That's the same I'm saying. What you quoted just says that you can charge for distributing free software but you cannot force other holders of the software to distribute it asking for a charge.

You as a distributor can charge for what you distribute, that's it. And it has been done with a lot of free software, like with Linux. That's why basically Linus changed his License from explicitly free in money to only free as in freedom.

The thing is that free software allows to have a paywall if the distributor wants it. Which has a lot of sense. But does not allow to enforce it to other distributors.

Richard Stallman distributed GNU tools by a price. HIS distribution of GNU tools. At the same time you can also get the GNU tools from idk Debian mirrors (for free).

Free software isn't free as in money. That's the whole point. The adoption of Open Source by the "cool" companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) has tainted the original meaning of free software.

[–] Rustmilian@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Did you even read my first reply?
It wasn't about wether or not you can charge. It was about the protections always being granted to the user regardless if they paid the fee. A user could "steal" a copy without paying a fee and still be able to legally distribute it, you wouldn't even be able to press charges for "theft" because the license grants rights regardless of the means it was accessed.

Also it's FOSS, not "free software", they're not the same thing. Free software could be any software that doesn't cost money, FOSS is Free(-dom) Open Source Software.

[–] mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

GPL is free (or libre) software. FOSS is a modern term adopted by companies.

[–] Rustmilian@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The term FOSS originated in the early 1980s from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project led by Richard Stallman (Creator of GPL) to promote software freedom and address the ambiguity associated with the term "free software".

The term "Libre Software" was actually introduced after FOSS in the early 2000s, sometime around 2002, alongside terms like "software libre" and FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software).

The term "free software" in the context of FOSS was introduced only a few years before FOSS by Richard Stallman with the Free Software Movement and was criticized for being confusing and ambiguous with the historical use of the term that dates all the way back to the 1960s that defines it as any software free of cost.

Not only is the term "FOSS" not modern, it predates all other terms except "free software" which it follows closely after.