Because it's rude to make demands of someone who is doing you a favor.
Because a system that adds costs to profit-free work will collapse.
Because your "distribution" line-in-the-sand doesn't exist. I assume you're thinking of NPM or pypi, but ex. Debian doesn't ask people before including their packages, and ex. nixos pulls directly from those "non-distribution" channels.
> My point is that they don't legally owe anyone anything but we should impose a moral standard in lieu of a legal one. If you are saying "here's this code, I've packaged it up and sent it out for distribution" I think it should be perfectly fine for us to say "did you do the bare minimum to make this code acceptable for others to use?".
Okay; let's also make a moral standard of paying people when we derive value from their work. I think it should be perfectly fine for us to say "did you do the bare minimum to repay the person who gave you this code to use?".
> I don't get why we say "you have no ethical obligations in open source", why do we do that? Who benefits? I get not having legal obligations, but once you're distributing code for use it seems absurd to say that you have no ethical obligations.
We do that because we benefit. Making things easy for the people who are giving their work away for free helps foster an ecosystem where people keep giving stuff away for free.
> You chose to do that, you chose to distribute it, you didn't have to do that.
Yes, that's the point. We'd like people to keep giving things away even though they don't have to. If you try to impose costs on them for doing that, you'll alter the incentives so that they do the rational thing and stop giving stuff away, and/or start charging for it.