> Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge.
The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not "invite" it; they are totally neutral on that point. Upstream FOSS authors can reject all third-party contributions, and their software is still unarguably FOSS.
> When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users
You're mischaracterizing the situation. It's usually about a specific small vocal subset of users, who are literally demanding things in a rude and arrogant manner.
> Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not.
"Unwritten social contracts" effectively only exist in cases where an overwhelming majority of people believe in the same set of social norms. That absolutely is not the case in the software industry. There's no broad agreement about what that social contract entails, or if it even exists, and therefore it de facto does not exist for the industry as a whole.
Individual projects can choose their own social norms, but that doesn't inherently extend those norms to the entire industry.
The purpose of any software license is to permit you to do things that, in the absence of a license, would otherwise violate the authors' copyright. This is unrelated to whether or not the author chooses to accept contributions. No FOSS license requires the copyright holder to accept third-party contributions upstream, nor do they directly discuss this topic at all.
Licenses are not invitations to collaborate. That simply isn't their purpose. This is why CONTRIBUTING.md is a completely separate document.
Most of the popular "OSI-approved" licenses predate the OSI's existence, so there's no plausible argument that adopters of these licenses are opting-in to a collaborative social movement with an "unwritten social contract" en masse.
For example, the original motivation for the MIT license was simply avoiding legal overhead for software that wasn't expected to have much financial value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#History
It's remarkable to me that in both of your comments you emphasize the role of the license, when my point was precisely that software, and particularly open source software, is much more than its code and license.
You may disagree with this, but it's clear that software that solves a problem well, while also being enjoyable to use, is open to contributions and feedback, and fosters a friendly community around it, is more "successful" by any conceivable metric than software that isn't.
However you define this, you won't find it in the license or the code, but it's real, and it's one of the wonderful things about open source. Being able to use the software gratis, and even having the freedoms to modify and share it, pales in comparison. Hell, there is even proprietary software that has these qualities, which makes it infinitely better than software that is only technically open source.
I'm emphasizing the role of the license because the non-license parts are intangible, unmeasurable, and potentially imaginary.
How exactly do you differentiate between software authors who choose a FOSS software license based on it simply matching their desired terms for licensing their software, versus software authors who are opting into the social movement and social contract you're describing?
What are some examples of these utopian open source projects where there's a lack of constant drama, infighting, maintainer burnout, and sacrifices to functionality due to financial considerations?
By the popularity of the software; by how pleased people are to use and contribute to it; by the impact it has on its product category and the industry at large; and many other qualities that are unquantifiable, as you say, and maybe even subjective, but are certainly not imaginary. This is because it's related to people's feelings, rather than any legalese text or technically the code itself.
The software doesn't necessarily have to be libre to have these qualities. Sometimes it may have few or many of them. But one aspect is crucial for these to develop: a community of passionate users needs to exist around the 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. At best, it may lead to forks where people who do care about this community aspect will allow it to flourish. And such projects usually are the ones people actually gravitate towards.
> What are some examples of these utopian open source projects where there's a lack of constant drama, infighting, maintainer burnout, and sacrifices to functionality due to financial considerations?
I never said that software communities are free from drama and other issues. Any group of people will have problems, as human relations are messy. But by and large, it is these communities that make the software successful for everyone. Nobody wants to contribute to a project for the benefit of only its original author or themselves. They do it because they want to improve the project for all of its users, not just a select few. This communal aspect is the "spirit of open source", which folks who invented these terms we throw around today deeply care about. The fact that it's been perversed by corporations and ignored by people like you is one of the tragedies of the modern software industry.
Anyway, I'm sure you can think of some examples yourself. You probably use and enjoy such software. Off the top of my head, I can think of: Python, Django, Debian, Arch Linux, Void Linux, cURL, most Grafana projects, etc. On the proprietary side of things, there's Obsidian, Sublime Text, Factorio, and many others.
Again, these are not "utopian" projects. Those don't exist. But they have a vibrant community that is core to what they are.
On the flipside, I challenge you to name a "successful" software project by the criteria I've outlined above, which doesn't have a vibrant community around it, and whose authors reject or ignore the user base. I can think of two categories of such software: languishes in obscurity driven by the will of its authors until it is eventually abandoned, or thrives by taking freedoms away from users and is driven by large corporations.
> 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.
E.g., the MIT license wasn’t motivated by collaborative considerations, but it was mostly about the effectiveness and practicality of software distribution.
The Linux kernel definitely has the interest to force people to upstream modifications. GCC rejected the idea of converting itself as a library to force vendors to upstream their changes.
If something is "forced", it is inherently not an "invitation".
Additionally, GPL and derivatives focus on sharing code with users, which isn't necessarily the same thing as collaborating with the project's creators upstream. It depends entirely on how and where the software is used.
The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not "invite" it; they are totally neutral on that point. Upstream FOSS authors can reject all third-party contributions, and their software is still unarguably FOSS.
> When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users
You're mischaracterizing the situation. It's usually about a specific small vocal subset of users, who are literally demanding things in a rude and arrogant manner.
> Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not.
"Unwritten social contracts" effectively only exist in cases where an overwhelming majority of people believe in the same set of social norms. That absolutely is not the case in the software industry. There's no broad agreement about what that social contract entails, or if it even exists, and therefore it de facto does not exist for the industry as a whole.
Individual projects can choose their own social norms, but that doesn't inherently extend those norms to the entire industry.