points by magicalist 10 hours ago | 0 comments
Seems like you aren't actually disagreeing at all?
First you're just disagreeing about the relative importance of "community" vs the license used. This does not seem like an important distinction, blog rhetorical structuring aside, since the value of each is really "it depends" (in the extreme, neither community or license matter if no one ever sees or hears of the code, for instance).
Second:
> If I publish my code under an open source license... If I keep my code proprietary...
That isn't even the distinction that the author is making. They're only talking about communities around open source code. They spell out the dichotomy quite explicitly:
> This is why I don't care as much anymore about a project being under a copyleft free software license or a non-copyleft free software license.
> This has taken a backseat, as I now believe that there is something more important than license: community. The community around a software project is what dictates the values of the project. A strong copyleft license does still signal that the project cares about software freedom, but, by itself it is not enough.
I don't care about community at all, the license is the only thing that has any "signal" when comes to someone caring about software freedom. If you release all your code as GPL (or MIT, or Apache, etc), you care about software freedom. Nothing is more important than the license.
The list of bullet points the author then provides are completely irrelevant to "caring about software freedom".