> This implies some kind of fairness/moral contract in a license like MIT.

The license tells you what you are legally allowed to do. It doesn’t supersede basic concepts of fairness.

The average person would say that if you directly make millions of someone else’s work, the fair thing to do is to pay that person back in some way.

Calling someone a leech is just saying that they aren’t following the the accusers model of fairness. That’s all. There’s no legal definition.

We say things like “my company screwed me over when they fired me right before my RSUs vested” despite that being perfectly legal.

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ricardobeat 3 days ago | parent [-]

> someone else’s work

It is not “their” work anymore (IP rights discussions aside) once they published with an unrestricted license. That’s the point. You do it expecting nothing in return, and do it willingly. Expecting “fairness” is a misunderstanding of the whole spirit of it.

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brookst 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Semantic games with “their work”. An artist who sells a painting can still call it their work, even if someone else owns it. And I suppose the collector who bought it could also call it their work, though that phrasing isn’t usually used.

It comes about because “work” is overloaded to mean both the activity of creating and the product/result of that activity.

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sarchertech 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>expecting nothing in return

Let’s ignore that no one contributes to open source expecting nothing in return.

I can help someone out expecting nothing in return. Then if my situation changes and I need help, but they look at me and say “sorry your help was a gift so I’m not going to return the favor even though I can”. That person is a dick.

The problem is you are taking the act of applying a permissive license as some kind of ceremony that severs open source software from all normal human ideas of fairness. You may view it that way. Most people don’t.

It’s perfectly reasonable to put something out in the world for other people to enjoy and use. And yet still think that if someone makes a billion dollars of it and doesn’t return anything they are displaying bad manners.

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Chris2048 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I can help someone out expecting nothing in return. Then if my situation changes

It sounds like you did expect something in return, conditional on your circumstances. Maybe it's good-will or something, but some kind of social insurance in any case.

	▲	sarchertech 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is partly getting into questions about whether “pure” altruism is even possible, e.g., is an anonymous donation truly selfless if you do it because it makes you feel good. But in the example above it’s entirely possible that you helped someone out with no expectation of being paid back. Let’s say you’re rich and the person you helped is a chronic drug addict. You have no expectation of every needing help and no expectation that the person you helped will ever be in a position to help you. Let’s say I give a homeless person a dollar. He turns around and uses that dollar to buy a lottery ticket and wins 100 million dollars. Years later, I’m homeless and the former homeless guy walks past me and gives me a lecture about how I should have put conditions on my donation. In that situation there was no reasonable expectation for anything except as you said maybe good will. But of course open source developers also expect good will.