I disagree. Free software projects like the GNU foundation or the OpenBSD foundation are striving towards freedom.
ThePirateBay.se et al are simply filling in on market demand created by the utter absurdity of treating digital data as if it was a can of tomatoes or a bag of crisps.
Actually, if the app I just bought off the app store was a "can of tomatoes", couldn't I use it on any device of my choosing, give it to my friend or include it as part of my estate as a gift to my children?
The absurdity is that we are consumers not customers. We have no rights except the bare minimum. We are sold on the dream and yet we will all experience a rude awakening (this part is never advertised).
Sounds great. The big bad record companies can't treat music like a bag of crisps. Neither can independent artists. Neither can Notch, because a game is no more like a bag of crisps than a CD track.
The consumers can and do. We collectively decided that a .99 cents for a song or $15 for a physical album isn't worth it. Equilibrium will eventually happen, the smart artists are already making money in the new music industry.
Yes and no. The pirating situation isn't that simple. I used to pirate a lot of games, but then Steam came along and I've pretty much not pirated anything since. Pirating was, for me, not just about being free in cost, but also a way to get the games via the internet without having to go into a shop and see if they had it, then possibly wait until they ordered it in. There was also the pain of license keys when they didn't work - it only takes a couple to start making you gun-shy.
Admittedly it's not music and I'm not familiar with the pirating in that arena, but it seems to me that pirating is a more complex beast than most people paint it.
In the words of a good friend of mine:
"You wouldn't download a car? Man if I could download a car off the internet for free, you bet your sweet ass I would!"
There is no "FOSS", Free Software is software which respects the users freedom, Open-Source software is software which allow the ability to study the source code(not that some Open-Source licenses is kinda like Free Software licenses too, but some are even similar to non-free software). They are two completely different things. Yes, I support FSF and GNU more than TPB of course.
There is such a thing as FOSS. That stands for Free and Open Source Software. There is software that is "Free" and software that is Open Source and, as I'm sure you are aware, the software that belongs to both groups is the (vast?) majority of each respective group.
It is called Free _and_ Open Source Software, it is the intersection of the two groups, and it is a pretty useful group to think about when you want to be inclusive and avoid word definition collisions with the word "free".
Going back and reading the initial comment, I think I see where you are coming from. The poster says "FOSS projects like GNU..." and that is off base if he was implying that GNU has anything to do with OSS. You are right, no one should be talking about a GNU as a FOSS project due to their outright rejection of the OSS ideology.
But just so we're clear, it is possible to talk about FOSS itself (the software) in a meaningful way. It's not like the term is oxymoronic or something, in fact, the two descriptions are nearly redundant when it comes to describing the rights you get as a user, which is what you should be concerned with as a user of the software.
Why shouldn't we apply this to projects as well? I guess the questions I would ask to clarify the point are: 1) What do you call a project that would like to empower users with software freedom but would also like to embrace the development style of Open Source? 2) Given that there are so many projects out there that embrace exactly that combination, shouldn't we have a name for that?
As I said before, different names results in different ideas. I haven't seen any software stating it's a FOSS software, I've only seen people who don't know the difference between Free Software and Open Software use the term. I don't think you are one of those but many are and that's why I hate the term "FOSS".
ThePirateBay.se et al are simply filling in on market demand created by the utter absurdity of treating digital data as if it was a can of tomatoes or a bag of crisps.