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@donnodubus @feditips I don’t think I’ve made my logic well understood. I don’t claim that anyone’s definition is inherently authoritative. It only becomes authoritative once it becomes the sole definition in common use. I claim that is the case for FSF’s definition, and therefore all software to meet it is rightly called ‘free software’, while any other software is not (at least in absence of further clarification). Other definitions of ‘free software’ are valid in theory, but they are not common in practice.

The four freedoms explicitly state that you must be free to ‘run the program as you wish, for any purpose’. It should stand to reason that if you are not allowed to run the program to exploit labour, you are not free to run it for any purpose. Therefore, such program does not meet the common definition of free software, and should not be called ‘free software’.

There is not a single word about permissiveness in the definition, and the only way the concept is relevant is if it limits any of the four freedoms. Licences like the GPL, MPL, Expat or zlib do not do this, while that of BookWyrm clearly does.