copyleft software, not "free" software

Thanks, I think this Nth million discussion about what "free software" means made me finally realize how poorly named hence poorly advertised it is. This is not just the confusion with "gratis" which does not help but is really not the main issue.

Of course I'm a bit slow: if something needs to be rephrased and discussed a million times then it's likely not just because everyone's stupid. Discussions that tend to get heated are also much more often triggered by misunderstandings than disagreements. Finally, who expects good names from software engineers? :-)

So the key concept/idea behind "free software" or more specifically "copyleft software" is transitivity: making sure not just the users but also _the users of the users_ are free to do what they want. This of course implies the first users are _less_ free to do what they want which means "free" is self-contradicting. Boom.

Even before someone wrote that "my freedom stops where yours begin" we knew freedom was a messy concept best avoided when possible. For some fun search for "weaponized first amendment".

This also seems like a classic case of trying to avoid a technical and unusual but very smart and extremely accurate term "copyleft" for the fear of confusing readers, dumbing it down and confusing everyone much more. And then not wondering what went wrong.

I will stop referring to GPL software as "free software" from now on, it will help save a fair amount of digital ink. "Copyleft software" it is.

PS: not sure yet how to best name BSD-like licenses. "permissive" is very vague.