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by zelphirkalt 1949 days ago
Check out the GNU or FSF websites. Copyleft is an important part obviously, as it is the thing preventing things to be forked, modified and then license changed. Did you ever watch a Stallman talk about the 4 freedoms and how copyleft works? If not, please do so, before writing more untrue things like: "The difference between 'open source software' and 'free software' has nothing to do with copyleft."
1 comments
e-v 1949 days ago
Please don't patronize me. I am responding to claims, not judging you and will ask you to please do the same.

The difference between Open Source and Free software (incidentally, I am in favour of the latter, but this is irrelevant) has to do with ethos and values, not copyleft.

From https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-open-overlap.en.html:

"Among all programs that are open source, only a minuscule fraction are not free."

From https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....:

"The two now describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand."

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zelphirkalt 1949 days ago
But how does any of this make it untrue, that copyleft is an important aspect, without which the freedoms are not maintained?

You quoted 2 phrases, which are not wrong, but which do not argue against what I wrote before. Here are more quotes from the same pages:

"Second, when a program's source code carries a weak license, one without copyleft, its executables can carry additional nonfree conditions. Microsoft does this with Visual Studio, for example."

It should be quite clear, that, when I can copy a program and modify it and then release under a different license, I can circumvent user freedoms easily. Do you have any counter point to this? What exactly are you trying to tell me?

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