About the fact that they are useless?<p>If you&#x27;re on HN, you&#x27;ve problably seen a lot of open source software and met people who write that, and you may agree with this assessment: 99% of it is written by people who would rather extract a wisdom tooth than file a lawsuit.<p>Yet there&#x27;s very little violation of the license terms going on. Some, not much.<p>IMO Jeff Atwood is right when he says that programmers excel at rules. Make rules for something, anything, and progammers will largely follow them, and will quarrel about the rules and any violation when given the slightest chance.