I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that “open” is every bit as ambiguous as “free” here - i’ve had way too many arguments with people who thought “open” just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was “open” just because you can look through the window and see products).

However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html

Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html

(That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)

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CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn’t recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.

Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the “four freedoms”) and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it’s unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.

Being proprietary is enough of a reason to refuse it. On top of that, being owned by Facebook is another good reason.

With proprietary software the developer is in control, and in this case the developer is known evil.

Ultimately it’s your work so it’s up to you how you want to release it. BSD/MIT aren’t really any more or less free than the GPL because they still guarantee the four freedoms. The GPL just prevents downstream projects from denying those four freedoms further down stream, which is seen as important in the free software movement, but it doesn’t have to be to you.

One thing to keep in mind with these permissive or “pushover” type licenses although they are free software licenses, normalizing them means that the proprietary software industry ultimately gets to choose what is allowed to be released as free software. There is a warning that “business friendly” free software licensing does not ultimately mean business will be friendly back, especially in an age where there is increasing concern over proprietary software companies taking advantage without either giving back nor funding upstream projects.

I would say not running Windows is itself a practical benefit. I would also say the four freedoms constitute a very practical benefit (even if the software you’re running on top of the OS is proprietary).

I think it’s even worse than that. I imagine the point is to mislead people into believing that privacy laws mandate obnoxious banners in order to get them to oppose said laws.

FOSS bros stay winning

This particular project is under the MIT license, so it is okay

https://github.com/futo-org/fcast/blob/master/LICENSE

This is a web wrapper for several proprietary social apps. It is effectively a browser locked into a pre-approved set of URLs. Just use a real browser.

I do not believe FUTO’s campaign to redefine open source has had a positive effect on the open source movement, given all the confusion it has caused. Maybe its “ownership” of Immich has had a positive effect on Immich, but I wouldn’t know.

It is worth noting, according to Louis Rossmann, he stopped working for FUTO in early 2025 (“almost a year ago”). Here is his response to this article. Posting for information not because I agree with him. I still think Silicon Valley billionaire Eron Wolf-in-sheeps-clothing is a shady character for trying to redefine open source.

ETA: I think it’s open source.

It is: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/blob/master/COPYING

I disagree with this take. As someone who feels entitled to the four freedoms with every program I run, proprietary is a dealbreaker. Crypto and “AI” crap can be disabled or removed. If the choice were strictly between Vivaldi and Brave, Brave would be the better option. Fortunately we have better choices.

I don’t use Brave, I use Librewolf (or Ungoogled-Chromium if I need Chromium). I suggested that a “debraved” browser might be the best chromium browser, but apparently Helium is close to this (I haven’t heard of it until today).

Vivaldi being proprietary makes it worse than Brave, even with Brave’s controversies. But I would still rather use Librewolf, but there is even Ungoogled-Chromium if you really need it.

There is definitely a space for a “deBraved” browser that keeps the good parts. That would be the best chromium browser.

Unfortunately Seal has not had a release in over a year, since October 2024. It may still work but due to a recent (November 2025) change in yt-dlp an external JavaScript runtime is now required for full YouTube support.

There is YTDLnis as an alternative. It’s on F-Droid but for some reason the page for it 404’s (it’s clearly there in my client though).

There’s no need to involve a third party server for this. yt-dlp + Open With extension can do this all locally.

Don’t be fooled by the name, yt-dlp supports many more sites than just YouTube

This is what I use. I use OpenWith extension to invoke yt-dlp from Firefox. This extension was abandoned in 2021 but it still works.

This is a proprietary extension for a proprietary “service as a software substitute” program living on someone else’s computer. It’s about the furthest from free software/open source as you can get

Vivaldi is proprietary garbage hyped up by privacy redditors and degooglers. No I don’t care how “private” it is and I don’t care that they’re worried about competitors “stealing” their work (which is, ironically, built on free software). I don’t care about its connection to Opera or that it’s European based. Proprietary is proprietary.

There are plenty of good enough free browsers. Ungoogled Chromium exists if you don’t want Firefox.