Why is it stealing? And how does "blame" enter the picture at all? Developers went into it with their eyes open. That's not shaming or blaming them, there simply is no "blame" to be had. They made something and decided to give it away with few/no strings attached. There's decades of precedent for such projects being used to great financial profit by millions of people, so I don't find it plausible that most developers aren't fully aware of what they're doing. In fact I'd argue many want exactly this to happen. To develop something that proves incredibly useful and gets adopted by many users.
If someone did inadvertently choose a more permissive license than intended, I'm not sure what to say. "Blaming" them has too negative a connotation, but there is some responsibility on their part for the mistake, though I can sympathize with them given that licensing choice can be complex.
There's a catch 22 with choosing a restrictive license though. On the one hand it may help you monetize a product if it becomes popular, but on the other hand it becomes a lot harder to gain users and achieve that level of popularity.
However I acknowledge that the open source ecosystem and incentives have deep seated problems on this. The rise of networked society is in many ways built on such work, so there is a public good achieved that might never have been possible otherwise. On the other hand, maintaining a project can be thankless and exhausting. There's been plenty of discussions on how to help this situation, with no clear answer that I'm aware of. I certainly don't have one.
If someone did inadvertently choose a more permissive license than intended, I'm not sure what to say. "Blaming" them has too negative a connotation, but there is some responsibility on their part for the mistake, though I can sympathize with them given that licensing choice can be complex.
There's a catch 22 with choosing a restrictive license though. On the one hand it may help you monetize a product if it becomes popular, but on the other hand it becomes a lot harder to gain users and achieve that level of popularity.
However I acknowledge that the open source ecosystem and incentives have deep seated problems on this. The rise of networked society is in many ways built on such work, so there is a public good achieved that might never have been possible otherwise. On the other hand, maintaining a project can be thankless and exhausting. There's been plenty of discussions on how to help this situation, with no clear answer that I'm aware of. I certainly don't have one.