I'm a supporter of Free (libre) Open Source Software but the reality is that there are disagreements on what these words mean as well as what is acceptable behavior. Honestly, I don't get emotional about it. After over 10 years in the Drupal opensource community I've heard these arguments over and over again.
This is my view point.
  • Free (libre) means modifying and copying the code is allowed via the license.
  • Open Source means the code is viewable and downloadable.
These topics have been talked to death in the FOSS world. I have no time for people that want to complain about people following the license of their software. That includes forks/copying whatever is allowed by the license. Drupal was forked a few years back. The license allows this. Many people were offended and angry. It is really dumb IMO to get angry about this. If you don't want a project to be copied/cloned/forked then change the license. Seems that is what happened here. I have no dog in this hunt. I like folks on both sides. Feels silly to me honestly. If I or my company write code we can do what ever we want with it. License it to be copied or not. If I license my code in a way that allows it to be copied I don't have the right to get all offended when someone does just that. You have to be ready for people to not give credit (though some licenses require this).
Read the license, no need to get all emotional about it. Now, the personal attacks/comments are another story and one I'm even less interested in discussing.
My two sats.
Another observation from my years working in software. Engineers are FAR more emotional than we'd like to admit. It can be quite comical sometimes. Guys it is ok. We are not robots. We have feelings. Sometimes these feelings get hurt. We get angry and do/say dumb things. Stay humble. Listen to criticism. Grow.
By the way. I continually have to work on this myself. Preaching to the choir.
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These two terms are very well established after decades of debate:
Free (libre) means GPL: modifying and copying the code is allowed via the license AND the modifications must be published.
Open Source means MIT/BSD/apache2: anyone is free to modify the software, with the option (but no obligation) to share the modifications.
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