The inverse is also true (barring possibly some insignificant exceptions). Can you name any mainstream open source license that is not considered free software?
It absolutely does. The difference between these two movements is purely philosophical; practically they describe the same things, they just do it in a different way and for different reasons.
(that doesn't mean the difference isn't important though)
Name an open source license that you don’t consider free software, then. Note that “source available” (Business Software License, etc.) is not the same thing as “open source”.
It's not about what you consider or not. The Free Software movement is very clear. It is about the freedom of the user: "I, the copyright owner of my own code, allow you to use my code as long as you let your users have (some kind of) access to my code in the product they buy".
Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much control as you can on what you buy, but why would you ever say: "I don't want those weird licenses that give me more access to the stuff I buy, I want the other ones that make it completely proprietary and inaccessible".
Of course as a company, you want permissive licenses, such that you can use it for free, but keep it proprietary (because companies like to think that this one bugfix they made is very strategic IP).
It sounds like you're implying that permissive licenses don't count as free software licenses, but that has never been true. FSF has always said that permissive licenses are free software licenses and that permissively licensed software is free software. However, they advocate the position that this might not be the best way to protect all downstream users' freedom.
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
Right, so you might have, for example, FreeBSD, which as distributed by the FreeBSD developers is free software, but which can also potentially be used in a proprietary downstream product, which is not free software. The FreeBSD developers did not deny users any of the four freedoms. They just allowed other people to potentially do so.
I was wrong indeed, thanks for the precision :-). So:
Permissive licenses are free in the sense that they allow making free software (but they also allow making non-free software).
GPLv3 enforces the complete derived work to be free. LGPLv3 says that the particular library should stay free.
GPLv2, LGPLv2 and MPLv2 say that the source code (either of the whole derived work or just the library) should stay free, but tivoization allows making the product non-free.
Please note that "Tivoisation" isn't what Tivo actually did and both the GPLv2 and GPLv3 ban "Tivoisation" but allow what Tivo actually did. "Tivoisation" as it is popularly known refers to blocking the running of modified GPL code, while what Tivo actually did was block running their proprietary software (their UI etc) on top of modified GPL code (here Linux). Both GPL versions block the former while allowing the latter. At least according to Software Freedom Conservancy.
That's interesting, I remember thinking that the original notion of Tivoization did apply to what Tivo did (including what you describe).
I wonder if this is a point of disagreement between FSF and SFC -- I know they now have several disagreements.
In a similar time frame, I criticized attestation features in trusted computing because they would allow (in fact one of their main purposes was to allow) network services to allow only certain software configurations to interact with them. And I thought I was talking about a similar concept!
You may be thinking of SFLC, their disagreements with FSF are much larger. SFC's disagreements with FSF are mostly related to keeping RMS around.
Attestation is indeed a big problem today, especially around Android devices and proprietary apps that won't run on libre Android distributions. The attestation feature of WebAuthn could also become a problem, but that is somewhat mitigated by the Apple passkeys not being attestable.
I get why companies can make more profit in a world where most software is under a permissive license. I just don't really see how it benefits users and, more importantly, developers as individuals.
To me, writing software in my free time and open sourcing it under a permissive license is shooting myself in the foot. I did the work for free, it may as well benefit me as a user. At minimum it should be MPLv2.
That matches my understanding. Some people might potentially only say "tivoized" (or a more explicit "incorporated in a product that prevents the user from modifying it in practice" or "incorporated in a locked-down product" or something) rather than "non-free" for a hardware product, but I guess "non-free" could also make sense for a hardware product.
MIT, BSD, Apache, anything that is open source but allows you to make the code proprietary.
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
Permissive licenses are "free" in the sense that they allow to distribute free software (e.g. I can distribute a binary together with its sources even if they are MIT-licensed, and that would be free), but they also allow to distribute non-free software (e.g. I can take MIT code and distribute a proprietary binary).
Copyleft licenses enforce the freedom downstream.
I guess my original point is that I don't understand why people don't like copyleft, because copyleft enforces free binaries.
Yes, that sounds right to me. “Free Software” and “open source” are synonyms, with the FSF preferring to use one term over the other, despite recognizing they’re synonyms, because they are ideologues who are obsessed with language use. Permissive and copyleft are two different types of free software/open source licenses, with the FSF preferring copyleft.
To answer your underlying question: I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
> I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.
But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.
And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.
> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.
Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences (thus open source).