Some recent events made me realise that maybe the biggest [dark] force against the FOSS “movement” is misinformation. Sometimes people really don’t know what it is about – and I’m not talking about people from completely unrelated fields, I’m talking about important people that simply never had the reason (or opportunity) to understand the GPL,LGPL or things like that.
Anyone can see that things really changed in the past 3 or so years but parts of the Open Source philosophy are still unknown to the main public – people think that in “open source” and “free” no one has any rights over it and that after you have released it, its not yours any more.
This misinformation really scares people that are in doubt on whether releasing or not some piece of software as FOSS. Even though people want to build a “community” around some project and to share it, they are afraid that doing so is like negating all property on said software.
Quick hint: releasing something as open-source and licensing it properly is more like:
“Whatever you wrote will ALWAYS be yours”.
If you feel like being on this misinformed bunch don’t feel bad, you are not alone but please, get some reading going on: