I disagree. With licenses that are “straight proprietary”, it’s obviously whats going on. The FSL is proprietary but tries to gaslight you into thinking that maybe its kinda not. That’s clearly worse because it relies on manipulation and can only ever be useful to someone acting in bad faith.

Sure, you can do all of that, fine by me. What you should not do is take that proprietary construct, slap the term “freedom” on in and try to muddy the waters of the FOSS licensing landscape neven further for your own gain.

Except its not like Linux at all. Linux uses the GPL which imposes no usage restrictions. This is why the GPL is a free software license and the FSL is a proprietary software license.

I would actually entertain the argument of protecting themselves against free-riding if and only if they would publish a transparency report detailing how they reimburse open source projects for the “common infrastructure” like, say, Linux, that they use to build and run their commercial offering and how they arrive at the amount they consider fair for their use. So far, I have not been able to find anything remotely like that, so their while argument is marketing and gas lighting.

The GPL is a fair play license as it offers everyone the same opportunities to use the software either for commercial purposes or otherwise. This license is a grants one party substantial rights over others, thus missing the main point of free software: free as in freedom, not free as in beer. That is also why free software organizations like the OSI won’t accept licenses like this as “open”.