Unless they know it came from you and where to get it (which will not be advertised), they are. Also, after you die and your source code is gone, the derivative work could still go on to whatever success and none of the users of your code will have access to it except for that developer of the derivative work.

And almost all licenses require attribution.

>Also, after you die and your source code is gone, the derivative work could still go on to whatever success and none of the users of your code will have access to it except for that developer of the derivative work.

This makes no sense. The source code of what I did will still be around, and still be attributed. Dying doesn't make my work disappear into the ether.

Yes it does, unless someone keeps it online or somehow available. But again, just because it technically exists somewhere doesn't mean a user of the derived work will know how to find it, nor what parts that work are actually covered by your code prior to finding it. You are starting to sound like someone deliberately not getting the point of this.

I see a valid need for "permissive" licenses, but the legitimate reasons are rarely cited by proponents of the licenses.

This sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Can you cite an example of abandonware that completely disappeared from the public internet but continued to be used by some user-facing product? It seems to me that if development stagnates on a project entirely, its almost a certainty that the project is unused, or has been forked (and potentially new changes have been placed under another license).

>nor what parts that work are actually covered by your code prior to finding it

So, the open source license should really only be relevant to highly technical users (that is, my parents will never care about the license software is under). I'd hope those users are capable of discerning what the OSS licensed software does.

Of course. The MIT license is the legal equivalent of putting shit out on your lawn with a big 'FREE' sign. There's no need to protect that. The GPL requires you to pay the developers in contributions, which requires enforcement.

No it does not. The GPL is a downstream license. It requires you pass on the freedoms if you share with others. It does not have any requirement that anything be upstreamed back to the place you got the software from.

The cynic is me says the answer is that the people interested in MIT licensing are not very interested in sharing their work with others in an organization.

Don't get me wrong, there are instances where MIT or BSD licenses make sense. Desktop software is not one of them.

What does this mean?