Comment by CooCooCaCha

I find it baffling in the other direction. The whole point of licensing is to ensure you’re a decent person.

If you’re creating something new and you dare try to copy anything without a license, the pushback is unanimous and universal: everyone agrees you’re a bad person for even thinking of it.

This is the same argument in the opposite direction. By fulfilling the terms of a license, you’re ensuring you play by the rules. In fact, licenses are the only real protection that open source maintainers have.

So why diss on someone for following the license terms? This whole moralizing and tut-tutting is a weird branch of the convo.

Sure, but contracts is the remedy society has developed to the problem that there are lots of indecent people around (not to mention that reasonable persons can disagree without being unreasonable).