Comment by onlinepersona@programming.dev on Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully source-available again

The repository for the previously private submodule is still called Floorp-private-components, though it’s public.

https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/ is a maintainer’s official response to… Reddit, which crossposted me apparently. Hooray!

Why is “non commercial” such an issue? It has the same “we shouldn’t tax billionaires because some day I might be a billionaire” vibe.

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Because many people are also fans of free software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

That just feels like communism: a nice, idealistic concept to achieve in its entirety but a good inspiration towards a better system. In the real world, both are ripe for exploitation. Communism is perfect for exploitation by power hungry humans, GNU software is perfect for exploitation by companies.

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I’d understand if you said that the FSF feels like communism, but how the heck is that specific philosophy in support of selling FOSS software communism?

GNU philosophy feels like communism. Also that standard of purity - no exceptions.

If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license

This leads to people conflating non-free and opensource or tightly coupling opensource to FLOSS - even though F and L are qualifiers for OSS. OSS isn’t forcibly F and L. “X is not opensource because you can’t use it commercially nor sell it”.

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FOSS was created as a compromise between the FSF and the OSI, and the latter’s Open Source Definition includes this:

Free redistribution: The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

Keep in mind that the OSI was made for the purposes of popularizing the term “open source”, which was created because some wanted it to be more pragmatic than political. This is a consensus.

That’s really great for people living in the 1990s. However for people and businesses in the now, with megacorps taking advantage of their dominant positions to sell an opensource product without contributing back and killing the business that provides the opensource product, hanging on to a lucid dream mean the death of the opensource product and loss of livelihoods.
Staying purist in the face of reality is one thing: delusional.

Maybe someday we’ll have the alternative of “The morgue is full of people who had the right of way” for FLOSS purists who didn’t want to give in to reality.

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Free software is very much like communism, the difference is that cloning something costs nothing, imagine if we could use a ray gun to clone any object, then communism would no longer be even remotely idealistic.

Both fail in certain areas once exposed to the real world. Communism fails because of human psychology and scale. Free software fails when competing against megacorps, those who don’t follow the spirit nor the letter of free software licenses, and when infringements are not enforced.

Megacorps don’t get to be megacorps by being nice. They will exploit anything to get ahead, and free software providing work for free is a benediction that they will happily exploit. People who get offended when free software providers defend themselves against such corps by changing their license to non-commercial or non-cloud compete are just victim blaming.

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Its not truely open source if its non commercial

If it’s free and open source and it’s also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully source-available again(github.com)

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