this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
1709 points (76.4% liked)
Memes
45730 readers
1152 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is misrepresenting FOSS quite a bit. A lot of open source software is indeed this permissive, but not all of it. It's important to refer to the license of each individual project because various licenses have different terms.
Some open source software may be free for personal use, but that license may not extend to other companies seeking to profit off their open source and good will. ZeroTier comes to mind as an example of this.
Further, other licenses like GPL only requires that you make your sources available upon request but you can require that your customers pay you to receive the product: i.e. RHEL. At the end of the day, FOSS means free as in speech, not free as in beer
Free as in speech, not necessarily free as in no money exchanged. The GPLv3 explicitly allows commercial use to both the creator and third parties.