[moksha256]

You're not wrong. But the door-holding example isn't really a good one because there's no such thing as a license for door-holding.

For FOSS, on the other hand, licenses are a well-established thing. And developers have free reign to pick a license for their code and they very commonly pick MIT...totally on their own volition. Which strips them of all privileges. It's like writing a book and explicitly setting it into the public domain. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but very commonly I don't think it's what developers actually want to do.

In the world of copyright, the long-standing legal default is for the author to own their work for a certain amount of time, whether or not the copyright is explicitly claimed. Because making public domain the legal default would be utterly insane.

I guess what I'm saying here is my beef isn't with entities that choose to be jerks—that's annoying and always gonna happen to some extent—it's more with the all-too-common decision to use the MIT License. And when I see people complain about it...I understand the sentiment but I also can't help but think that the folks complaining had it coming and it was totally avoidable.

[brookst]

I knew door holding was weak, but I think the principle holds. To me, it is reasonable to release under MIT with expectation of helping lots of people, and also to expect (not require) some credit if a notable company adopts kit and kaboodle.

[azinman2]

Door holding falls under a social contract.