> That's the Free Software slogan, not open source. The only relationship between the two is that open source can easily be relicensed into Free Software (or proprietary, or whatever.)
> There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development.
Your view of the meanings of "free" and "open source" software is very literal and narrow. I'm not trying to debate the technical definitions of those terms, because frankly, I don't care and I don't think they matter in this discussion.
The crux of what I am saying is this:
A company may choose to share their source code for others to benefit from, under the hope that large players will contribute back in some way rather than use the situation to the disadvantage of the upstream company.
In other words, they might hope to:
* Let hobbyists learn from and use their code for free.
* Let competing companies use their code, as long as they contribute something back (money, bugfixes, festures, community support, QA).
* Make their employees happy.
and they may not hope to:
* Empower other large companies to freeload--ie, profit without contributing back at all.
Yes, I understand that permissive open source licenses allow freeloading in a legal sense. That does not mean the upstream companies have to be happy about it, much in the same way that you're allowed to use your office's shared kitchen to microwave fish, but your colleagues do not have to be happy about it.
> There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development.
Your view of the meanings of "free" and "open source" software is very literal and narrow. I'm not trying to debate the technical definitions of those terms, because frankly, I don't care and I don't think they matter in this discussion.
The crux of what I am saying is this:
A company may choose to share their source code for others to benefit from, under the hope that large players will contribute back in some way rather than use the situation to the disadvantage of the upstream company.
In other words, they might hope to:
* Let hobbyists learn from and use their code for free.
* Let competing companies use their code, as long as they contribute something back (money, bugfixes, festures, community support, QA).
* Make their employees happy.
and they may not hope to:
* Empower other large companies to freeload--ie, profit without contributing back at all.
Yes, I understand that permissive open source licenses allow freeloading in a legal sense. That does not mean the upstream companies have to be happy about it, much in the same way that you're allowed to use your office's shared kitchen to microwave fish, but your colleagues do not have to be happy about it.
What about this is so hard to understand?