Recession be damned. The first quarter of the year saw a record $203.7 million of venture capital flow to young open source companies. You'd think that would be a cause for celebration, but for too many members of the open source community money is, well, icky.
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aboutblank
15 years 47 weeks 4 days 13 hours ago
Free Software Isn't Open Source
This is yet another reminder that software freedom is not the same as open source. People often tout that one benefit of open source is that open source software is gratis and as a result, people learn to associate open source with software that has no monetary cost. Some of these people then go on to complain when open source software becomes commercial open source software.
Free software does not deal with issues like that. Free software is a socio-political movement designed to address the social aspects and ethical implications of computer software and promote the freedom of society through software. We consider that users must require full rights to practise four specific liberties http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html in order to be a free and upstanding member of society. Anybody (whether corporate or individual) that distributes software that deprives the users' right to any of these freedoms are harming society.
Conducting business with free software is perfectly acceptable; as long as the user remains free after the transaction, there is no problem. The problem occurs whenever people decide to withold users of their essential freedoms. The instance when MySQL announced that they were going to publish an attractive proprietary program in order to get richer is a good example of the problem. I have no problem with them getting richer, my problem is that they are committed an unethical act in order to get richer. They should not withold freedom from their users for whatever reason.
We should reject all business with those that hold our freedoms in contempt in order to remain free.
Balzac
15 years 47 weeks 1 day 19 hours ago
Hearing and reading "Open Source" is annoying to me.
I'm sick and tired of the "Open Source" marketing campaign drowning out the earlier, more socially-relevant, more powerful freedom campaign of "Free Software".
I never say "open source" except for when I'm explaining that it's not what I'm about.
kiba
15 years 47 weeks 1 day 1 hour ago
Improvement in the
Improvement in the development process of softwares is meaningless without economic freedom.
That how I would sum up your post.
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*"Monopoly corrupts. Absolute monopoly corrupts absolutely"-- http://againstmonopoly.org