| > "The people who are a party to shared source licenses, have access to the source" > So do the employees of the original vendor. So what? How does that matter at all? It means nothing and has no bearing on this topic. The title of this topic begins with: "EULAs Aren't Inherently Evil" My point is that, FOSS only provides benefits to users who care about modifying or redistributing that software. Not everyone does. Giving my mother the right to modify and redistribute software does not provide any tangible benefit to her, because she will never do that. For the many institutional users who take advantage of shared-source licenses, they also have no desire to redistribute or change the software, they simply want to audit it. They are not being prevented from doing anything that they wanted to do. What evil is done to a user when you take away a right to do something they had no desire to do? And for that matter, why is taking away people's tort rights something that is assumed to be good for users? I personally appreciate and contribute to FOSS, but the idea that it protects the rights of anyone other than developers specifically is myopic. Just like proprietary licenses restrict the rights of users, so do almost all FOSS licenses -- just in different ways. The difference is not that one protects your rights and the other one doesn't, the difference is in which rights they choose to protect. |