>Unless they know it came from you and where to get it (which will not be advertised), they are.
And almost all licenses require attribution.
>Also, after you die and your source code is gone, the derivative work could still go on to whatever success and none of the users of your code will have access to it except for that developer of the derivative work.
This makes no sense. The source code of what I did will still be around, and still be attributed. Dying doesn't make my work disappear into the ether.
>> This makes no sense. The source code of what I did will still be around, and still be attributed. Dying doesn't make my work disappear into the ether.
Yes it does, unless someone keeps it online or somehow available. But again, just because it technically exists somewhere doesn't mean a user of the derived work will know how to find it, nor what parts that work are actually covered by your code prior to finding it. You are starting to sound like someone deliberately not getting the point of this.
I see a valid need for "permissive" licenses, but the legitimate reasons are rarely cited by proponents of the licenses.
>But again, just because it technically exists somewhere doesn't mean a user of the derived work will know how to find it
This sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Can you cite an example of abandonware that completely disappeared from the public internet but continued to be used by some user-facing product? It seems to me that if development stagnates on a project entirely, its almost a certainty that the project is unused, or has been forked (and potentially new changes have been placed under another license).
>nor what parts that work are actually covered by your code prior to finding it
So, the open source license should really only be relevant to highly technical users (that is, my parents will never care about the license software is under). I'd hope those users are capable of discerning what the OSS licensed software does.
I think this is partly why the GPL makes much more sense pre-internet in the eras of floppy and CD distribution. (It shouldn't be surprising that the GPL 3 still has physical media requirements.) With the internet it is hard not to think that source code is "merely" a search away.
This is fair, and admittedly I'm young. By the time I started writing code, github already existed. I can't really fathom a situation where all versions of a library could fall out of public access, unless that library was truly and completely unused.
And almost all licenses require attribution.
>Also, after you die and your source code is gone, the derivative work could still go on to whatever success and none of the users of your code will have access to it except for that developer of the derivative work.
This makes no sense. The source code of what I did will still be around, and still be attributed. Dying doesn't make my work disappear into the ether.