Where’s the fifth freedom?
Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
Why I'm Changing the License in Over 80 of My Code Repos After Talking to the Co-Creator of Fediverse
Why I'm Switching from MIT to AGPL and from CC BY-NC to CC BY-SA after a conversation with Dr. Matt Lee about copyleft licensing and protecting free softwa…
software
Software freedom is the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose, to study how the program works, and change it, to redistribute copies and your modified versions so you can help others.
The state of the copyleft license
In this post, I want to go a little deeper into one important type of license: those that require sharing of modifications under certain conditions, often called “copyleft” or “reciprocal” licenses
When Free Software Depends on Nonfree - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
When a program is free software (free as in freedom), that means it gives users the four freedoms, so that they control what the program does. In most cases, that is sufficient for the program's distribution to be ethical; but not always. There are additional problems that can arise in specific circumstances. This article describes a subtle problem, where upgrading the free program requires using a nonfree program.
Cryptographic Autonomy License
1. Purpose This License gives You unlimited permission to use and modify the software to which it applies (the “Work”), either as-is or in modified form, for Your private purposes, while protecting…
Mx. Aria Stewart (@aredridel@kolektiva.social)
I knew it was this way but it's really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.