I also suspect that few people actually believe it’s ok and these legalistic defenses are more about circling the wagons. How many people would defend Microsoft if a new Office version automatically and quietly stripped edit history from documents that were originally created by other versions? Would we be hunting for limited liability clauses in their EULA to defend the design decision?
Thankfully, that's not a thing I ever did.
> I also suspect that few people actually believe it’s ok and these legalistic defenses are more about circling the wagons.
For me it's more about healthy boundaries and expectations. If I'm somehow paying for a project's development, I have higher expectations. If I'm not, I understand that I've chosen the dev/test track and there will be bugs and issues. The developer may choose to run off in an odd direction coughGnome3cough and my only recourse is to fork or hope someone else does. Disagreements as to how things should work happen pretty often.
I'm not defending anything or anyone. Just describing the system as it exists.