In several sessions, folks have debated how open is open. In the Signal group and elsewhere, some links have been shared. Please add more below with your thoughts to respond!
Richard Stallman makes me want to 
almost as much as ESR, but I do think thereâs a lot of merit to his point about âfree softwareâ as opposed to âopen sourceâ. And I might note, while Iâm on the topic, that âopen sourceâ was in fact coined Eric S. Raymond himself, b/c he thought âfree softwareâ was too social justice-y I guess.
So yea, I am more inclined to label the software I work on as âfreeâ (as in âfree speechâ not âfree pizzaâ) or libre, or if Iâm strictly referring to the license then as âcopyleftâ; I still use âopenâ when Iâm careless or worry the other terms will be misconstrued, but try to avoid it.
Insofar as what âfreeâ software means, I defer to the âFour Essential Freedomsâ outlined by GNU, which are the best place to start imo:
However, as Iâve been diving deeper into more cooperative ideas about software development and licensing, Iâve come to think more critically about even this more deliberately political stance, which still does tend to skew a bit right-libertarian. There have been some interesting critiques from more left-libertarian folks (ya know, like, anarchists) and Marxists alike on this front, a lot of which bubbled up after the big Mozilla lay-offs in 2020 that shook peopleâs faith in what these kinds of approaches could achieve, most notably this polemic and its retorts:
But thereâs been a growing body of criticism like this for years now, starting at least as far back as Dmytri Kleinerâs âcopyFARleftâ Peer Production License, which he included in his 2010 book The Telekommunist Manifesto, followed up by similar âcopyfairâ licenses, which Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation have been vocally promoting:
http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-the-communism-of-capital-to-a-capital-for-the-commons/2014/03/22
And of course thereâs now an awesome-copyfarleft repo on GitHub, too, including the explicitly âAnti-Capitalist Software Licenseâ which I noticed recently a food pantry software project out of Colorado was using:
Then going more explicitly into cooperativist movements, there have been some really interesting work by CoopCycle in France, Kat MarchĂĄn (aka, zkat) and others working on platform coops:
At the end of the day, however, I think the GNU Public License (GPL) or close variants of it are the most tried and tested licenses, so for purely legal reasons Iâm not inclined to use these other licenses just yet, but itâs really great to see this kind of dialogue and experimentation taking place.
All the licenses and many of the links I shared above do only pertain, after all, once you show up in court, so I think itâs really important to explore other means of stewarding this work and making it âopenâ that are not strictly legal.
oops maybe I should have said ânot strictly litigiousâ but hey you do you. ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ