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> 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?



What I'm saying is that you're merely taking for granted that society will not compensate free software so that it will have to be done by volunteers.

Yet the question under consideration is exactly whether this state of affairs is acceptable or not.




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