Ask HN: Do you believe in GNU's Free Software?

"“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies." - From the GNU Website.

Do you believe in Free Software? People often talk about the benefits of open source, but they tend to switch to proprietary, partly-proprietary (Jetbrains is a good example. Only parts of their products are open source), or corporate controlled open source (Corporations like Microsoft who espouse open source, but not free software because most of their stack is proprietary), when there's convenience to be had.

Is free software a lost cause? If we believe in things like right to repair, must we also believe in free software? Is using free software for financial benefit and then not contributing back simply by promoting and using free software immoral? Are we building a bad future for software by not fighting for something like the Free Software movement?

Without free software we would be in the hand of a couple corporations with nowhere to go.

So yes, I believe in GNU's Free Software.

These questions seem lost in ideology. The free software movement gave me an operating system and critical applications so I can do my work without big company garbage interfering.

Unfortunately there is a low ceiling to the utility of copylefted software as my experience in commercial software development shows that any commercially successful development based on copylefted software invites scrutiny such that one must constantly prove that every feature of the software can be directly linked to published source code changes. Any failure to do this can result in costly and distracting legal actions. Because this is onerous software developers who seriously wish for success and profit minimize exposure to copylefted source code. This makes it clear that freedom is a complicated business of trade offs and not a matter of ideological purity tests as the hype surrounding copyleft implies.

No i don't but there might be cases where such a license worked well however there are newer licenses i expect to work better.

I like having the freedom to use libre software, but also having the freedom to choose non-libre software, as the need arises.