I agree in broad strokes with almost everything you say. I don't think adding rules is the correct way to build societies with some desired ethics.
That said, open source software licenses are extremely simple as far as contracts or licenses go. At least an order of magnitude shorter than closed source software EULAs, for example. What I see people advocating for is not tackling on additional complexity onto the existing licenses, but replacing the fundamental principles of existing licenses with new simple principles that slice the world into acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a better fashion.
Of course, licenses alone are not sufficient for change as you say. A lot of other social structures will indeed need to be built to change large scale behavior. That's a hard long slog.
> but replacing the fundamental principles of existing licenses with new simple principles that slice the world into acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a better fashion.
Feel free to come up with a different set of principles, but don't call it FOSS.
What frustrates me about this current FOSS discourse is that the are a bunch of people who want to change FOSS principles without (seemingly) understanding what those original principles are or why they were chosen. These critics live in a world in which FOSS has been uproariously successful but don't appear to appreciate what was necessary for it to be successful in the first place.
That said, open source software licenses are extremely simple as far as contracts or licenses go. At least an order of magnitude shorter than closed source software EULAs, for example. What I see people advocating for is not tackling on additional complexity onto the existing licenses, but replacing the fundamental principles of existing licenses with new simple principles that slice the world into acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a better fashion.
Of course, licenses alone are not sufficient for change as you say. A lot of other social structures will indeed need to be built to change large scale behavior. That's a hard long slog.