Comment by jowea
17 days ago
I think free software was more about that about that. Open source always was about getting financially motivated companies onboard.
17 days ago
I think free software was more about that about that. Open source always was about getting financially motivated companies onboard.
I am not absolutely sure, but I do not think so.
Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.
And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).
I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.
Stallman was propagating the ideal of Free and Open Source Software, where the notion of Freedom was paramount. I think that is the Free the poster you are responding to was talking about, not as in Freeware (usable without paying, but not necessarily open source).