> 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.
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.