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Comment by firtoz | Hacker News Reader

If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting

Just because it’s legal and allowed doesn’t mean it’s not off putting.

Personally, I have no issue with them making their own internal fork, but then blogging about their thing without contributing it back leaves a little bad taste. If it’s so good, then contribute it back, since they benefited from the volunteers.

You can't have it both ways. As a library author choose MIT to encourage commercial usage because companies are afraid of GPL, but then complain that companies are actually using it in a MIT license way without contributing back.

License it GPL, and it will be fed to a model as training data to recreate it copyright free anyways.

Training falls outside of copyright concerns because of fair use, so proprietary or free is orthogonal. This is how the world is currently trending.

I can find it off putting regardless. Especially since I’m not the person who released it under MIT license.

Law, spirit of the law, common decency. Rare currency these days, I know...

You don’t have to agree that it’s off-putting, but if you’re “struggling to understand why” that demonstrates a serious lack of empathy and awareness of social dynamics.

> If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting

What? Who cares about the license agreement? Lawyers and bureaucrats maybe. The real issue with _any_ software project is whether it is meant to be a step toward a more livable and peaceful world or not. Sure, some people make guided missile software to murder people for profit, but that's just obviously antisocial behavior, regardless of how well it complies with license agreements.

If you put up a sign on your house saying "businesses, feel free to come use my driveway for whatever you want" and McDonald's sets up a restaurant there then you won't have much sympathy from me.

Well sure, maybe in this case the driveway owner hasn't been slighted, as they consented to the use, but that doesn't mean that suddenly some other person critiquing Mickey D's for factory farming and using prison-slave labor to make uniforms is misguided. You can't just say, "Well, I'm struggling to see why it's off-putting for McDonald's to use that driveway for their slavery-poison-food operation".

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