[frabert]

Honestly, this point is kind of nonsense to me. If people acted as if they were held to the higher standard, we would not need licenses. People (especially when they're not acting alone, e.g. corporations) act in their monetary interest, most of the time. Hence, stick to the license that's least restrictive that still ticks all the boxes you feel are important. If you feel attribution is important, choose a license that makes it legally binding.

[wpietri]

There's plenty of sense to it.

Every contract, every law states what we see as the bare minimum required not to be actively harmful. They're society's skeleton. But bodies are more than bone, and societies are more than people doing the bare legal minimum.

Look at what the law requires of parents, for example. Food, shelter, clothing, school attendance, a lack of physical abuse. But parents who do the legal minimum and no more are awful parents, and awful people. But more laws wouldn't help. What kind of law could guarantee love? What kind of police could enforce it?

Community spirit is not something that can be expressed in a contract. Acting like people should have foreseen a particular asshole and tried to defend against them contractually is victim-blaming. The actual solution is for assholes to hear from the community that the behavior isn't welcome.

[frabert]

I'd call this wishful thinking and something that's been proven time and time again to be not working as well as it should, in practice.

[wpietri]

It's not perfect, but it works very well. None of my contributions to open source projects happened because they were required by license. On my own projects I've had people give generously of their time and expertise out of community spirit. Are some people jerks anyhow? Sure. But a different license wouldn't have changed that.

[Gehinnn]

I think it worked with Microsoft. They have a much better image now with regards to open source.

[josalhor]

If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude. If I got that idea from examining the competition, that would be seen as a smart move.

Sure, if attribution is a requirement then the natural thing to do is to turn it into a legal requirement. But I don't think that is the discussion here.

It comes down to how we want to treat open source. In order to encourage open source, I believe giving credit, even if not required, is courteous. Corporations are not monolithic entities that are perfectly defined. People work on these corporations.

[geodel]

> If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude.

It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social media berating you for stealing other people's ideas. If just office ideas were this important may be they need to be submitted with process of academic journals with proper attribution.

It can't be both ways: "Announcing that take my idea / software and run with it" And if someone does, telling them "you are first rate moocher, aren't ya?"

[Aeolun]

> It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social media berating you for stealing other people's ideas

Would it? I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.

The message is not ‘stealing other people’s ideas’, it’s ‘stealing other people’s ideas without acknowledgement’.

[geodel]

> stealing other people’s ideas without acknowledgement’

Huh, I never heard of 'stealing with acknowledgement'. That'd be plain usage.

> I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.

I'd think that co-worker would be subject of constant derision where people would run every trivial thing by them asking if they had thought it originally.

Edit: To be clear I support directly confronting folks taking ideas often without attribution or taking to higher ups if that is so important. But social shaming means the person better be prepared to live up to much higher public standards than it would be for some interpersonal issue.

[rbanffy]

Corporations the size of Amazon are imune to shame. If it's not a hard requirement, they'll only comply if it's not against their self interest to do so.

[lioeters]

I agree this is about the culture of software and open source in particular.

Reducing the issue to the bare minimal legal requirement is stooping low, that we cannot expect corporations to behave ethically, with common decency and respect, unless forced to do so by law. Sure, that's the real world, but we should demand better of the people who run and work in these corporations.

[toyg]

> that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude.

In a few places I worked at, this was just par for the course. It's all in the (corporate) game.

As much as decent, polite, and courteous people do exist (and I try to be one of them), it's a fact of life that assholes exist, and they often prosper on the back of such decent people.

[young_unixer]

> If you feel attribution is important, choose a license that makes it legally binding.

Some of us think copyright is unfair and we want to use it as little as possible. That means using MIT or BSD licenses.

That doesn't mean we are against attribution. We are only against the use of coercion to get attribution.

We can say "It would be nice if you give attribution" without saying "I'm going to use my legal rights to coerce you into giving me attribution"

[kevincox]

That seems like a very hard line to me. Copyright gives fairly comprehensive control over use, however trying to draw a line somewhere down full-control, attribution or no control seems very hard.

As it is today you can use your full control to allow full use with attribution. Of course the "unfairness" probably comes from the fact that you can't force others to do the same.

In my opinion the best option is to keep copyright at "full control" with a time limit. Probably 10-20 years. However that doesn't solve your desire for only attribution.

[tengbretson]

> If people acted as if they were held to the higher standard, we would not need licenses.

In the same way that we must continue to steer our car even in the presence of guard rails, we must continue to act morally in the presence of rules.

[unethical_ban]

Essentially, you don't believe there is any gray area for something to be legal and yet a dick move.