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evanelias 4 hours ago

> Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge.

The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not "invite" it; they are totally neutral on that point. Upstream FOSS authors can reject all third-party contributions, and their software is still unarguably FOSS.

> When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users

You're mischaracterizing the situation. It's usually about a specific small vocal subset of users, who are literally demanding things in a rude and arrogant manner.

> Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not.

"Unwritten social contracts" effectively only exist in cases where an overwhelming majority of people believe in the same set of social norms. That absolutely is not the case in the software industry. There's no broad agreement about what that social contract entails, or if it even exists, and therefore it de facto does not exist for the industry as a whole.

Individual projects can choose their own social norms, but that doesn't inherently extend those norms to the entire industry.

1718627440 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not "invite" it;

The whole motivation to write such "permitting" licenses is to invite that.

evanelias 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The purpose of any software license is to permit you to do things that, in the absence of a license, would otherwise violate the authors' copyright. This is unrelated to whether or not the author chooses to accept contributions. No FOSS license requires the copyright holder to accept third-party contributions upstream, nor do they directly discuss this topic at all.

Licenses are not invitations to collaborate. That simply isn't their purpose. This is why CONTRIBUTING.md is a completely separate document.

Most of the popular "OSI-approved" licenses predate the OSI's existence, so there's no plausible argument that adopters of these licenses are opting-in to a collaborative social movement with an "unwritten social contract" en masse.

For example, the original motivation for the MIT license was simply avoiding legal overhead for software that wasn't expected to have much financial value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#History

purple_turtle an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you sure? For all of them?