"Common decency", much like "common sense", is just a projection of one's own values on to others.
I dislike telemetry and ad tracking and I avoid software that includes them whenever possible. I think they're against common decency but I know that others disagree and think both are perfectly acceptable.
We'd all like to believe that we share a definition of what "common decency" is but sadly we don't. It's why we resort to the law to settle disputes and why we need legal professionals to interpret that law.
What you're describing, misleading users or publishing malware, these are not things controlled by some notion of common decency or some personal moral code but either by statutory rights or criminal laws. e.g. in the UK with have the Computer Misuse Act to stop people adding things like time locks to software.
That's completely different to whether the source to an application is available and whether you can distribute modified versions of that source.
> That's completely different to whether the source to an application is available and whether you can distribute modified versions of that source.
That’s fair. My point was that the obligations of open source developers/maintainers do not begin and end with the explicit terms of the license, which is true. There are laws (and norms, though you don’t seem to acknowledge those as legitimate) that publishers of software are obligated to comply with.
I dislike telemetry and ad tracking and I avoid software that includes them whenever possible. I think they're against common decency but I know that others disagree and think both are perfectly acceptable.
We'd all like to believe that we share a definition of what "common decency" is but sadly we don't. It's why we resort to the law to settle disputes and why we need legal professionals to interpret that law.
What you're describing, misleading users or publishing malware, these are not things controlled by some notion of common decency or some personal moral code but either by statutory rights or criminal laws. e.g. in the UK with have the Computer Misuse Act to stop people adding things like time locks to software.
That's completely different to whether the source to an application is available and whether you can distribute modified versions of that source.