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Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

> They could have picked a different license, but didn’t.

I disagree.

Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts — claiming that to restrict in any way the liberty of another person to exploit one’s work is unethical. Human beings are social creatures, and most human beings are not asocial with decoupled ethical systems like myself; so, given the social pressures in play, few human beings truly have the liberty to pick another license and endure the shame and vitriol that exercising that freedom earns from us.

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I don't think its fully correct that social pressure means that permissive licenses are no longer meaningful when it comes to the ethics or sociology of open source software.

Since the original subject is also about swapping out the imagery, it's also difficult to take your argument too seriously as the term "exploit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your argument.

I will also add that the social and ethical component goes both ways: is it ethical to knowingly give something away freely and without restriction and then immediately attempt to impose restrictions through a purely social mechanism? I would say so as long as your expectation is that some might politely decline.

Or worse, some may respond with the same vitriol and then we're at your original point, which doesn't seem to be preventing such an approach here, making me doubt your hypothesis.

> Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts

I'd have to disagree. However let's just run with it because your subsequent reasoning doesn't seem consistent to me.

If you do A you'll be met with hostility. So instead you do B, but then you add a request "actually please abide by A" and somehow this is supposed to not be met with hostility? You can't have it both ways. B but with an addendum that makes it A is just A wearing a mask. Changing the name doesn't change the thing.

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