rather free software use more permissive licenses. We've seen where that road leads many times. It's even worse with cloud stuff

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quadrungle wrote

There's still a TON of those "open source" people, just as you describe.

It's just that when you use different language to refer to the same thing, you'll find people adapting. So, people who come to software already interested in ethics and freedom and see lots of references to "open source" continue holding their ethical views while talking about "open source". So, it gets muddy.

The OSI is still more of the reformist, in-the-system, don't-push-the-politics as an org. But they're more like (really, don't take this analogy too strictly) the Democratic Socialists of America where (A) yes, they don't all hold the real hard-core positions but they aren't actually trying to undermine them it's (B) more of a strategic question of reform versus revolution etc.

Given that lots of people remain uncertain, you find more and more people who don't take a partisan position but have sympathies all around.

The truth is, as bad as "open source" is as a term, it was a political error for RMS and the FSF to reject it instead of co-opting it. Instead of trying fruitlessly to push-back and say, "no, it's not Open Source", they should have been saying, "yeah, and we also call it Free Software because Open Source is about freedom!" etc. It was wrong to let the original OSI set the language on their terms. And we should keep that in mind going forward.

It's better to tell the "open source" people that THEIR language and values are about freedom and inject that into the discussion rather than leave the divide as is.

We want people going forward to approach places where they see "open source" with a reaction of, "hey, WTF, you said you were Open Source but you're doing X, Y, Z in ways that violate the freedoms and ideals!" Don't let them have their anti-ethics term.

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libre_dev OP wrote

Don't we have this with the term FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software)? The free part is still in a bit of a limbo there, being able to pay rent with free-as-in-freedom software is still something I feel is important

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quadrungle wrote

It's NOT (at least shouldn't be) "Free and Libre Open Source Software", it's "Free/Libre, Open Source Software".

And FLO is better because it drops the stuff that's so software specific and works as an adjective.

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