Enjoying this conversation!

> I don't understand the point-of-view of someone who looks at the GPL, says, "that exception was an arbitrary compromise" and then concludes, "let's add more arbitrary compromises."

I don't think we should carve more ugly exceptions into a bad rule. I think we should have a better rule that better serves the underlying purpose. Specifically: license conditions that require developers using open source to build software to contribute their own work alike ought to be welcomed, no which kind of "use" as we slice and dice that term triggers the obligation. In FSF-speak: copyleft can regulate exercise of freedom 0 and freedom 1 as well as freedom 2 and freedom 3, to the same end, adaptable for both activist and pragmatic business use.

> I just don't see why that has to involve attacking a tribe that is resistant to fundamental changes of this sort, and that is perfectly happy with its current growth and direction.

Because that resistance to change creates and perpetuates restraints that prevent developers from addressing pressing, practical problems. Embedded library developers have recognized license choices at hand to keep their work free, or to dual license. Service library developers do not. Distributed-application developers have established license choices to keep their work free or to dual license. Developer toolmakers do not. And so on.

Intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, the old-guard posture picks winners and losers. No picking losers, then claiming to represent them.

> going to war with the existing FOSS community

I'm not at war. But there is no singular FOSS community to go to war with. And again, doctrinal specifics---like being able to rattle off the four freedoms from memory---aren't characteristic of any broad set. They're common knowledge only among a particular cohort of developers who came into open practice in particular ways at particular times. I suspect that includes both of us, but not nearly everyone. It took me way too long to internalize that.

For example, I published a noncommercial software license a while back and took great care not to present it as "open source". Many of its early adopters did anyway. When I reached out to them to warn of the feedback I thought they should expect, the answer was often "nobody I code with cares about any of that". I'd send them the Open Source Definition or links to fsf.org. No awe. Lots of good questions I couldn't answer.

That was my experience with the maximal-copyleft license and OSI, too. After a number of weeks, I had to report back that approval didn't seem likely, but that I didn't feel I could make a strong case why in any but political terms. The developers I thought I was serving by taking the debate for the team responded, almost unanimously: "We don't care. I know open source, and it's open source. Why are you wasting your time on that process in the first place?"

> But the distinctions still exist, and they allow us as a community to precisely describe ourselves, and we have used them for years, and you don't have the right to arbitrarily take them away.

Sure I do, but not arbitrarily.

I believed as you do, that FSF and OSI definitions represent rigorous, legal-flavored standards. Having actually dove into them now, the only precision to take away is false precision. Without linking you to a bunch of long blog posts: The OSD is a fork of DFSG, which OSI holds out as a technical standard, but Debian never did. When the text actually met many eyeballs under OSI, the org ended up making a bunch of hasty changes and commentaries to stem the tide of hackers reading it to exclude GPL. Twenty years later, I still saw comments on OSI's mailing list to the effect that the nondiscrimination criteria prohibit copyleft---more confounding than helpful. In the intervening time, OSI approved a number of controversial and just plain bad licenses. They approved stronger-than-GPL copyleft terms like OSL and RPL.

If the organizations' work in today's climate is to preserve a winners' history of open licensing circa 2000-2010, they should build that monument. Monuments don't move. Movements have to.

If "the movement" was just a tribe, you're right. It belongs to its time and place ... long past. But if "the movement" was really more than that, a set of goals beyond mere market penetration and a very niche kind of fame, the mantle belongs to those advancing those goals. Developers unhappy with where software freedom has run aground don't deserve to be marker for scorn or shorn of their "open source" identity. If that happens, they won't bend over backwards to honor open source as predecessor. They'll turn on it. New tribe.