[derektank]

> Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.

Governments have presented us with a third option, intellectual property, which allows a creator to release their intellectual contributions publicly while preventing someone else from reproducing it. Violating the terms of an open source license are generally considered intellectual property violations and allow the creator to seek damages.

[carlosjobim]

Good luck with that. If you throw your wallet onto a busy street corner, then by the law nobody is allowed to take it either. But cops will tell you that they have more important things to take care of than victims who take every measurable action at hand to make themselves victims.

[derektank]

Thankfully, you don’t need cops to pursue a civil case.

I don’t know why you’re pretending as if this is some Herculean effort. This is pretty well tread territory at this point, see Jacobsen v. Katzer. Katzer was forced to settle for $100k in 2010 for violating the license on Jacobsen’s model train software that had been uploaded to SourceForge.

[bluefirebrand]

There are a lot of things that are immoral (or just rude) to do but not explicitly illegal

Personally I would prefer to live in a society filled with people who are better than thinking "well there's no law against it so it's 100% fine"

Edit: I also don't want to live in a society where every tiny piece of social decency must be encoded in laws to get people to actually be decent