[btown]

In a way, the damage done to the word "open" is even more egregious - because OpenAI allowed people to access a SaaS product, for free, many people will now see the Open prefix as "you're allowed to play on my land."

The entire notion of "open source" will start to blur with "source-available" and even with "freemium SaaS" in the minds of an entire generation using a closed product called OpenAI to do their homework. How does OpenOffice distinguish itself from Google Docs when the word "open" means nothing? (Yes, LibreOffice, I see you there, but sadly your "fetch" is not going to happen in the English speaking world!)

One might say, "non-programmers don't need to know this" - but of course they do. They should know that a product that is truly open is guaranteed to be available so long as a community wants it to be - not at the whims of a corporation that could take away a freemium tier or revoke someone's ability to build code derived from a source-available license at will. And I fear this will take at least some wind out of the sails of a lot of incredible projects.

[leidenfrost]

We're all partly responsible for that.

Every time any open source project tries to make money, people quickly fork the project into a similar free-as-beer one: "OpenSomething wants my money? I'll fork it into LibreSomething then"

At this point, the point made by RMS that people can make money selling FOSS software just fine is naive at best.