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copyleft software, not "free" software

copyleft software, not "free" software

Posted Sep 26, 2020 20:09 UTC (Sat) by smcv (subscriber, #53363)
In reply to: copyleft software, not "free" software by marcH
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

"Permissive" is a term I've seen used frequently in e.g. Debian to refer to non-copyleft licenses (BSD, MIT/X11, Zlib, CC-BY, Unlicense, WTFPL and many similar licenses) as a group. Sometimes people draw a spectrum from strong copyleft (e.g. GPL) to permissive, with weak copyleft licenses like the LGPL in the middle as a compromise between the two.

Using "free software" to refer only to copyleft licenses and "open source" to refer to permissive licenses seems really confusing, since it's in conflict with the way the originators of those terms use them: the FSF considers both copyleft and permissive licenses to be free software, and the OSI considers both copyleft and permissive licences to be open source.

The free software movement and the open source movement (inasmuch as either of those is monolithic) have different goals and different focuses, and perhaps free software is more closely aligned with copyleft while open source is more closely aligned with permissive licensing, but I think a lot of people who consider themselves to be part of one community and not the other would agree that both styles of licensing have their place (although probably not on the specifics of which one is more suitable for a particular project).


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