Idea: Public Software Foundation

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https://www.gnu.org/licenses/

> Published software should be free software. To make it free software, you need to release it under a free software license. We normally use the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), specifying version 3 or any later version, but occasionally we use other free software licenses. We use only licenses that are compatible with the GNU GPL for GNU software.

License restrictions are a bother for corporations, who avoid it. Apple wasn't inspired by gcc for example to make its whole operating system open source.

There's also this thing about software being able to have a price, then users can share the price. But the marginal cost post internet is low; the economics don't work.

Nowadays we see people paying money to support projects they care about, bug bounties, etc. Kinda dystopian late-stage capitalist libertarian u/dys-typia, but kinda cool

Still you gotta love

1.1 Why support GNU Emacs on Windows?

It is not our goal to “help Windows users” by making text editing on Windows more convenient. We aim to replace proprietary software, not to enhance it. So why support GNU Emacs on Windows?

We hope that the experience of using GNU Emacs on Windows will give programmers a taste of freedom, and that this will later inspire them to move to a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. That is the main valid reason to support free applications on nonfree operating systems. 

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq-w32/Why-Emacs-on-Windows.htmlß

I guess there's this idea about free software being pulled into nonfree software and then the user's freedoms to view source could be removed from the software

there's this issue of contributor agreement signing: see https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package/issues/282#issuecomment-621310930 for an example ...

Would it be a bad thing to make a competitor to the fsf with public software? We have some fabulously useful projects thanks to the gpl: linux, git, emacs, gcc

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs.  If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library.  If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General
Public License instead of this License.

from the gpl