I am honestly confused by this line of thinking. what should projects do in your opinion? should there be a LEGAL-LICENSE and SOCIAL-LICENSE?

I believe that the legal is the "top-level" statement that sets expectations all the way down.

Legal documents don’t really make an affordance for what would be impolite versus what would be against the license. Usually I think the unwritten expectations work out ok (for example, in a project I help maintain I recently wrote out an apology for stepping away from development and ignoring contributions to fulfill these obligations) but perhaps writing it down in some sort of Code of Conduct style document might be beneficial.

I think that people have pretty much put their "core values" into their licenses these days. People who don't want Amazon to run their software as a service use the AGPL. People that don't really want an open source project but want to put "open source!!!11!" on the box add caveats like "you can't run this code on a device you didn't buy from us" (very common in the keyboard firmware market).

If people aren't choosing a license compatible with their values, then that's on them. The era of Github only giving you free hosting if you pick a DFSG-compatible license are long over; you could put the Windows source code on Github and they would be happy to use a heart emoji to describe how they feel about it.

agreed that it is being stretched. perhaps a better metaphor would be not just opening the door, but building it.

> you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users.

like, for example, in a license file?

> As far I can tell, no actual product or value is generated, it's like a "business virus"

I believe that is what the OP means by MLM (multi-level marketing)

An MLM is a regular pyramid scheme with an actual product mixed in to lend legitimacy and to make it legal in the first place.

The proposed business virus is different. Unlike a pyramid scheme most costs are on signup, and there are no multi-level incentive structures.

Well at least with MLM there is some sort of product changing hands (knives, essential oils, etc.) Here, as far as I can tell, the purpose of the business is to create more businesses that create more businesses, etc. (but there is no actual product).

A telephone technician that I worked with warned me against using these, saying that they are "lightning magnets." I don't know if this is true or not, would love to hear from someone else.

Awesome work!

Just curious: Why did you choose to take on the entire OS instead of building on top of an existing distro as a base?

Thanks hardbop200! Partly it's because I'm the kind of person who just loves hacking on tall stacks. Before this, I was doing browsers for many years, which has many traits in common with operating systems.

Speaking more emotionally, I feel like *nix used to be a lot of fun and full of hacker's spirit, and it's just not like that anymore. Things aren't simple anymore, and they can't easily be taken apart and understood in an evening, like they used to. So I figured I can just make my own then, just the way I like it :)

If you like understandable tools, you might enjoy some of the projects the bootstrapping crowd posted to the page below. It's not very organized since it was just a dump site for work that a small crowd of people were taking inspiration from.

https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page