this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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I'm just a bystander here, but I would recommend to take this very seriously. The free-software-writing community already gets a certain amount of license abuse from the corporate side (RHEL being a recent example). If we are being lax about license violations internally, that puts us in a much weaker position in the face of whatever is inevitably coming in the future.
E.g., maybe Meta grabs the MIT-licensed app, adds additional technology to it that makes life difficult for the existing Fediverse community, and deploys it, refuses to share their changes. They could do that anyway, and we might have to figure out how to respond to it, but it puts us on a lot firmer ground legally and PR-wise if we've been on point about our internal licensing up until that point vs. if no one's really been bothered about license violations in the past.
It doesn't mean that someone from the community who's just trying to contribute something good and doesn't share that viewpoint suddenly needs to become "the enemy." We can just have an open discussion about the technical details of licensing and why they're important. But I wouldn't take it lightly.