• cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    FOSS is free open source software, which means it doesn’t cost money and you can use it for anything you like.

    In practice this means you can download these apps and modify them or contribute to them, and you always know exactly what they do (for the most part). FOSS isn’t necessarily better than paid software, nor is it necessarily worse, but it is more accessible software.

    Sync is ad supported or paid which some people are against, arguing it’s monetizing free content. They don’t like the ad tracking and I strongly agree with that.

    But at the end of the day, if a developer wants to get paid to write software I’m in favor of it, it’s not like this is Google or some other large Corp, it’s a single developer building and maintaining Sync (though I think the lifetime price is way off the mark).

    • liara@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      it doesn’t cost money and you can use it for anything you like.

      This is misrepresenting FOSS quite a bit. A lot of open source software is indeed this permissive, but not all of it. It’s important to refer to the license of each individual project because various licenses have different terms.

      Some open source software may be free for personal use, but that license may not extend to other companies seeking to profit off their open source and good will. ZeroTier comes to mind as an example of this.

      Further, other licenses like GPL only requires that you make your sources available upon request but you can require that your customers pay you to receive the product: i.e. RHEL. At the end of the day, FOSS means free as in speech, not free as in beer

    • Rossel@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Free as in speech, not necessarily free as in no money exchanged. The GPLv3 explicitly allows commercial use to both the creator and third parties.