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I do not think anybody is making the _legal_ argument that consumers of publicly available software with an associated clear LICENSE file are granted any additi
by throwaway78123 6y ago
I do not think anybody is making the _legal_ argument that consumers of publicly available software with an associated clear LICENSE file are granted any additional rights. Open Source is much more than what you are suggesting. It's like saying all there is to soccer/football is <first degree technical definition here>.
Just like most things, there is a very important and obvious people/social dimension on top of that.
It's not entirely surprising this is a problem in our industry. After all, Software Engineers are most definitely NOT known for their social skills. The emergent properties of human interactions over time is a very complicated problem.
- Retric 6y agoI think you’re confusion is around the most well known OSS projects which try and increase adoption and generally request donations. That’s a relatively small chunk of the overall OSS community which is well known specially because maintainers have a personal desire or financial incentive to increase adoption. Far more often projects are released as OSS because sharing a project is a net benefit to the world and costs the donator nothing. That’s really the central idea of the OSS movement, when copying is free it’s easy to be generous. Forcing a social obligation is therefore toxic to the OSS community as releasing software becomes expensive.