this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Free and Open Source Software

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There's a popular-ish open source game I remember playing a few years ago, Warsow, and when I checked on it now, it's been forked and while the fork is genuinely better and funner to play in so many ways, it expects to be launched through Steam. I wanted to tinker with maps and stuff and started researching, and while I did find what I was looking for somewhat in older Warsow-related threads, when I went to the official warfork-qfusion github repo looking for specific documentation for the new fork, I was greeted with a link to their Discord "if you have any questions".

Yet this game brands itself FOSS, and it is technically released under a FOSS license and their github shows that they are actively developing it in cooperation with a community - just not a community you can be in without accepting certain walled gardens. It honestly sucks to see. I wanna access threads discussing this software, but I won't be able to unless I go through an ID verification process and trust a silicon valley company to both secure my data and not use it in some nefarious way. And to even run the game, I had to accept Steam, which I honestly didn't have to do in order to run Warsow back in the day, and I enjoyed that - what was wrong with just shipping a binary and letting people launch it how they like, with optional integrations? What's wrong with having an open forum for tech questions? Why wall the garden that you're making supposedly open products in?

In short, what do you call projects like this - the increasingly common projects that, while technically FOSS, put all their documentation and discussion on discord, and seem to expect their users to swallow unsavory default options or even use proprietary middle-ware or launchers? Proprietary FOSS?

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[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The "F" stands for "free". Free software is defined as having four essential freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Notably, this definition places no restrictions on ethics. In fact, it explicitly states the opposite:

The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user's purpose that matters, not the developer's purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to other people, they are then free to run it for their purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on them.

What you are looking for is a different term, for example, "accessibility". Accessibility of information is very important, but source availability and limited restrictions are what make something FOSS.