Hey, original author here.

The moral obligation is real, and I personally feel quite strongly about it and I know most of my coworkers feel the same. Morality is relevant because it's a human feeling. It's easy to forget that even big companies like Facebook make decisions by the hands of single individuals.

Facebook was built on the LAMP stack >10 years ago. Without open source, Facebook wouldn't exist and we all know that.

I personally find satisfaction in sharing as much of the stuff we build as possible as open source in the hopes that others will be able to build something great.

>so they do have a certain moral obligation to give back.

What moral obligation are you talking about? There's no moral obligation for anyone using open source software to give anything back. Are you aware of how software licenses work?

There's an interesting nuance in the phrase "a certain moral obligation." In my understanding, it's a fairly weak statement [1], somewhat akin to "People will think more highly of you if you do this thing, and less highly if you don't."

Contrast this with "they have a moral obligation." To me that is a much stronger statement: "People will think you are behaving in an immoral way if you do not do this thing."

It's funny how adding the word "certain" to the phrase actually makes it a less certain, gentler way of putting things - quite the opposite of the literal meaning of the word.

Put another way, I could imagine a law being passed to enforce "a moral obligation". But it seems much less likely to have a law enforcing something described as "a certain moral obligation."

[1] I mean "weak" in the sense of not being a strong claim of obligation, not "weak" in the sense that the phrase is a poor way to say something.

Right, I just meant in a "pay it forward" or "the decent thing to do" sense.

If you're referring to software license terms, you're making a legal, not a moral argument.