this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
44 points (83.3% liked)
Privacy
31998 readers
1186 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not Libre software. It's source available, which is great for a commercial product, allowing people to compile it themselves, but the license is revocable at any time.
It's not contributing to the open source ecosystem, so it's not part of the libre environment.
It's a good thing, I'm glad it exists, and I'm excited to see it spur libre development in the same vein. But it is not open source as the term is commonly used.
I will never forget whoever decided it would be a good idea to conflate "FOSS" and "open-source" to mean the same fucking thing, and to have to refer to software that has open source code "source available". I see this exact fucking discussion going on at the very minimum once a week...
Edit: I know it's a common misconception. My point is that it's a misconception because of the term choice. There's a reason we have to explain it over and over and over again.
The person who invented the term "open source" simply intended it to be "free software" but in business speak. The fact some random people on the internet thought it means "source available" is not the term's fault.
Who was it?
I thought it was companies just using marketing spin to look better than they were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
Common misconception. "Free as in freedom, not as in beer" had to be explained to many people.