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April 12, 2023
All the software I’ve written (which isn’t much, to be honest) so far has been licensed under the ISC license, which is functionally equivalent to the 2-clause BSD license. This is so that everyone can read my code (of dubious quality), take from it and use it as they wish, and I will continue writing code under that premise.
The reason I’ve always used non-copyleft licenses, and specifically the BSD licenses is that they’re easy to understand. As a non-English native speaker, I’ve had trouble reading and fully understanding licenses like the GPL and family, simply because of how large they are.
As for the title of this post, “Open-source software” refers to the corporate- friendly software you see regularly; NPM packages licensed MIT on GitHub who (may or may not) receive funding from a couple companies that use them. Realistically, this doesn’t happen too much, and often you see cases of OSS contributors and maintainers getting burnout from this. After all, you’re doing free work for corporations who have no problem in using your code because they know that you’ll maintain it. Corporations are awful.
The free software movement is different. Free software (as in freedom and as in beer) has the difference that anything licensed using a copyleft license (as for example, the GNU General Public License) forbids proprietization (more precisely, it restricts that the freedoms can be taken from users of the code.)
For a long time I steered away from the FSF, and therefore the free software movement, mainly because I dislike rms, and disapprove of many things he has said. Drew DeVault’s post, The FSF is dying[a] pretty much summarizes many of the reasons I used to steer away from the FSF.
The same day, I read another post by @j3s@merveilles.town[a], titled drones run linux: the free software movement isn’t enough[b], which also summarizes many of the reasons I used to steer away from the FSF. (thank you for putting my thoughts into words!)
After all, there’s only so much you can do to avoid proprietary software and whatever until your life becomes noticeably complicated. It’s a hard truth.
When I say I’m giving up on open-source software, what I’m giving up on is non-copyleft licenses. Realistically, I am too much of a small entity to be “exploited commercially”, or whatever the FSF says that could happen if you don’t use a copyleft license. In fact, I actually like non-copyleft licenses, but that affinity I have falls under the premise that people who are equally-minded to me will be the ones who stumble upon my code, and use it if they wish.
I sadly cannot control who sees my code. Maybe I am doing a good job of hiding it by obscurity, as I refuse to use software forges like GitHub, GitLab, etc. (I keep a GitHub account for collaboration purposes, but I’ve barely used it, and will never host my own code in it.)
Drew mentions in his post the MPL (Mozilla Public License) as a good copyleft license that isnt the GPL or its derivates. I think I will be using that from now on.
Hopefully, one day I won’t have to worry about how my code is licensed so a company can’t use it to drive the machines that will eventually kill me.