| Likewise, I don't understand your position. Just because something is legal doesn't mean we're not allowed to complain. Besides the legal contract, the social contract can be just as important. For example, my country has freedom of speech and assembly and so forth, and it's easy to see cases where someone exercises their legal rights in ways that are supremely annoying to others, and not in any way productive for society. When we see people abusing the system, we speak out about it. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. What's the alternative? Disallow freedom of speech? Sometimes we might feel tempted, but it turns out that that has all kinds of terrible problems. As they say: this is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. There are many cases where doing the minimum that the law allows is fine and accepted. (Most people don't intentionally overpay their income tax.) There are other cases where doing something that's merely not technically illegal is frowned upon by social convention. What we're seeing is the corporate world (legal minimum) and the individual world (social contract) colliding. Who wins? So far, the corporations are. It's easy to say "You should have picked a different license, then!" after the fact, but maybe there isn't a license which would have worked better. Maybe this is the best of several bad options. (Maybe using a more restrictive license would have caused the company to ignore the software entirely and write their own completely proprietary alternative, for example.) Maybe using the internet soapbox to plead for leadership is actually the optimal strategy. The GNU GPL was an amazingly clever hack to use the legal system to assist enforcing a social contract, but I don't think we can expect to find solutions like that in every case. |