I don't claim to know exactly either, and maybe you're right, and I'm over-correcting based on my environment :) But I have had a lot of conversations about this in the past few years...

(I personally prefer the FSF model, but think that the OSI has won, at this point. All my software is Apache2/MIT these days. And even though I prefer it in the abstract, I have a lot of criticisms of both.)

Free Software seems like a model aimed at maximizing the available benefit for all people, while Open Source seems like a model that aims to maximize growth (in both quality and quantity) of that benefit, even if unevenly applied.

To me, this seems very analogous to some economic models I could mention. Communism sure sounds good, but I feel pretty confident in stating that the wild growth Capitalism has encouraged has made even the poor much better off than they would be in a system that was purely communistic for the same time period.

That said, I wouldn't call our current system purely capitalistic, which I think goes a long way towards explaining why the poor have an increased standard of living, and points towards the truth of what you're seeing (and what we've been seeing more recently with "interesting" business models using Open Source). The middle ground is often much more beneficial than the ideological extremes.

To bring this back to Free Software and Open Source, do we think there would be nearly as much high quality free software if Open Source had not introduces the large talent pools and funding of businesses? Would Open Source have had anything to entice those businesses with had not Free Software provided the base upon which to build the current ecosystem? They both provide a large benefit, but for different aspects. I think a mix of them is the most beneficial way forward, whether that's a third way, or a vacillation between these extremes as more licenses are developed and tweaked that change how the market for software of this type responds.

I don't agree that the middle of extremes is better, but I do think this is a very interesting framing, thanks for this. Your first paragraph, especially is pretty insightful, I think.

I think I forgot who I was talking to for a sec... I'm guessing there's quite a bit we agree on :)

Looking across the aisle, I do wonder from time to time if the AGPL was a sort of breaking point. GPL always "threatened" industry at the desktop level and lower but once everyone's beloved FAANG+/- was in the cross-hairs the discussion maybe degraded a bit.

:)

I think so, but I tend to think of it as not the AGPL's fault, exactly. That is, the GPL was a product of its time: it's very concerned with the details of writing non-networked C code. It pre-dates the web! It was impossible to forsee these kinds of changes, and it just so happens that it was not really prepared for them. The AGPL was an attempt to plug that hole, but it was too little, too late.

Yea, I don't think it's AGPL's fault. I think people became complacent with the landscape of GPL and what that meant for production applications but when GNU came around and tried to make it all apply uniformly (right after dot-com) OSI had already gained enough traction that a full GPL looked "weird" and turned into more of a signal that you didn't want anyone to use your code. That and Google et. al. banned it as it obviously threatened its model that some might see as abusing GPL.

Almost the right timeframe, but from my perspective the GPL2/GPL3 split is what broke everything. The GPL was a glorious hack as long as it was alone in its niche (supported by admonitions against license proliferation), but its success was predicated on it instantiating itself as a singleton. But the basic problem was simultaneously desiring (a) the ability to combine any collection of software and (b) preventing certain combinations of software. Now that we have to choose, the zeitgeist seems to have given up on (b).

For GPL'd software you're required to share your changes, for open source software you aren't. That's a big difference, especially for a business that wants to sell their changes.

So when people say open source is business friendly, they don't mean that the vibe is business friendly, they mean that it removes a restriction and allows more avenues to make money.

Being similarly FSF-aligned, all I know is that in gamedev it's not unpopular to consider things like Unreal Engine "open source" simply because you can get access to their source code on GitHub :(