[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.