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Many years ago some people proposed to move open source to paid licensing to guarantee income for core open source developers. But the self-righteous community attacked them like it was the end of the world.

In the current cancel culture even if you use *GPL licenses you get attacked for not being MIT or similar. But mysteriously never a peep about Big Tech making billions off open source without giving back even a tiny 1% to the projects. Insanity.





The sales pitch for FOSS to corporations in the 1990s and 2000s was "free as in speech and free as in beer". Reneging on that is a straight-up rug pull on the adopters.

Pretty sure it was "free as in libre and not as in beer". Source: I was there.

Both gratis and libre were talking points for FOSS advocates, with gratis being leaned on heavily to persuade businesses who didn't give a hoot about libre, which turned out to be almost everybody. Source: I was there too.

"Open Source" has always been a play for Free Software from a pragmatic and business-focused point of view, as opposed to a community-focused and moralistic one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...




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