Open Source was made by someone. With copyleft they decided: You can use my code, you can modify my code but if you build on my work you will also open source that.
Open Source is not necessarily a business decision but often a personal one. Often authors start without any pay but instead because they thought it was a nice thing they want to share. So it's their right to say what people can or can't do with their original work.
Companies have the ability to write their own software if they don't want to follow these rules.
> People have a strong instinct for reciprocity and it is strongest when it is entirely their choice.
My experience disagree with that statement. The places where I find the strongest form of reciprocity is when social norms heavily emphasize reciprocity and punish defectors, which is typical in environments where peoples survivability depend on social norms and reciprocity.
A typical example is rural community vs a city. In a rural community there is existing and historical dependency on reciprocity to handle accidents (a barn burning down, a poor harvest, a bad hunt/fishing season, and so on). Defectors from the social norms can be punished for several generations ("I remember that your grandfather did not help my grandfather"), which makes defecting rare and expensive. The stereotypical example from large cities is that a person can bleed out on the street and people will continue to walk past, pretending to not see.
Naturally neither is an utopia and both has their own problem, but saying that the strongest form of reciprocity is found in places with no social norms, social expectations or enforcement seems to be plainly wrong from my experience.
> The places where I find the strongest form of reciprocity is when social norms heavily emphasize reciprocity and punish defectors
I think it is important to make a distinction between chosen reciprocity and expected reciprocity. Both are valid but come from different circumstances and motivation.
If you are an open source proponent, how did you become one? For me, it was growing up at a time when the vast majority of software that I needed was not free. Then the open source movement took hold and brought a wide choice of high quality free software in virtually every category. This was software you can trust more, learn from, and build upon because the source was available. And the developers have little or no expectation, it was free even though it could easily compete with proprietary options. This made a big impact on me and helped me recognize the value of open source.
Survival is not a relevant concern when it comes to open source. I'd wager that most people who advocate for it were impacted by a similar experience. Expected and transactional reciprocity is something that people are more likely to see as a burden. If you want to spread an idea, it's not a very effective approach. People generally recognize and appreciate a meaningful sacrifice for a good cause. Attaching strings makes the sacrifice confusing. In a pay it forward kind of system, chosen reciprocity sends a much clearer message. And that may not always be the intent, but it is effective either way.
Some people, maybe even the majority of people, may choose to use it without giving back. That is also a part of human instinct. As someone else mentioned, corporations that care only about profit will take advantage of the opportunity. But the beauty of software is that it can be copied at virtually no cost. You can write software for the positive impact and let the others do what they will do.
The distinction between chosen reciprocity and expected reciprocity is indeed one aspect of the concept, and they do indeed have generally different circumstances and motivation. I would add that chosen reciprocity has additional context here that also play a major role. Let make an example here.
Let say you are helping, for free, young adults/children to learn programming. You sacrifice time and energy for a good cause, and generally make the world a better place. No string attached, and no expectation for payment by those you help, a clear example of giving something away with no conditions or string attached.
Let now say that a for-profit tutoring company notice this and start to send their students to you. Instead of paying expensive teachers, they will use you as free labor and still demand payment from the parents. Does this change the context for your teaching? The parents, not knowing that you do this on your spare time for no pay, starts giving demands and expect you to behave as a paid employee, and do not recognize the sacrifice. Does it now mean something has changed, or are you still doing the exact same teaching to children as before?
I have seen multiple times when developers that release software under permissive licenses getting upset and stop developing when a for-profit company takes advantage of the fact that the license was permissive, breaking a social norm that has been created around the project. The permissive licenses only worked for those developers if everyone followed the social norm of reciprocity. How should such motivation be interpreted?
That presumes consumers have a choice to make in maintaining that freedom.
For a concrete example look at OpenWRT, there were not many good choices before copyleft forced the linksys release. Now they have exploded and there is an entire ecosystem of open software and modifications on routers.
Copyleft is about freedom of consumers to make whatever choice fits their target, unlike permissive licensing, which is about freedom of corporations to take away freedom of consumers.
Surprisingly, there are use-cases for closed source other than the of greed of corporations. A server is one of those use-cases. I love to see open source servers and have worked on them myself but there are obvious reasons why that is not always feasible.
Greed is a loaded word, there are economic realities of paying developers to create the open source software. Could you elaborate on the non-economic use cases you are thinking of?
That was my point too. There are valid reasons to go with closed source, open source may not be a viable option for a variety of concerns, including economic realities. The person I was replying to raised the issue of corporations that take and do not give back (which definitely exist) and I was responding to it.
Yes, we don't have a great business model for this yet. We see the problems caused by things like Elastic Search either locking away important features or getting killed by well funded incumbents like Amazon.
My response was asking more, when you said "use cases" if there were non-economic ones you had in mind.
Years ago I got it in my head that we needed an open source copy left license that allowed for automatic licensing/royalty schemes in commercial use where the money would flow down to the project. This would give end users complete control over the software and modifications to the software, while distribution and money generated would be shared up the supply chain.
I still would like to see something like that but have no idea how to frame it.
My experience has made me consider closed source for three general reasons: backends where the security implications of open source would be a problem, software that has a high potential to be misused, and economic realities.
I've always tried to find another solution besides closed source because it takes away a big part of what makes me want to work on a project. But I recognize that it's not always going to be the best choice.
That sounds like a worthwhile reason for something like copyleft, since funding can be a problem. I have seen a lot of companies basically implement it by providing both kinds of licensing.
The free-software answer to something like Amazon/ElasticSearch is a license that forces Amazon to pass on all their freedoms to their customers, which is something that Amazon doesn't want to do. That license isn't necessarily AGPL or SSPL as those have their problems.
