> It just won't be a FOSS license by the traditionally understood definition of FOSS. For better or worse, the Free Software definition guarantees more freedom around end-user usage than it does around how you distribute software.

I appreciate your frank admission of the distinction, but I have yet to hear a good defense of it that both rests on something other than "that's the way we said it is" and doesn't trap GPL or AGPL.

The understanding you describe exists, but I can't agree that it's broadly shared or accepted. If there's a tradition, it belongs to a very narrow tribe. That tribe isn't growing particularly fast precisely because its tenets are so esoteric and don't stand up to typical hacker interrogation by those not thoroughly marinated in the political history. That's the "byzantine, insular ideology of copyleft" I mentioned in the blog post.

> The only thing you can't do is purposefully confuse people by calling your licenses something that they're not.

I can call it open, and I do. Folks may hear both your view and mine, but the result isn't confusion. It's a choice.

There is no proprietary right in the terms "free software" or "open source". And there is no good reason for those presently ill served to pretend those ill serving them enjoy such a right. When a better mousetrap comes along, the designer of the last model doesn't get to pull the words "mouse trap" out of the newcomer's mouth. As in software, so in licenses: lead, follow, get out of the way, or get run over. When I follow my people to a license problem, I try my best to lead with solutions.

> Nobody is upset that SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick exist.

I'm glad to hear you say so, but I've received lots of feedback from people who are upset. And not just because "license proliferation". Have a look at the OSI license-review archives ... though I don't generally recommend that.

> The licenses you mention are not Free Software licenses because restricting what people do with their software, and not just how they share it, violates rule 0.

Making changes and building applications are things that people do with software, ways that people use software, in common parlance. The only folks I know who want to split that hair aim to defend FSF's free software definition. That definition was largely a post hoc rationalization designed to alleviate the cognitive dissonance between the increasingly libertarian, permissive bent taking over open source ideology via OSI/ESR and the overt prescriptivism of GPL. OSI revels in permissionlessness and an idealized, rules-free environment. GPL is full of rules.

It was politically expedient to draw a line around GPL and say "no rules, except these rules, because we need these people as allies". Not rigorous. Not otherwise coherent.

> Just stop trying to co-opt a movement and blur lines that have been clearly understood for years.

That movement hasn't moved in some time. The initiative is out of initiative. There is no widespread understanding of the details we're discussing. We are both rarefied wonks.

The movement you seem to think I'm coopting was itself coopted. Open source "won" by giving software freedom to developers who don't pass along to end-users in turn. I don't apologize for writing copyleft licenses that eschew the compromises of the earlier forms. Especially in light of their performance to date.