Comment by psychoslave
1 day ago
With free libre software, where freedom and liberty are about what the end user is empowered with actually, the software is mostly metonymic. Free software, free society, because there are free people in the middle of course.
Right, as I said elsewhere, maybe let's just let "open-source" have it.
"Open-source" can be "anything you can go out and grab a copy of and use" but doesn't give you much legal certainty about any of it, and reserve "free software" for the other, better thing.
But, free software lost it's way around GPLv3. From the end user's perspective, GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, on hypothetical open firmware devices, or if you install it yourself.
AGPLv3 partially solves the issue by blocking people like Google from using it to build proprietary cloud services that take away their users' freedom. (It still doesn't solve the problem where providers use network effects to achieve the same end game.)
> From the end user's perspective, GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, on hypothetical open firmware devices, or if you install it yourself.
What in the world do you mean?
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I don't understand this either. The GPL doesn't address end users and their use of software at all, to be technical. It only addresses what terms of copyright redistributors of GPLed software are allowed to apply in-turn to subsequent end users.
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