By the popularity of the software; by how pleased people are to use and contribute to it; by the impact it has on its product category and the industry at large; and many other qualities that are unquantifiable, as you say, and maybe even subjective, but are certainly not imaginary. This is because it's related to people's feelings, rather than any legalese text or technically the code itself.
The software doesn't necessarily have to be libre to have these qualities. Sometimes it may have few or many of them. But one aspect is crucial for these to develop: a community of passionate users needs to exist around the software. Such a community has no chance of being established if the author adopts the literal license-only approach you're vouching for, and treats the user base as ungrateful leeches. At best, it may lead to forks where people who do care about this community aspect will allow it to flourish. And such projects usually are the ones people actually gravitate towards.
> What are some examples of these utopian open source projects where there's a lack of constant drama, infighting, maintainer burnout, and sacrifices to functionality due to financial considerations?
I never said that software communities are free from drama and other issues. Any group of people will have problems, as human relations are messy. But by and large, it is these communities that make the software successful for everyone. Nobody wants to contribute to a project for the benefit of only its original author or themselves. They do it because they want to improve the project for all of its users, not just a select few. This communal aspect is the "spirit of open source", which folks who invented these terms we throw around today deeply care about. The fact that it's been perversed by corporations and ignored by people like you is one of the tragedies of the modern software industry.
Anyway, I'm sure you can think of some examples yourself. You probably use and enjoy such software. Off the top of my head, I can think of: Python, Django, Debian, Arch Linux, Void Linux, cURL, most Grafana projects, etc. On the proprietary side of things, there's Obsidian, Sublime Text, Factorio, and many others.
Again, these are not "utopian" projects. Those don't exist. But they have a vibrant community that is core to what they are.
On the flipside, I challenge you to name a "successful" software project by the criteria I've outlined above, which doesn't have a vibrant community around it, and whose authors reject or ignore the user base. I can think of two categories of such software: languishes in obscurity driven by the will of its authors until it is eventually abandoned, or thrives by taking freedoms away from users and is driven by large corporations.
> By the popularity of the software; by how pleased people are to use and contribute to it; by [...]
None of these attributes allow you to accurately infer the original authors' motivations for selecting a license, nor whether they've made their selection as an overt act of intentionally opting in to an "unwritten social contract".
Furthermore, your examples (cherry-picking some of the largest open source projects) are driven by survivorship bias. There are plenty of projects that have been equally good at community-building but eventually fell into obsolescence anyway for other reasons.
> "spirit of open source" [...] perversed by corporations and ignored by people like you is one of the tragedies of the modern software industry.
"Perversed by corporations"? Literally the entire origin story of the OSI's efforts around "open source" was to make a more corporate-friendly alternative to Free Software.
> Such a community has no chance of being established if the author adopts the literal license-only approach you're vouching for, and treats the user base as ungrateful leeches.
I am not even remotely "vouching" for a "literal license-only approach" which "treats the user base as ungrateful leeches".
My comments have simply focused on refuting the existence of the "unwritten social contract" in the software industry as a whole, the lack of any intangible parameters for open source beyond the OSI's definition (a situation which came about as a direct result of OSI's actions for decades), and the lack of any strict requirements of community involvement for software to be "open source".
My overall point here is that community norms vary per project, based on the preferences of the project creators/maintainers/admins; and that is wholly separate from the notion of whether or not a project is "open source".
At no point have I expressed any personal preference for different maintainership/community approaches, nor vouched for mistreating users. I've even directly clarified that the "entitlement" complaints pertain to a specific small subset of users. Yet you continue to make broad aspersions about my supposed views. I see no point in replying further under these circumstances, as you keep replying to concepts that bear no resemblance to what I've actually said.
By the popularity of the software; by how pleased people are to use and contribute to it; by the impact it has on its product category and the industry at large; and many other qualities that are unquantifiable, as you say, and maybe even subjective, but are certainly not imaginary. This is because it's related to people's feelings, rather than any legalese text or technically the code itself.
The software doesn't necessarily have to be libre to have these qualities. Sometimes it may have few or many of them. But one aspect is crucial for these to develop: a community of passionate users needs to exist around the software. Such a community has no chance of being established if the author adopts the literal license-only approach you're vouching for, and treats the user base as ungrateful leeches. At best, it may lead to forks where people who do care about this community aspect will allow it to flourish. And such projects usually are the ones people actually gravitate towards.
> What are some examples of these utopian open source projects where there's a lack of constant drama, infighting, maintainer burnout, and sacrifices to functionality due to financial considerations?
I never said that software communities are free from drama and other issues. Any group of people will have problems, as human relations are messy. But by and large, it is these communities that make the software successful for everyone. Nobody wants to contribute to a project for the benefit of only its original author or themselves. They do it because they want to improve the project for all of its users, not just a select few. This communal aspect is the "spirit of open source", which folks who invented these terms we throw around today deeply care about. The fact that it's been perversed by corporations and ignored by people like you is one of the tragedies of the modern software industry.
Anyway, I'm sure you can think of some examples yourself. You probably use and enjoy such software. Off the top of my head, I can think of: Python, Django, Debian, Arch Linux, Void Linux, cURL, most Grafana projects, etc. On the proprietary side of things, there's Obsidian, Sublime Text, Factorio, and many others.
Again, these are not "utopian" projects. Those don't exist. But they have a vibrant community that is core to what they are.
On the flipside, I challenge you to name a "successful" software project by the criteria I've outlined above, which doesn't have a vibrant community around it, and whose authors reject or ignore the user base. I can think of two categories of such software: languishes in obscurity driven by the will of its authors until it is eventually abandoned, or thrives by taking freedoms away from users and is driven by large corporations.