The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.

And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.

It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.

But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.

A regular user who just downloads a build and runs it on their system (i.e. the most common use case, because it's the one that takes the least effort) also doesn't share anything. Why is it worse if a company does the exact same thing?

Are you purposefully playing dumb or what? If you don't see how the answer is obvious, I'm afraid nothing I say is going to make you change your mind.

Okay, thank you for confirming you have no answer.

Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.

Then why is there not a file outlining the ethical expectations, alongside the legal agreement? The companies using the products have no way of reading the developers' minds regarding expectations of reciprocity.

The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects today have non-legal outlines of expectations of community members. For a single example, codes of conduct are very common.

I don’t think this is a discussion about what the project owners specifically expect ethically (users would be free to disagree), but about what we collectively find to be ethical or unethical in this space. If there is disagreement about the ethicality, then one party having it written down doesn’t change anything about the disagreement. And there is nothing that binds one party to submit to the other party’s notion of ethicality, unless you turn it into a legal matter by making it part of the license.

Again, this thread is about whether we as a society, or as the software development community at large, consider the behavior ethical or not. It is not about the specific open source developer imposing specific rules.