[dessant]

Awesome project, though the perpetuation of open source software needing to be free is regrettable.

> Software as it should be.

> Free forever

Mostly all popular projects need some form of funding, and setting the expectaction of a free lunch forever for new users is not healthy. Btw, do you remember who used the tagline "It's free and always will be"? It was Facebook.

[xla]

Important to note that "Free" here doesn't refer to "for free". You rpoint about funding of popular projects was at the heart of radicle from the beginning. We believe that FOSS as backbone of the digital infrastructure needs to be sustainable, which includes the resources/funds to maintain it and keep it free and open. If you wanna find out more about the philosophy we follow, here is the original research and premise: http://oscoin.io/

[samatman]

The unfortunate conflation of libre and gratis in the English language is... not a new observation on your part.

[Taek]

I've been back and forth with members of the open source community a few times on this, and it seems like a battle that isn't going to be won. Software that has a price tag attached to it is unlikely to be accepted as open source, from what I can tell.

Which makes me wonder: should we come up with a new name/classification for software that is 'free as in freedom' but not 'free as in beer'?

[krageon]

> the perpetuation of open source software needing to be free is regrettable.

You think it would be better if we gated access to a valuable technology behind something that excludes people without money to spend?

[merelydev]

I think it is Free as in Freedom.

[dessant]

That's possible, but they also mention "Completely open source" in the same list, and that would make "Free as in Freedom" redundant.

[zeusflight]

I don't know what 'free' means for the project, but open source and 'free as in freedom' are not redundant these days. While open source is legally indistinguishable from free software, time has proven that open source software can be designed in non-free ways. Examples:

- Bloating codebase so much that it can't be audited, extended or forked easily

- Tightly controlling the development

- Open shims for opaque blobs

- Hiding documentation and troubleshooting information

Freedom is more about intent than definitions.

[saberd]

So free as in open source, why is this called free and not open then?

[cowsandmilk]

Free is a term used by the community for decades, literally in the name of the Free Software Foundation. I guess you could argue that their need to explain what free means indicates it was a bad choice to use, but it is pretty standard now.

https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software