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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your spooky 'net denizen"):
joepie91@slightly.tech ("Sven Slootweg 🔜 eth0 ("still kinky and horny anyway")") wrote:
I feel like we need some sort of explicit distinguisher between types of FOSS:
1. Corporate FOSS: projects that directly serve the interests of a single corporation and is governed by that corporation, but the source code is freely available
2. Public/Community FOSS: projects that are intended to be both governed and used by a wide variety of different people. Usually characterized by actively trying to promote the project to potential users in some way (including 'community evangelism'), and by actively trying to attract contributors of some kind.
3. Personal FOSS: people's own projects that are essentially fully controlled by them personally, and written for their personal use, just the source code is shared freely for others to use if they want to. Usually few contributors, or may not even accept contributors at all.All of these have wildly different characteristics and governance structures, and users should have different expectations of them, so it seems reasonable that we should be treating them as different things, even if they are all nominally "FOSS"? And it would probably be helpful for projects to explicitly declare which of these they are, too, to set the right expectations.