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- Embed this notice@Hyolobrika @alex @dushman @mauve @mattskala The post seems to be complaining about how businesses have subverted "open source" - even though business subversion was the whole idea of "open source" - to silence discussions about freedom and only focus on the technical aspects of the software, so that businesses wouldn't feel uneasy and therefore be less reluctant to supply funding for development.
After 26 years of such disaster (don't forget that "open source" was only a thing since 1998), things are looking disastrous - but that's the expected outcome.
The post also puts Linux first and refers to GNU as a "pile of tools", even though tools are only part of GNU and those tools are organized and proceeds to miss the point and get thing very wrong so much that I stopped reading.
The article champions the usage of pushover licenses or making software proprietary by not licensing and making it "All Rights Reserved" and of course boringcactus has psyopped themselves and doesn't even realize that pushover licenses gives freedom and power to only the developers - who then usually proceed to exercise the given power to make the software proprietary and deny freedom to the users.
Although many users may not care about having access to the source code right at this moment in time, they *should* have it, as later there is a very real possibility that they'll like something to be changed and doing that sanely would require sending the source code to a programmer, or becoming a programmer (not very difficult for certain changes even) - which clearly is impossible to do if the user doesn't have the source.
In my opinion, even braindead windows useds like boringcactus shouldn't be denied access to source code, even if they've gone so far to write an article where they're pretty much begging for mistreatment.
Access to the source code is only one of the four freedoms anyway.
>There should be an extension to the four freedoms for stuff like this, is what I'm saying.
The four freedom are enough for users and programmers alike to exercise their freedoms - "extending" them by adding restrictions would be a step back rather than a step forward.
Programmers should not use pushover licenses for nontrivial works, but even then there's no wrong done if you publish a work under a free license - although the benefit to humanity usually ends up cancelling out to 0 (or rarely goes into the negative), as while people can use it in freedom, businesses can attack humanity by proprietarizing it and usually do if the software is any good.
Despite how boringcactus complains, the GPLv3-or-later does an excellent job at ensuring that both the programmers *and* the users get freedom, as neither the users nor the programmers can make the software proprietary and therefore prevent the execution of the 4 freedoms - although the AGPLv3-or-later does a slightly better job at ensuring freedom.