This is their money
To be precise, this is our money, and among other things my money. What would you say if Lisk developers made a runner with the development funds, spawned their own fork under some arbitrary reason that had nothing to do with the network itself, and even had the gut to steal the name and collude with everyone they can find to attempt to discredit the still perfectly valid and unchanged original network?
At some point in life, one has to invite pragmatism. If ETC is to survive and not get bogged down in years worth of legal fights, then I feel the best path forward is to treat it as a sharedrop to all active ETH Accounts. Whatever the people do with those accounts is their affair.
I'm not the leader of nor do I desire to be a leader in the ETC community. If you want to advocate a different position, then by all means argue it. But do understand the implications of inferring ownership of ETC. It has consequences beyond the foundation.
It is more accurate to say that ETH is a sharedrop to ETC accounts. It is completely illogical to claim that an unforked chain that has continued in a linear fashion using unchanged code is a sharedrop.
Nevertheless pragmatism or other factors may still support a decision not to fight over the foundation funds.
In light of this perspective I'm curious why you choose to describe ETC as a sharedrop. To me it seems to play into the rhetoric that continues to try to frame ETC as a rogue or illegitimate fork/project. Comments?
I'm not personally advocating going the legal route, but the legal issue is real and the Ethereum Foundation is aware of it. They have effectively wronged a significant fraction of their investors and defaulted on multiple written commitment. I don't think they have anything to win worsening their case by refusing the one opportunity they have to prove their good faith. This can be used to negociate an orderly release of the ETC side funds.
Smooth and Recursive pretty much nailed it.