Context:
Somebody made a post promoting the proprietary search engine they are working on, claiming in the post that it “would make Stallman smile”. In a comment below the post they said that they made the statement about Stallman to “drive engagement”. The post was later removed for promoting proprietary software.
Image description:
At the top is a screenshot from the modlog saying:
Removed Post We’re building a search engine to compete with DuckDuckGo. No JS, no WASM, no spying. Just a statically generated results page.
reason: Comm rule 2: Don’t promote proprietary software
Below that is an image of Stallman smiling.
I replied to that thread.
OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.
Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.