> distinguish free software and open source software
The movements are different sure, but when it comes to acceptable licenses, they are pretty much equivalent. Sounds like you are talking about licenses people common associate with each movement though. I agree there is somewhat of a dichotomy, although I feel like at the beginning open source was a bit more of a copyleft thing, and became more associated with permissive/pushover licenses later when GitHub became popular and Big Tech steered folks towards those licenses.
> Competitors launching a service based on free software isn't the real issue.
It is for the companies who are adopting the AGPLv3 in an attempt to be seen as "real open source" again. They don't actually care about users, except to the extent they can get cash from them, to pay back their vulture capitalist funders.
> It's all about us, the users of the software. Developers don't really matter.
Sure, as far as licenses etc go, but developers have to matter to some extent, otherwise you get unmaintained/buggy/nonexistent software.
In a world without copyright law, there would still be proprietary trade secret software, and Free Software. I see the Free Software movement as aspiring to providing a high level of equality of access to a work between both the original author and far downstream recipients. The license is only one aspect of that, the other is the source code, without which you can't have equivalent access to the author. The form that source comes in also matters, since there are forms that can only be modified with proprietary software, and forms that discard information (like machine code exectuables, or lossy video encoding).
That would remove the one possibility of GPL enforcement that we have, since I assume we aren't going to resort to kneecapping violators when copyright goes away :)
Perhaps there would be other non-violent tactics like boycott campaigns or trademarks to mark ethical software that could be effective. We should be doing those now too though, and are to some extent.
> It is for the companies who are adopting the AGPLv3 in an attempt to be seen as "real open source" again.
If it's a problem for them, then they're not really committed to free and open source software. That's how we test them.
> They don't actually care about users, except to the extent they can get cash from them, to pay back their vulture capitalist funders.
Exactly. This is why we cannot fooled by their attempts to open wash their reputation. They're still looking to control and monetize and exploit users at every turn.
> developers have to matter to some extent
Developers are users too.
Users can also hire developers to work on what they need. I've been hired to customize open source software. I even upstreamed the work. Pretty great as far as jobs go. I think this is how professional programming should be like.
> That would remove the one possibility of GPL enforcement that we have
It would also get rid of "anti-circumvention" nonsense and allow
us to copy and distribute software much more freely regardless of attempts to lock things down.
It'd fix many more problems than it'd cause. No need to enforce anything if everything is already free by default. Only one copy is needed for infinite replication.
> Perhaps there would be other non-violent tactics like boycott campaigns or trademarks to mark ethical software that could be effective.
The Open Source Hardware Association has a trademark that projects can use to advertise. It can be revoked if they're not compliant.
The movements are different sure, but when it comes to acceptable licenses, they are pretty much equivalent. Sounds like you are talking about licenses people common associate with each movement though. I agree there is somewhat of a dichotomy, although I feel like at the beginning open source was a bit more of a copyleft thing, and became more associated with permissive/pushover licenses later when GitHub became popular and Big Tech steered folks towards those licenses.
> Competitors launching a service based on free software isn't the real issue.
It is for the companies who are adopting the AGPLv3 in an attempt to be seen as "real open source" again. They don't actually care about users, except to the extent they can get cash from them, to pay back their vulture capitalist funders.
> It's all about us, the users of the software. Developers don't really matter.
Sure, as far as licenses etc go, but developers have to matter to some extent, otherwise you get unmaintained/buggy/nonexistent software.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
> Copyright is a lost cause.
In a world without copyright law, there would still be proprietary trade secret software, and Free Software. I see the Free Software movement as aspiring to providing a high level of equality of access to a work between both the original author and far downstream recipients. The license is only one aspect of that, the other is the source code, without which you can't have equivalent access to the author. The form that source comes in also matters, since there are forms that can only be modified with proprietary software, and forms that discard information (like machine code exectuables, or lossy video encoding).
https://wiki.debian.org/AutoGeneratedFiles
> I advocate for its abolition.
That would remove the one possibility of GPL enforcement that we have, since I assume we aren't going to resort to kneecapping violators when copyright goes away :)
Perhaps there would be other non-violent tactics like boycott campaigns or trademarks to mark ethical software that could be effective. We should be doing those now too though, and are to some extent.