> Everyone is pretty clear about something like the MIT license I don't think this is really true. I think people are often upset or surprised when their MIT-l

> Everyone is pretty clear about something like the MIT license I don't think this is really true. I think people are often upset or surprised when their MIT-licensed programs are used in ways they don't agree with, or they reuse MIT-licensed programs in ways that violate their license terms (e.g. it takes many companies many, many years to realize they have to actually include a way for users to view copyright notices). Open source software is built on many different fuzzy notions of community and collaboration, encoded into an imperfect-but-legally-robust set of protocols that try to establish common language for people to build on. These protocols have proven very, very successful in encouraging collaboration and minimizing exploitation, but there's still a regularization/compromise process that's necessary so that everybody has a common ground to work from. For another perspective, think about them like security software—I personally might not know why TLS uses DH key exchange, or how it works, but if I threw it out in hopes of making thing simpler, things would probably go pretty badly for me when someone else notices.