Richard Fontana

Authored Comments

I disagree with at least some of what you say here. One terminology issue - you seem to suggest that BSD-style licenses are not "FOSS", but that is incorrect. Permissive FOSS licenses like the entire BSD license family, the MIT license family, and the Apache License 2.0 represent a whole category of FOSS licenses, and account for much of what is considered FOSS.

I also disagree with your comment about Richard Stallman as being "anti-capitalist". This is not at all correct, although I do think that in his earliest days of thinking about free software RMS struggled to develop the "free beer" vs. "free-freedom" distinction. RMS was, in fact, the first open source businessperson (much as he would hate to hear himself described that way): he was probably the first person to earn a living from FOSS, when he provided consulting services around GNU Emacs after resigning from MIT. Indeed, I suspect his need to earn a living and his ability to do so through services around free software had a significant influence on his developing the freedom vs. "free beer" distinction.

Moreover, Red Hat's own Michael Tiemann, founder of the first significant successful example of what we'd today call an "open source business", Cygnus Support (later of course acquired by Red Hat), has often noted that he was inspired by RMS's GNU Manifesto, which Tiemann saw as a "business plan in disguise" (I think that's close to a direct quote from Michael). In fact, if you read the GNU Manifesto you can see that much of it is devoted to RMS showing that free software (I don't think he was distinguishing between copyleft and noncopyleft here) could be the basis for many profitable business models.

Just a technical clarification about Liberation Sans: the license is not actually GPL, but a sui generis combination of GPLv2 with an additional condition akin to the anti-lockdown provisions of GPLv3. For that reason Fedora labels it as "the Liberation Font license". https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Good_Licenses_4