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Comment by pocksuppet

2 hours ago

They don't have to. If LibreOffice wanted them to have to, they should have used a different license.

you people are always mixing up the legal thing to do with the right thing to do

  • I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return.

    If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.

  • Who decides what the right thing to do is? Everyone has different opinions.

    • Mostly individuals decide what they will do, and then communities decide if they respect that or not. Doesn't exactly apply to companies tho, since they're functionally sociopaths.

  • Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.

    In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.

    Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.

    • They clearly would like donations, but choose not to require any payments.

      Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.

      And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.

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    • > Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.

      It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear.

      > In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.

      Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.