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Posts: 45 | Thanked: 20 times | Joined on Jul 2010
#204
Originally Posted by rm42 View Post
This affects much more than just the GPL. Even some of Microsoft's own open source licenses are excluded.
Well yes, they have restricted the licenses that don't fit the app store model and haven't excluded their own just because it's their license. So they haven't been hypocritical.

Sure there are some licenses that are considered open source that are acceptable to MS, as mentioned on the article above. But, those are not the licenses that most FOSS coders like to use.
There are plenty, and they are some of the most popular OSS licenses, they are also the most 'free' licenses used by the most altruistic coders. In fact almost the entire android userland uses one such license.

People who knowingly restrict themselves from this are either ignorant or too imprisoned already by non-free software.
The flipside of that is that the benefit isn't there for the majority of people. Freedom is great but it seems that there still is no consumer-level free platform that can match the user experience provided by the less free commercial solutions and it seems the vast majority of people prefer that and restrict themselves to everything that isn't a restrictive OSS license because the benefit simply isn't there (at least for them).

Maybe we should start to use the term copyleft more often to avoid confusion.
Probably, FOSS is about more than restrictive OSS licenses, it includes even the very permissive ones that place almost no restrictions on the user at all.