I don't think laws are the same as ethics, but I do think that laws and especially changes to the law are a means to an end.
> This is not too dissimilar from the common refrain of, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I support you're right to say it." It's an explicit acknowledgment that there's a difference between what's legal and what's ethical/preferential/whatever.
I don't think it is. People who say that think that everyone saying what they think is ethical/preferential/whatever; they may disagree with that person's views, but they think a world where everyone says what they think is better than a world where people keep their disagreeable views quiet. Or they value having a spread of views rather than a monoculture. They'd prefer the person not have those particular views at all, sure, but the thing they want to legalise is the thing that they want to happen, when viewed at the right level of abstraction.
If you want to encourage people doing what they like with code they found rather than worrying about what the author permits them to do, then fair enough, but I don't think using an obscure license is an effective means to that end. (I've heard some people advocate "license anarchy" - deliberately not putting any license on code they publish, so that it's most easily used by people who don't worry about licensing - of course, this prevents the kind of corporate use you're also wanting to encourage). People who are actually going to check which specific license you're using are already a minority. People who are going to check the minutiae of your reasoning and not just assume that you mean the same thing by using the UNLICENSE that most people using the UNLICENSE mean are a fraction of a fraction. And if the upshot of all that is that you just want them to act the same way they would if your code was under the MIT license, then all you're going to do is piss them off.
I mean, I've put more time and effort into understanding this than the vast majority of users will, and I still have very little idea what you actually, concretely want people who find your code to do. Use it only in free programs? Use it in proprietary programs with attribution? Use it in proprietary programs without attribution? A philosophical position is all well and good, but people looking at a license are mostly trying to find out what they concretely should or shouldn't do.
I said as much in the opening of my post. I get into both philosophical and practical discussions on licensing online fairly frequently, and the same questions and arguments are recycled over and over. So I wrote them down primarily so that I can reference them.
As far as my beliefs, ideally, I want to see IP abolished. So what if it's quixotic? I have plenty of other quixotic beliefs. I'd like to see the war on drugs ended too. I don't see a problem with having these beliefs.
You might say it's a waste of time to have and act on these beliefs. I think it should be clear from my post that I at least partially agree with that, since I've continually acted as a pragmatist rather than as an idealist. But that doesn't mean I can't take some small steps toward the ideal while I'm at it.
Sometimes shifting the Overton window just a little bit is a big victory.
> (As a legal realist, I think we should evaluate law like any other human activity; licenses that lead to outcomes that we want are good, licenses that lead to outcomes that we don't want are bad).
I don't really share that view when it comes to law, so we probably have some really fundamental disagreement somewhere. But, I do think elements of legal realism are important. They just aren't what form the bedrock of my beliefs.
> I, at least, assume that when someone uses a license that grants me permission to do something (such as falsely claim authorship of their code), they approve of me doing that thing, because that's what people granting permission in a license normally mean by that grant of permission.
To me, that implies you conflate laws with ethics. Again, probably due to some fundamental disagreement on the nature of law (or ethics).
This is not too dissimilar from the common refrain of, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I support you're right to say it." It's an explicit acknowledgment that there's a difference between what's legal and what's ethical/preferential/whatever.