You were at least consistent up until this point, but this phrasing runs directly counter to the rest of your thesis. It's not stealing to use software that you put out as FOSS to be used by anyone for any purpose. If you didn't intend to do that, that's on you to have picked a license that reflected your intentions and to accept the consequences of that choice (mostly likely less interest in using it from everyone, not just megacorps).
There's no moral imperative to respect terms of use that existed only in the head of the developer—on the contrary, it's an immoral bait-and-switch to release your code as FOSS and then throw a fit when someone uses it to make money.
MIT explicitly gives the right to sublicense. That means you give certain rights to Alice, who gives fewer rights to Bob. Bob isn't allowed to give away copies of the software Alice gives her, because Alice, being a smart businesswoman, made sure Bob's license agreement is a proprietary one. She's not violating MIT, because she put your name and a copy of the MIT license in notices.txt, but the license doesn't actually apply to the software.
I think when you take something from the public domain and make it proprietary, that is close enough to stealing that it's appropriate to use the word colloquially.
Only if what you took from the public domain is actually taken—as in, no longer available to the public. The scarcity model that we use for the literal commons (the shared fields in a village) doesn't apply when we're talking about bits.
I think TFA is onto something by pointing out that there are very real ways that some of the recent use of the commons falls into the realm of abuse that harms the commons. But most of the kinds of usage that has people giving up on FOSS doesn't actually fall into that category.
You are entirely right about my word choice, good point! (it's a bit ironic in retrospect)
However, let's not pretend that choosing a licence is a fully informed decision free of any kind of pressure. If you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs (as you said, less interest from other developers for example)
The problem is two-sided: both those companies exploiting the FOSS landscape and the participants in the FOSS landscape more concerning themselves with uploading the status quo than to try to do something about the problem.
P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly consist of exactly those corporations themselves. The FSF are much better but the FSF's philosophy was mostly informed by RMS not being able to fix his printer in the 80's.... times change, y'know? A philosophy/worldview which worked for the 80s and the 90s might not be appropriate for the 2020s.
> If you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs (as you said, less interest from other developers for example)
Yes. People make a decision to choose from the FOSS licenses because being seen as FOSS is valuable to them. That comes with tradeoffs, and it's unethical to expect to receive the benefits but not the drawbacks of your chosen license.
> P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly consist of exactly those corporations themselves.
I know. I find the bellyaching about the "spirit of Open Source" to be pretty ironic given that Open Source exists to "dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape" [0].
> those companies exploiting the FOSS landscape
Exploiting how? What harm does $MEGACORP using a FOSS project do to the FOSS project? Does it hurt that it gives them more credibility? For there to be exploitation there has to be a quantifiable harm to the exploited victim—it has to be win-lose, not win-neutral or win-win. So where's the loss to the FOSS maintainers as victims?
You were at least consistent up until this point, but this phrasing runs directly counter to the rest of your thesis. It's not stealing to use software that you put out as FOSS to be used by anyone for any purpose. If you didn't intend to do that, that's on you to have picked a license that reflected your intentions and to accept the consequences of that choice (mostly likely less interest in using it from everyone, not just megacorps).
There's no moral imperative to respect terms of use that existed only in the head of the developer—on the contrary, it's an immoral bait-and-switch to release your code as FOSS and then throw a fit when someone uses it to make money.