Re: re: clearly OSS has a free loading problem
Thing is, a lot of folk's interpretations of various OSS licenses have little in common with what the licenses actually say.
For example, those banks and their use of OSS software, with no give back. The only valid expression of the software authors intentions is the license. If that license says "you can use that software for free", there is no other possible reading of it. And whilst many others may assume that the authors are looking for some sort of quid pro quo, some sort of give back, that's not actually what the license requests. It's not for third parties to say what the software authors meant to say instead of what they did actually say in the license they stuck on the front of their code.
One cannot be both obligated and free of obligation at the same time. And, the established reality of the Western world's capitalist democracies is that if a company is not obligated to do something, the shareholders are allowed to get properly grumpy if the company then does burn shareholder money on something they don't have to do. Arguably, releasing software for free into such an environment in the hope that major corporations will shower your project foundation with funds or code donations is somewhat naive. And where it gets very complex is that the companies "free loading" may well be part owned by the pension scheme the software author is a member of...
There are - amazingly - companies that'd rather pay for software (and get support) than use free software. The problem these days is that, in quite a few fields, there is no commercial option; it's OSS or nothing.
There are other business cultures. In Japan companies exist as much to be socially useful as to be profitable. This is why Japanese company execs are on TV bowing deeply in apology when the company screws up; it's a personal social issue for themselves (and the share price crash is a mere secondary consideration).