In other words, free as in freedom, but not free as in beer.
That's the Free Software slogan, not open source. The only relationship between the two is that open source can easily be relicensed into Free Software (or proprietary, or whatever.)
There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development. I'm not forced to take your advice or contributions just because I'm open source, so how could that have anything to do with it?
> There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development.
Your view of the meanings of "free" and "open source" software is very literal and narrow. I'm not trying to debate the technical definitions of those terms, because frankly, I don't care and I don't think they matter in this discussion.
The crux of what I am saying is this:
A company may choose to share their source code for others to benefit from, under the hope that large players will contribute back in some way rather than use the situation to the disadvantage of the upstream company.
In other words, they might hope to:
* Let hobbyists learn from and use their code for free.
* Let competing companies use their code, as long as they contribute something back (money, bugfixes, festures, community support, QA).
* Make their employees happy.
and they may not hope to:
* Empower other large companies to freeload--ie, profit without contributing back at all.
Yes, I understand that permissive open source licenses allow freeloading in a legal sense. That does not mean the upstream companies have to be happy about it, much in the same way that you're allowed to use your office's shared kitchen to microwave fish, but your colleagues do not have to be happy about it.
What about this is so hard to understand?
While you are correct that the Free Software Movement has slogans like "free as in freedom" and has a definition based on "the four freedoms," the Open Source Movement also recognizes and advocates for "Software Freedom" as well.
"We build a world where the freedoms and opportunities of Open Source software can be enjoyed by all." [1]
Software that is licensed under Apache 2.0, MIT, BSD, or any of the other so-called "permissive" licenses is labeled "Free Software" by the Free Software Movement as-is. It does not require a "relicense" to become Free Software.
Said another way: you don't have to use a copyleft license like the GPL to qualify for the "Free Software" label.
It is just a different name for the same thing, because there was a group that developed a vocabulary before another group existed.
Opinions like that are the reason why more and more companies are walking away from the great attempt of building stuff collaboratively.
It's totally understandable to not want companies to profit off of proprietary, closed-source forks of your software. I get it! But there are licenses that you can use to stop that from ever happening (namely [A]GPL). Why not use one of those?
Copyleft is politically scary to some people, so they refuse to acknowledge it other than to call people zealots. Explicit licenses protect you. Open source spirits don't. Everyone should be honest: the only reason a lot of people prefer open source is because they want to preserve a rug-pull option. Then they get surprised with it's Amazon pulling the rug on them.
Indeed, copyleft can be politically scary. Especially when for-profit companies co-opt copyleft to drive licensing revenue by selling alternative license arrangements [1]. If all those who adopt copyleft licenses pledged to commitment to community-oriented GPL enforcement principles [2] I think that it would be a lot less scary. Unfortunately we've seen "copyleft trolls" that try to wield copyleft as a weapon, either for profit or to make other demands that are not helpful to the community.
Copyleft licenses are, indeed, protective licenses from my perspective. Or, they should be.
An aside, when it comes to "Amazon pulling the rug" -- what exact incident are you referring to?
[1] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...
[2] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
IMHO not everything needs to be open-source, but in many case it just makes so much sense that is a dumb idea to reinvent the wheel.
Many projects are succesfull this way. One I can think of is LLVM.
Because projects believ(ed) that the good will of their users would be enough to sustain their projects and businesses.
Now that certain projects see that good will isn't working, they're switching to the legal system.
Projects are free to choose permissive licenses like BSD.
Companies are then free to use the code however they like and not contribute back in any way.
Projects are then free to be annoyed by this because they hoped that companies would contribute time and/or resouces out their own good will.
Finally, projects are free to move to "business source" licenses because good will didn't work, so they need to utilize the legal system to ensure that large companies help sustain the project.
What part of this do you disagree with?
