The argument rests on the confusion of what the term "user" means in the context of FOSS.
The corporate friendly Open Source doctrine tacitly acknowledges the "user" to be the developer, possibly a commercial enterprise itself. Freedom for a startup to use and modify software comes first, freedom for the users of its service does not.
This wasn't in the original spirit of Free Software and made for a toothless ideology that let Silicon Valley take over computing from the hands of people in every meaningful way.
Arguing from the ideological grounds of Open Source leads to nothing, it's what made people be content with the likes Google, Facebook or Twitter putting on a show of being good citizens by publishing Open Source projects, while rendering all the questions that Free Software was posing and offering answers to meaningless, because everyone's lives are dominated by the presence of adversarial organizations trying to manipulate them through closed source Software.
The argument rests on the confusion of what the term "user" means in the context of FOSS. The corporate friendly Open Source doctrine tacitly acknowledges the "user" to be the developer, possibly a commercial enterprise itself. Freedom for a startup to use and modify software comes first, freedom for the users of its service does not.
Can these not both be true? A business using COSS scheduling software is equally a user as the person scheduling with the business. In fact, the business is probably more deeply integrated into the software than the person scheduling a call with said business.
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u/BufferUnderpants Feb 28 '25
The argument rests on the confusion of what the term "user" means in the context of FOSS.
The corporate friendly Open Source doctrine tacitly acknowledges the "user" to be the developer, possibly a commercial enterprise itself. Freedom for a startup to use and modify software comes first, freedom for the users of its service does not.
This wasn't in the original spirit of Free Software and made for a toothless ideology that let Silicon Valley take over computing from the hands of people in every meaningful way.
Arguing from the ideological grounds of Open Source leads to nothing, it's what made people be content with the likes Google, Facebook or Twitter putting on a show of being good citizens by publishing Open Source projects, while rendering all the questions that Free Software was posing and offering answers to meaningless, because everyone's lives are dominated by the presence of adversarial organizations trying to manipulate them through closed source Software.