I would flip the question around. We've seen a number of companies like Mongo put real effort into claiming that they should be considered Free (as in speech) software. They didn't have to do that, but they thought it was worthwhile to do so.

My feeling is that the philosophical distinction does matter, or else people and companies wouldn't get so bent out of shape when it's pointed out that their licenses are philosophically different. There is a lot of reputation and public perception rolled up into words like "Free/Libre content", and into words like "Open Source".

I am, to a certain degree, genuinely sorry that "Free" as it is used here has an inherent positive connotation. But also, it's not our fault that society standardized around a word that had a positive connotation. And it is not true at all that the entirety of the positive connotation around Free/Libre software came from the word "Free", Open Source advocates have fought hard to distinguish between Freedom and commercial cost.

You're right that this is a fight over connotations, that's all it is. But you're wrong in saying that there's not a fundamental difference between GPL and Non-Commercial licenses. Being able to accurately and quickly describe, label, and search for a category of software/content is important, and it is valid to be upset about putting a ton of activism and time into building a category of software/content, and then having a bunch of other people come in who fundamentally do not understand why those distinctions exist or why they matter -- and then for those people to argue that they get to use those connotations now, and Free Software advocates need to go away and start over from scratch if they want new terms that describe what they mean by "freedom".

You're also right that Freedom is a continuum, but you're wrong that this means we should stop trying to define the word. Right now we're fighting over whether Non-Commercial licenses are "Free". There are licenses that do not even meet the minimum CC definitions that want to label themselves as Free. There are music licenses that openly label themselves as Copyright Free that have restrictions on whether they can be shared or where they can be embedded or streamed, even for Non-Commercial products. They want (and in fact are) also participating in this debate.

So because this a continuum, and because there really is no clear, universal cutoff point where we can say something isn't Free, there is thus a large benefit in setting up a clear standard to prevent the continual erosion of the word "Free". There is a large benefit in being able to search for terms like "Open Source" or "Free/Libre" being confident that you'll get back a category of content/software that will meet at least a minimum standard threshold for what rights they'll guarantee.

See also words like Vegan. Reducing animal harm is a continuum as well. There are different standards of Veganism, and grey areas where different people disagree on what does and doesn't count. Different parts of the Vegan world are more strict about wax coatings and micro-ingredients. But broadly, we still have a cutoff point where almost across the board we don't consider stuff like beeswax to be Vegan. And if someone comes and argues that animal harm is a continuum and we're just arguing over connotations and definitions, and a piece of food that's vegan but has honey is still better than a steak, my response is going to be, "yeah, so? What's your point?" We want a category that makes it easy to find stuff in the grocery store, and we want a well-defined standard so we can narrow down where people are on that continuum of reducing harm. The same is true of Open Source and Libre software.

The "fields on endeavor" clause is a disputed clause. It wasn't a widely-accepted tenet when the term "free software" started out. It was added later when "open-source" started to gain popularity.

It's true that the main proponents of "fields of endeavor", namely the OSI, have a much stronger voice than the rest of us. Does it mean they get to define what is free software? They would like to think so, but I'm not sure that being the mainstream, or having a budget due to corporate backing, means they have a monopoly over a movement that started by individuals long before the OSI started.

There are also plenty of voices, right now, within the OSI, talking about removing the "fields of endeavor" clause. There was a big internal "controversy" over it only a few months ago.

Having a discussion about the term "free software" and about the "fields of endeavor" clause, without mentioning any of these facts, is more propaganda, than an attempt to argue in good faith.

If they want to push their own brand of "free software", that's fine. But they should at least be honest about what they're doing. Not argue that they don't care about the "fields of endeavor" clause, but just trying to correct some philosophical/technical inaccuracy.

FTA:

> Isn't prohibiting the usage of some artefacts for commercial purpose good for free artefacts? Maybe it is. May be it is not. That is irrelevant while deciding whether a license is considered free or not.

No, it's not irrelevant. The better philosophy should win, not the one with the most corporate backing.

Well, when we're talking about culture, word definitions are descriptive of current usage, not prescriptive. So yes, absent rigorous technical definitions, the people with the strongest and most mainstream voices do get to define what words mean, because definitions describe usage.

When we're talking about Open Source, both the rigorous technical definitions and the mainstream common understandings of the words reject NC licenses as Free/Libre. Is it possible that might change in the future? Sure. But it hasn't changed yet.

> is more propaganda, than an attempt to argue in good faith.

Let's be honest about what's happening here, both of us are making propaganda, because that's the only thing we can talk about. There is no natural law of the world that defines what any word should mean, when we have these conversations we are necessarily making moral/value arguments about what the definition of Free/Libre should be.

Nevertheless, the "controversy" about Fields of Endeavor that you're highlighting is not as big of a deal or as big of a controversy as you're making it out to be -- in general the support for keeping Fields of Endeavor is a lot larger than the movement to remove it. Not that it would matter anyway, because NC licenses also violate clauses 1 (Free Redistribution) and 9 (License Must Not Restrict Other Software). So even if clause 6 did go away, it's still going to be a while before NC licenses can be considered valid under the OSI definitions.

> The better philosophy should win

What if we find out that the best way to fund Open Source is by restricting source access to approved people and by restricting people's ability to distribute modifications? Does that mean we should consider software that restricts that stuff to be Free/Libre?

Saying the better philosophy should win is in some ways exactly what I mean by not understanding what the philosophies are -- it's predicated on this idea that the real definition of Free/Libre is "whatever works", rather than treating Free/Libre as a theory about what might work.

"The better philosophy should win" is the kind of thing we properly say when discussing Free/Libre vs Proprietary software, or Communism vs Capitalism, or Veganism vs Vegetarianism, or any number of competing ideologies about the world. The effects of those philosophies in the real world are what we're trying to determine, not the definition of what those philosophies are. It may well be that the best way to guarantee free artefacts is by distributing Non-Free software. If that's the case, it doesn't make that software Free/Libre, it means that the proprietary model is better. It may well be that eating honey is better for the environment than abstaining from honey. That doesn't make honey Vegan.

Free/Libre is a philosophy that (among other things) states that having a shared, collective commons of software that everyone uses and contributes to will be better than having a proprietary model in which people are forced to get permission before they're allowed to inspect/modify or distribute modifications to the programs that they build.

That philosophy might be wrong, or it might be right. That's a different conversation than what the philosophy is.

The idea that clauses like 1, 6, and 9 are just corporate quirks of the OSI definition of Free/Libre, rather than serious philosophical statements about what Free means -- that is what I mean by people not understanding the philosophy behind what they're critiquing. "Fields of Endeavor" doesn't exist just for corporate interests, it's intended to be a general prohibition against license restrictions like "don't be evil", "don't use for any cause I dislike", and "don't make money." People who argue against that clause ought to have better philosophical arguments than "corporations like it, so it must be evil."

There's a very real effort to portray clause 6 as merely a quirk of history, and to avoid putting in the effort to dissect what the implications of clause 6 actually are, what purpose it serves, and what the implications of removing it actually would be and what removing it would change about the nature of Free/Libre software.

But... again, clause 6 is not the only part of the OSI definition that NC licenses violate. NC licenses would have violated even most early definitions of Free/Libre before clause 6 had been added and before Open Source had become popular.

> both of us are making propaganda

That may be. As long as we're being honest about it, I think that's fine. I feel like the article wasn't being honest about being propaganda.

> It may well be that the best way to guarantee free artefacts is by distributing Non-Free software

I don't really follow. If charging 1$ from everyone ends up being the best outcome for free software (we're talking about free as in speech, right?), then yeah, I think that makes it free. Just not as in beer. I don't see how it can be otherwise.

> The idea that clauses like 1, 6, and 9 are just corporate quirks

I'm not saying any of them are quirks. I'm saying that they are not axioms. If you write an article trying to defend them, you should try to actually defend them, rather than say "this is how it's always been" or "this is the mainstream, just accept it."

It's very likely that if we argued about the actual free/open-source licenses, I would end up agreeing with most of what you say.

But I still believe the article in question was written in bad faith, and you didn't convince me otherwise.