Comment by dancemethis
2 years ago
It's not, because Free Software handles practical and ethical advantages as an indivisible unit, while open source focus only on promoting practical advantages.
2 years ago
It's not, because Free Software handles practical and ethical advantages as an indivisible unit, while open source focus only on promoting practical advantages.
You are missing the point. The definition of free software focuses on the freedoms of the user, but these freedoms are not easy to verify against a specific software license. The practical aspect of the open source definition (which really is the Debian free software guidelines with the word Debian removed) is that it gives you a toolkit, ten criteria that a licence must fulfil to be considered free software. Importantly, when this definition was created, the alternative, the free software definition, was incomplete and lacked the freedom zero [0]. Even more importantly, that text apparently wasn’t widely known back then, and even Richard Stallman himself liked the DFSG as a definition of free software [1].
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
[1]: https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1129863&cid=268758...