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翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 23-Aug-2024 23:57:19 JST 翠星石
@clew >I'm kinda hesitant to blindly license it under a license that doesn't even exist yet
It's not blindly;
"The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU Affero General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be ***similar in spirit*** to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns."
If the AGPLv4 turns out to be no good, you can choose to no longer license under AGPLv3-or-later and change the license to AGPLv3-only for your version.
>I'll give it some serious thought and look around to see what the consensus is on this.
The consensus is licensing -or-later - the few developers who license -only have done so for dubious reasons and seem to be interested in things other than freedom.
>I think both "Open Source" and "Free Software" "miss the point", after being in the FOSS ecosystem for years
"FOSS" is attempting to be neutral between "open source" and free software - so claiming that they both miss the point, is claiming that "FOSS" misses the point twice as hard (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html).
Unfortunately, "FOSS" fails to achieve neutrality, as people seem to take it to mean; gratis, source-available software
The earliest I've seen "FOSS" being used as a term was in February 2004; https://web.archive.org/web/20040208005409if_/http://www.dwheeler.com:80/oss_fs_why.html but it really hasn't been around as long as free software (given a concrete definition in ~1984, although software freedom was enjoyed since the start of computing, until proprietary companies started screwing things up) and "open source" (which has only been around since 1998 and was quite novel in its idea of attacking freedom and to state that the only important thing is developing functionally better software, faster, even if that requires getting money from proprietary software companies to develop primarily proprietary software (just as long as source code is under a license of approved criteria for some users it's okay - even if the software is proprietary for the vast majority of users)).
There is no "FOSS ecosystem" as an ecosystem is something that just happens and you just observe what happens - free software has only been possible because of all the hard work GNU developers have put in to developing all required software to allow for a free OS, whether interesting or uninteresting, thus allowing other developers to focus on writing their interesting software without having to write the compiler, the assembler, the linker, the binutils, the shell, the editor, the C library, the buildsystem, the coreutils, the bootloader, the image editor, the apl interpreter, the strings translator (for multi-language interface support), the windowing toolkit, the multilingual font, the BGP implementation, the forth interpreter, the chess engine, the crypto library, the signing and encryption software, etc, etc, etc (https://www.gnu.org/software/) first.
>what's more important to me is that it's made by people for other people, not by corporations for their customers.
Most software is custom software written by corporations for their customers and if the customer has any wit, the contract will state that the source code will be provided and copyright assigned - making that free software, which is legitimate.
Of course corporations will make software proprietary if you let them - in their thirst for more profit (even if misconstrued) - but when kept carefully under control, accepting contributions from corporations is not a problem.
Most free software seems to be made by developers for themselves, but rather than being spiteful and refuse to share any of their improvements, they happily share it with everyone.