I think we need to distinguish using and abusing. IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

When corporations utilize the code and make a good faith effort to contribute back something, no matter how trivial, they are using the source.

Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right and I feel confident given the current state of the world saying that we should start expecting more from corporations. The idea “they only exist to make money” is how you break the social contract.

> a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

What I'm saying is that's the point of the license. That's why universities use the licenses (e.g. MIT, Berkeley) and why Apache uses it. They're designed to stimulate the private sector by moving IP from research into industry (universities) or by industries pooling resources to make software purchases cheaper (Apache).

I don't think it makes sense to describe using them in this way as abusive or bad faith.

> IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

I don't agree. Releasing under a permissive license is explicitly saying "dDo what you want with this, including using it commercially without giving back". And if you're saying that, you can't cry "abuse" when someone does exactly what you told them they could do. Because that's what you've done: the license terms explicitly say that.

"Legal" has nothing to do with it; if you want other people to have to contribute their changes publicly, you use a copyleft license. If you don't care, you use a permissive license, and then there's no such thing as "abuse", as long as people follow the letter of the license.