[tsimionescu]

No, this is completely wrong. Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software, such as demos or shareware. Any software that is freely available for users to legally modify and redistribute however they see fit, under the same license or some other, is free software.

Examples of non-free software are shareware like WinRar, software only available for non-commercial use like OMNeT++ [0], and (slightly more controversially) things like ElasticSearch or MongoDB.

[0] https://omnetpp.org/intro/license

[jibal]

It's not completely wrong ... how rude. Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

And

> “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. We explain the difference in Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software.

etc.

[tsimionescu]

That definition, and Richard Stallman himself, completely agree with me. A BSD license also guarantees "that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software".

Here is Stallman spelling it out explicitly:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html

> The two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL insist that modified versions of the program must be free software as well. Non-copyleft licenses do not insist on this. We recommend copyleft, because it protects freedom for all users, but non-copylefted software can still be free software, and useful to the free software community.

> There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license, X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses.

So, I stand by my assertion. You are completely wrong in saying that only copy left licenses are free/libre software, even according to Richard Stallman himself.

[pabs3]

The BSD license does not offer the same software freedom guarantees as copyleft licenses though, since downstreams can elect to not release the source code. You are right otherwise though.

[F3nd0]

> Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer.

Yes. The comment you are replying to already said this: ‘Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software’.

Your earlier comment wasn’t wrong for saying that ‘free software’ refers to freedom; that part was correct. But it was wrong for agreeing with a comment which claimed that ‘free software’ means ‘copyleft’. Copyleft is free software, but free software isn’t always copyleft.

Saying that ‘free software means copyleft’ is like saying that ‘bird means goose’. Goose is a kind of bird, but not every bird is a goose; just like copyleft licences are free, but not every free licence is copyleft. The responses (which you called incorrect) were trying to explain this important difference.

[jakelazaroff]

Copyleft licenses don't even need to be free! All copyleft means is that derivative works must use the same license. For example, the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license [1] wouldn't fulfill freedom 0, since you can't use the material for commercial purposes.

(Granted, Creative Commons licenses are typically not used for software, but the point stands.)

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

[F3nd0]

Is that really the case? I’m not outright disputing this, but with the term ‘copyleft’ originating from the free software movement and all, I normally take it to identify free software which protects the freedoms it grants (typically by extending the terms of its licence to derivative works).

I see that a similar mechanism is used by some non-free licences, as you have just shown, but are those really considered ‘copyleft’? Isn’t the term more properly used when said mechanism is used specifically to grant and protect the four freedoms? Both the FSF¹ and Wikipedia² seem to view the freedom aspect as an important part of copyleft, at the very least.

1. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

[jakelazaroff]

Hm! The Wikipedia article intro explicitly lists the Creative Commons share-alike license condition in its list of "notable copyleft licenses", but later says that "any copyleft license is automatically a share-alike license but not the other way around". So at the very least I guess it's debatable :)

(I'm not sure I would rely heavily on Wikipedia for this — they only use secondary sources and in practice most of their sources will be GNU-related, so the article is probably biased in that direction.)