I’m an observer with no horse in this race, but from my armchair I think this argument in a vacuum sits very weird with me.
It’s strange that you can, in the first section, decry the situation of a company opting out of something that is optional on the basis of it being part of an unspoken social contract, and then later in the same article defend your own side’s decision to opt out of their part of an unspoken social contract because it is optional.
I also can’t help but keep going back to - if the founders view is that enterprise users, hosting companies, every business who’s name starts with R, or some other selection of users needs to contribute some resources to the project, why doesn’t the license say that? The argument being made takes for granted that the social contract here is common sense, but that’s not true. This is exactly why licenses exist - to clearly define these lines and avoid ambiguity.
If it’s not in the license, the presumption (legal _and_ ethical) is that it’s intended to be optional. If a company is trying to compel behavior, does that line up with it being optional?
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I’m an observer with no horse in this race, but from my armchair I think this argument in a vacuum sits very weird with me.
It’s strange that you can, in the first section, decry the situation of a company opting out of something that is optional on the basis of it being part of an unspoken social contract, and then later in the same article defend your own side’s decision to opt out of their part of an unspoken social contract because it is optional.
I also can’t help but keep going back to - if the founders view is that enterprise users, hosting companies, every business who’s name starts with R, or some other selection of users needs to contribute some resources to the project, why doesn’t the license say that? The argument being made takes for granted that the social contract here is common sense, but that’s not true. This is exactly why licenses exist - to clearly define these lines and avoid ambiguity.
If it’s not in the license, the presumption (legal _and_ ethical) is that it’s intended to be optional. If a company is trying to compel behavior, does that line up with it being optional?