@pointlessone I didn’t say free software was friendly towards open source. There’s a philosophical difference there that matters to people (on both sides).

And I didn’t say that businesses necessarily like GPL either — it’s true that in many cases they prefer the non-copyleft licences. (Not universally though.) This is not because the OSI treated it differently but arises from the businesses’ own understandings of their own interests.

My sole point is that the Free Software versus Open Source split has never been the same as the copyleft versus non-copyleft split.

(There are plenty of people on the BSD side who’d come down on the philosophical freedom side of the split, for example, but would argue that ‘permissive’ licences are more free.)

And no, that’s not the reason FSF supports non-copyleft licences. That would imply that non-copyleft-licenced projects only have value in terms of being incorporated into copyleft projects. The real (and simpler) reason is that the FSF recognises that non-copyleft licences provide all of its “four freedoms”. In fact, the FSF will advocate for using weaker copyleft or non-copyleft licences in certain circumstances; it’s a tactical matter, like I said. (The idea of the GPL is meant to be to promote the spread of free software; if using the GPL would not achieve that they’ll advocate using some other licence — eg this is why glibc is under the LGPL.)

@pointlessone No, like I said, the OSI promoted the same licences. And the FSF never advocated *against* non-copyleft licences. (Though it does promote copyleft it also recognises that non-copyleft licences are often appropriate and has never suggested that those are less free — it considers the choice to be a tactical one.)

I agree, actually, that it’s not *only* marketing — it’s about whether to care about an ethical dimension versus a profit dimension. When I said “only marketing” I meant that what they were promoting was the same but the justifications differed.

@pointlessone “These people figured that if they used different licenses that were more friendly to businesses it would help adoption.”

This is false. Nothing about the definition of what licences were acceptable differed from the “free software” conception of the same. In fact the Open Source Definition was (and is) the same as the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

It was entirely a difference of marketing: emphasising the business benefits instead of the human rights aspects.

In practice, yes, businesses often have preferred non-copyleft licenses to copyleft ones (though not entirely — e.g., corporations happily use Linux even though the BSDs are available); but this wasn’t because of Open Source claiming that copyleft was bad.

(And, after all, the non-copyleft free software licences — BSD, MIT, X11, etc — had all been around just about as long as the GPL had, if not longer.)