Free and Open Source Software

From the first 15 min of the edited video: that FUTO boss is an embarrassment, good on Rossman to get him to change things.

I don't really want to watch the remaining hour, after someone says things like:

• He didn't follow the discussions back in the 2000s
• OSI didn't hijack the "open source" definition
• Less than 1000 people would care
• Asked his programmers, and they didn't care

I call BS. Weak excuses.

There is a reason people say "FLOSS" instead of "Open Source". There is a reason Stallman says what he says. There is a reason you can tell apart who understands what's going on, by whether they understand the differences or not.

A quick reminder:

• Free - as in beer, not as in freedom
• Libre - as in freedom
• Open Source - you can see the source code

Stallman created the GPL to allow people to see (open) and change (libre) the code (source)... then "pay forward" that freedom, in echange for being able to charge money (non-free) for their contributions.

He often referred to it as simply "Open Source"... which turned out to be a mistake. Very soon (as in pre-1990), it became clear that there were two more competing camps for the "Open Source" definition:

• Academia - people who got paid anyway, whether they saw a penny from their software or not
• Business - who wanted to get as much money as possible, for as cheap as possible

Both those camps aligned with licenses where developers gave up all their rights, but anyone could very easily take them back and claim as their own ("closing" the software). Famous examples are Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.

The "Open Source Initiative" was created to gatekeep the "Open Source" definition, by keeping a list of licenses that were "OSI compliant". A side effect of that gatekeeping, was erasing the understanding of the terms "Free" and "Libre" from the public's minds.

Plenty more than "1000 people" understood what was going on, and were against OSI, seeing it as an EEE move from the Business camp.

People new to it, started using the term "open source" (as per OSI) without a care, only to later realize the Business camp was taking advantage of them... [surprised Pikachu face]

This FUTO boss is not young or inexperienced, he's a Business-man who, not surprisingly, decided to use a license with a closing clause, that he used the chance to call "Open Source" by exploiting people's lack of understanding.