What does positive externalities have to do with it? The entire point of volunteer work is to do something with positive externalities where you don’t get paid.
If you’re asking why people choose an open source license when they expect to get paid instead, the answer is simple: they don’t understand open source.
This is no different than someone putting some literary work in the public domain and then getting mad when their work gets popular, criticized, all without pay.
I'm saying that you're _assuming_ that they are "volunteers" when that is precisely the question being asked.
Thus, "begging the question" -- begging means assuming. Begging us to take for granted an answer to the very question we are debating.
Probably there is a reason the phrase isn't found "in the wild"... people don't understand what it means.
> This is no different than someone putting some literary work in the public domain and then getting mad when their work gets popular, criticized, all without pay.
Federally-funded research is placed in the public domain. Emphasis on funded.
In the absence of funding, people may still perform. If they do, why wouldn't they be upset about the lack of funding?
(In fact, people can be, and are, upset about the lack of funding even if they don't perform. I am personally upset about the lack of funding for many works that are not my own.)
You seem to have a victim-blaming mentality. As if no complaint about the social environment or the treatment of the individual by society can be valid because "you should have known better." The mere fact that people can know about some aspect of society cannot ever justify that aspect of society.
And don't presume people didn't know. They probably knew. Either way, it doesn't invalidate the complaint which has to do with basic fairness considerations.
> I'm saying that you're _assuming_ that they are "volunteers" when that is precisely the question being asked.
It’s not being asked. The authors didn’t get confused and expect to be paid for their work. I don’t know of anyone in the open source community who expects payment for their work from the community. If you want to get paid by your users, open source is not for you. I say this as a long time open source contributor.
> Federally-funded research is placed in the public domain. Emphasis on funded.
Open source contributors get funded by corporations all of the time (see Red Hat, Canonical, Google, etc, etc). That’s not new or novel and is a well-known way to get paid to work on open source. That’s still not comparable to complaining that your users aren’t paying you.
> In the absence of funding, people may still perform. If they do, why wouldn't they be upset about the lack of funding?
Again, we’re not discussing lack of funding. Most of Linux contributions come from people who are paid by some party to work on Linux. The important point is that they aren’t trying to turn around and shakedown people who use it under the auspice of being open source.
> You seem to have a victim-blaming mentality.
No, a victim blaming mentality would imply I’m blaming the victim of something. Who is it you think is the victim here and what are they victim of?
> Either way, it doesn't invalidate the complaint which has to do with basic fairness considerations.
“Basic fairness considerations” is a weasel phrase. What exactly is it you think is unfair about people publishing open source work and it being used under that license?
