Comment by layer8
1 year ago
Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.
1 year ago
Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.
Then why is there not a file outlining the ethical expectations, alongside the legal agreement? The companies using the products have no way of reading the developers' minds regarding expectations of reciprocity.
The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects today have non-legal outlines of expectations of community members. For a single example, codes of conduct are very common.
I don’t think this is a discussion about what the project owners specifically expect ethically (users would be free to disagree), but about what we collectively find to be ethical or unethical in this space. If there is disagreement about the ethicality, then one party having it written down doesn’t change anything about the disagreement. And there is nothing that binds one party to submit to the other party’s notion of ethicality, unless you turn it into a legal matter by making it part of the license.
Again, this thread is about whether we as a society, or as the software development community at large, consider the behavior ethical or not. It is not about the specific open source developer imposing specific rules.