This was the original 1986 definition of “free software”.
‘The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.’
Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
I don't know, they were focused on freedom for users not for vendors/programmers.
I think it's very intentional that a restriction on what you can do with software -- including reselling it -- is a violation of the "four freedoms" -- freedoms for what someone can do with software, including redistribute it or use it for any purpose they want (including reselling it).
These licenses meant to prohibit users from using the software in ways that harm the business interests of the programmers -- I am confident the original creators of free software four freedoms would agree they are not free software. It is very intentional that they were saying the freedom of users to do what they want with software should not be limited for the convenience of the business interests of those who wrote the software.
The 4 freedoms came later. The above definition predates them. There’s nothing in that definition that makes me think anyone was thinking of anything beyond community created software,
distributed by the community.
This license isn’t about users. If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.
This license in particular isn’t my favorite, but I’m totally fine in theory with licenses that attempt
to patch loopholes exploited by bad actors.
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
That was written in a world where “selling software” meant charging people money for Software that ran in their computers, like the famous example of Stallman mailing tapes with Emacs tarballs.
The whole thing was thought up when residential internet couldn’t be used for much more than email, BBS and Usenet, and it wasn’t viable to use it for downloading a text editor.
It’s not a timeless set of principles to live by forever after, proprietary software —that’s not charged for- dominates everyone’s lives more than ever in the public and private sphere, precisely from companies that benefited from the open source ecosystem of software engineering tools.
The 1985 GNU Manifesto explicitly brings up the possibility of third-party companies whose sole business is charging for setting up, running, and managing free software:
> Meanwhile, the users who know nothing about computers need handholding: doing things for them which they could easily do themselves but don't know how.
> Such services could be provided by companies that sell just handholding and repair service. If it is true that users would rather spend money and get a product with service, they will also be willing to buy the service having got the product free. The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one. Meanwhile, those of us who don't need the service should be able to use the program without paying for the service.
That's not quite true. They didn't imagine that 3rd parties would be "running" the software. In the scenarios above the end user is running the software on their computers. They always have access to the source code and there's no vendor lock-in.
"The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one."
> If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.
In the Free Software community, this line was always blurry, almost non-existent even.
Even if the receiver of the Free Software package is not a programmer by any definition, at worst case, they can ask for a friend to patch something up, and if another friend wanted his patched version, the modified source code has to move with the software package.
Open Source software can block even this simple pathway by not giving back the modified source from friend to the user, creating a dependency. It'd be heartless to do this between two friends, but companies will happily do that.
My most vivid example of this is SDKs for hardware. Half of the API is open, but the patched version of the (open source) libraries cost $2K+, several NDAs and allegiance to company for the rest of your life or you can be sent to a concentration camp operated by an alliance of companies doing the same thing.
...and this is just for a small biometric scanner you happen to find in a piece of 10 year old discarded tech.
> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. Freedom 0 applies to everyone.
Giving a gift does not confer an obligation, and "contributing back" is meaningless in this context. Someone using a gift you gave them to run a business does not harm you in any way whatsoever.
If it was merely about “giving a gift” with no obligations or restrictions there should be no open source licenses. Everything would just be released into the public domain.
Free software has never been about giving gifts with no obligations.
The conglomerates can also host it on their extensive cloud infra at a price small competitors will never be able to match because they own the cloud infrastructure too.
Somehow the service+infra is the same cost or cheaper then buying the infra alone and trying to deploy the open source version to it.
"First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you" I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose. So, even under this definition it is not free or open source.
The GNU Project and Richard Stallman, who made this statement, would agree that it's not free under even this earliest definition. They in-fact made it even clearer when they defined freedom of "use" as the distinct 0th freedom eventually to make it even clearer that being able to use the software freely is fundamental to their idea of freedom. Again, freedom isn't about price, it's about usage, availability, redistribution and lack of restrictions on this. I cannot freely redistribute FSL licensed code under the original definition of free software.
"Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then."
Yes, the GNU project were acutely aware of this and designed the GPL licenses around such scenarios - they just didn't design it for SaaS businesses, where if you redistribute the built program externally after modifying it but only distributed its responses over a network, you technically weren't obligated to open source that modification. AGPL resolved this issue, and has more case law behind it than this 2 year old license, and has certainly less daunting implications than a not legally well defined 'competing purpose'.
Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with whether or not Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, and the license was made by lawyers to clearly provide protection. Did you create this legal theory yourself? Because I've not seen any writing from a lawyer on the internet that suggests that Amazon could firewall themselves off in a friendly jurisdiction under any reading of the license, and I read a lot of AGPL lawyerblogging.
Sentry, the company who created FSL, even states that this license restricts user freedom explicitly - for the sake of the business interests of the original developer.
So summing up.. Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GNU Project, the OSI, the creators of the FSL, the company now currently using FSL, all agree that this source available license does not meet the definition of "free software". So, whose definition are we using out of thin air?
>I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose.
You’re free to distribute it to your neighbors for free for any purpose. You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one. You just can’t commercialize it as a competing product.
“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.
This isn’t my favorite license, but it provides a lot more freedoms than merely looking at the source code.
With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.
>You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one.
So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?
>“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.
No, the source is available to read and the software is not free based on the historical definitions you're providing, unfortunately. Happy to understand from a different lens, but Stallman specifically meant freedom in the way even FSL writers agreed with.
Also, please refrain to using commonly used terms in the common way as 'disingenuous', it doesn't lead to interesting discussion and is how these threads end up needing to be patrolled by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.
So, this is a personal non-legal theory that does not have a basis in jurisprudence, then? GPLv3 is proven as enforceable, and is what AGPL is based on. No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control". That's just not how copyright or licensing contracts work. You may want to disclaim conjectures like this with IANAL..
My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.
My entire point is how big tech has captured the zeitgeist, so the common use of that term is irrelevant.
>No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control".
You are 100% incorrect. Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
>So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?
The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
>My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.
It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.
That you're ascribing malice to the entire FOSS community seems a bit strange, when they're the ones who created the free software definition in the first place. The source is available but is not free software even in the original definition.
>Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
So, personal theory, wrt AGPL. Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
>The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
You're right that a business might offer a fee for free software under this definition, but that's unrelated to it being free to distribute under any clauses.
Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
>It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.
I've been involved in this for decades at this point. Free Software and Open Source folks generally "source available" as a pejorative.
By using a term that implies the lowest level of freedoms possible for software that doesn't restrict access to the source code, you are implying that no freedoms exist beyond reading the source.
>Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
AGPL significantly changes GPLv3. If you want to understand how that could cause it to be unenforceable read up on severability and its limitations in various jurisdictions. Courts have wide latitude in most jurisdictions to decide how much of a contract or license (in civil law jurisdictions they are always the same thing) to uphold if certain parts are invalidated.
>Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
Free speech has restrictions in every jurisdiction in the world. Saying in something is "free as in free speech" has no implication that it is absolutely free from all duties, obligations , or restrictions.
If that is a requirement for free software, the GPL isn't a free software license because it does place obligations on distribution.
>Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
I don't care what a single individual says about what he believes now. I'm more interested in what he said in 1985 and what the people who made up the community believed.
Mostly though I only care about any of the past cruft because Open Source and to a lesser extent Free Software has takes the air out of the room in any discussion about software freedoms.
I'm interested in realistic compromises to make more free software more viable in a world where Amazon, Google, and Facebook exist. I'm not interested in ideals about a very specific meaning of absolutely free software.
>I'm interested in realistic compromises to make more free software more viable in a world where Amazon, Google, and Facebook exist. I'm not interested in ideals about a very specific meaning of absolutely free software.
Okay, I'm confused why you bring free software or the free software definition into this at all then if you're just picking and choosing what parts of the original statement/bulletin you care about and what parts you choose to disregard, on top of disregarding the original movement and organization founded at its inception.
If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
Since, again, from the start there the goal of free software was that no single company was supposed to be the single commercializer of a piece of software. That principles carries to the GPL.
If you're hoping to convince us that source available software is actually free software, you're giving me a great platform to talk to others about the history of actually free software and making yourself appear wrongheaded as if you didn't read the original bulletin or understand the larger software development community, or worse that you're attempting to co-opt our very specific yet widely accepted professional definition of free software.
>Okay, I'm confused why you bring free software or the free software definition into this at all then if you're just picking and choosing what parts of the original statement/bulletin you care about and what parts you choose to disregard, on top of disregarding the original movement and organization founded at its inception.
1. It's important for people to understand how OSI co-opted the goodwill and some of the ideas from the Free Software movement.
2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
>If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
I could publish a new project on hacker news and call it "fair source" and then explain how fair source isn't free software, but it's like free software with an extra restriction.
The 5 freedoms:
-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
0-4 same as the rest.
I guarantee you 90% of the comments would be attacks on the license (even if -1 was something reasonable). And it would start off with negative goodwill. Most people haven't actually read the 4 freedoms or the OSD, most people just follow the zeitgeist and it says Open Source == good, everything else == bad.
I do not think that a group financed primarily by big tech should have this kind control on the goodwill doled out by the community. But they do. I think that the more people that understand that the better.
>1. It's important for people to understand how OSI co-opted the goodwill and some of the ideas from the Free Software movement.
Okay I don't understand why this is happening in the same breath you're suggesting that OSI is responsible for making everyone in the free software movement believe freedom of use (even in commercial cases) is required otherwise things are source available. GNU foundation, OSI, and even source available license writers basically agree on this part. Can you be specific here?
Because otherwise you're just reinforcing the perception I explained above, since largely the disagreement between OSI and the original free software people is that OSI supports too _permissive_ and too many non-copyleft licenses, not that the permissive or copyleft licenses need to enshrine certain license holders or disenfranchise others, or block commercialization or competitors. That's deeply antithetical to the idea of free or open software, regardless of the camp.
>2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
AGPL, despite achieving all of your goals to prevent hyperscalers from free riding, is not one of them?
>I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
Because the community has largely agreed on the principles codified by OSI. The principles you propose seem to betray the larger movement's intentions significantly, which is much bigger in scope than OSI.
>-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
>0-4 same as the rest.
That's a lot different than source available licenses actually, which usually declares enshrines the original license holder, even though it's not technically free under the other principles. I think if you thought up of a new consistent principle that didn't enshrine a single distributor or disenfranchise entire classes of other distributors, people would be open to the idea of a variant of free software.
But I think the bigger issue is that you think AGPL is failing somehow in not being restrictive enough compared to source available licenses. Maybe you could articulate that more clearly, and _that_ would gather more mind share. Merely stating that OSI is bad doesn't really change people's opinion of source available. Mostly reinforcing free software/copyleft maxi's ideas and insinuating GPL needs to be more common.
> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
this is absolutely right, and the OSI has been successfully captured by these companies
would RedHat be able survive to IPO these days? I very much doubt it (see: Oracle Linux)
a new term is needed, "Open Source" is no longer fit for purpose in a world where the hyperscalers exist
