Thank you for this important information.
Free access is an unintended consequence of the freedoms that the GPL grants to end users and is probably today the main cause of the failure of the free movement.
I'm not going to argue about the free and unintentional aspect, which apparently stings for-profit projects. Personally, I disagree with the "cause of the failure of the free movement" aspect. Among the proven causes are:
1 - The decline in the level of access to information, preventing the greatest number of people from flourishing and participating in the development of a common project (a result caused by the ideology that drives the current economic world). The free aspect
Therefore, it is clearly not unintentional....
2- A free software mentality perverted by societal needs and capitalized to the extreme (everyone needs to eat and no one is to blame for that, and creating and maintaining software is
very expensive (in terms of time and organization). Fortunately, the GLP is there to limit the damage... and allows communities to protect themselves against profiteers (who patiently wait for the community to work for them before making the product paid), and to leverage the source code to extend the free and community-driven nature of a project. Free access ensures that even the most disadvantaged can contribute. And often, these contributions, sometimes driven by a passion for this ideology of participatory exchange, make all the difference.
3- Making a product resulting from community work into a paid product inevitably generates feelings of betrayal and certainly a gloomy distancing from "free" practices. (Creating dependency and then, bam... charging...it's becoming increasingly common)
3- Loss of public confidence due to various media outlets that exacerbate the situation through ignorance, laziness, and likely bias... Yet, if we consider the most common bone today, we can only lament the number of problems it generates daily and the time spent solving them...
4- Mentalities are changing, becoming biased in the face of the reality of dependence on capital, and the increasingly oppressive economic reality that pushes everyone to devour each other before they devour us. Even within a small community, and this worsens over time.
These are, for me, the reasons for
the "failure" of freeIt is a democratic ideology evolving within a system that is not democratic.
In my opinion, it's not a failure. Free software forces the capitalist faction to outperform it in order to survive... this is a major benefit... and it's for this reason that the capitalist side sometimes borrows heavily from community work and, above all, hopes to stifle it to reduce its research and development costs. This way, they can make us believe that a GUI change is a major OS change to make us pay for the update license.
Fortunately, there are still dedicated individuals like you and the Debian community who allow us to continue to obtain excellent community products. And an even better enterprise version.
Continue.
As a new WAPT user, I am still learning Python and am certain that I will be able to participate at least in the generation of packages in a little while.
With all my thanks and encouragement.