Comment by kstrauser
18 hours ago
Open source, and Free Software especially, isn’t about pragmatism, or at least not only pragmatism. It’s about user freedom.
And I only hear people complaining about shared source and other proprietary software licenses when the people using them claim they’re open source so that they can piggyback on that goodwill without actually participating. It’s perfectly fine if someone wants to release stuff under a closed license. They just don’t get to do that and then brag about their open source contributions.
> It’s about user freedom.
I think it's worth asking "who is the user?" in this type of scenario. Because to my mind, AWS or WP Engine aren't really "users" per se - they are resellers that provide services to end-users, and the end-users are the only ones whose rights we should be particularly concerned about
Of course, most of these licenses were written before reselling open-source software was a hugely valuable endeavour, so they make no distinction between resellers and end-users...
They're using the software to achieve a useful aim (build a business that offers a service).
Difficult to get a purer example of a "user" than this.
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