alt Hacker News“Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft.
All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.
Replies
This is completely false and ahistorical. The first license associated with the term "open-source" was the MPL, which is a copyleft license.
Open-source never attempted to distinguish itself from free software in terms of licensing or content, and "free software" has always included permissive licenses.
You can find lots of free software licenses which are not copyleft listed on the FSF website, with links to longer commentaries on them. The FSF clearly identifies them as free software licenses, and always has.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
this page is linked to from FSF.org here:
https://www.fsf.org/licensing/
Take a few minutes reading the publications of the organizations and movements you're misrepresenting. Take a look at the OSI's Open-Source definition as well.
You are correct ... the other responses to you are not. "Free software" as in the FSF is "free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", which is why copyleft was invented, to establish such a distinction.
> “Free software” means copyleft.
No, it doesn't. The FSF uses “Free Software” to refer to a broad class that is essentially identical to the OSI use of “Open Source.”
The term the FSF uses for copyleft is “copyleft”, which is a subset of Free Software.