> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

That was written in a world where “selling software” meant charging people money for Software that ran in their computers, like the famous example of Stallman mailing tapes with Emacs tarballs.

The whole thing was thought up when residential internet couldn’t be used for much more than email, BBS and Usenet, and it wasn’t viable to use it for downloading a text editor.

It’s not a timeless set of principles to live by forever after, proprietary software —that’s not charged for- dominates everyone’s lives more than ever in the public and private sphere, precisely from companies that benefited from the open source ecosystem of software engineering tools.

The 1985 GNU Manifesto explicitly brings up the possibility of third-party companies whose sole business is charging for setting up, running, and managing free software:

> Meanwhile, the users who know nothing about computers need handholding: doing things for them which they could easily do themselves but don't know how.

> Such services could be provided by companies that sell just handholding and repair service. If it is true that users would rather spend money and get a product with service, they will also be willing to buy the service having got the product free. The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one. Meanwhile, those of us who don't need the service should be able to use the program without paying for the service.

That's not quite true. They didn't imagine that 3rd parties would be "running" the software. In the scenarios above the end user is running the software on their computers. They always have access to the source code and there's no vendor lock-in.

"The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one."

> If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.

In the Free Software community, this line was always blurry, almost non-existent even.

Even if the receiver of the Free Software package is not a programmer by any definition, at worst case, they can ask for a friend to patch something up, and if another friend wanted his patched version, the modified source code has to move with the software package.

Open Source software can block even this simple pathway by not giving back the modified source from friend to the user, creating a dependency. It'd be heartless to do this between two friends, but companies will happily do that.

My most vivid example of this is SDKs for hardware. Half of the API is open, but the patched version of the (open source) libraries cost $2K+, several NDAs and allegiance to company for the rest of your life or you can be sent to a concentration camp operated by an alliance of companies doing the same thing.

...and this is just for a small biometric scanner you happen to find in a piece of 10 year old discarded tech.