The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is

The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is

So many people were writing to me and Conservancy to ask for an opinion on this Commons Clause thing, that I wrote a blog post so I wouldn't have to keep responding individually. The one point I didn't make in the blog post is that I think we're all (including me) giving this more attention than it deserves. This is one silly non-Open-Source licensing thing drafted by one lawyer who is promoting multiple “sounds like Open Source but really isn't” licensing schemes. In turn, a very small group of companies think is coolest licensing thing they've ever seen, presumably because it sits better with their VCs than actual FOSS. There's not much more to the story than that.

While Jake's article is well written and covers all the angles, I worry that giving it this much attention (including the attention I'm admittedly giving it by writing a blog post and by posting here) actually is helping these anti-Free-Software folks promote this thing, and that our response subtly legitimizes something that really is just “yet another creative way to do proprietary software”. That's the trap of press coups like this: someone proposes something outrageous, everyone feels compelled to respond because they fear that something this outrageous might get traction, then it looks like it was a legitimate and widely held position from the start (instead of the fringe activity that it is), and then suddenly, the position is granted legitimacy because the response in outrage gave the position legitimacy it wouldn't otherwise have.

The best outcome, which fortunately is still pretty likely for the moment, that everyone will have trouble even remembering what the Commons Clause was in five years, and the codebases that chose it will fall to obscurity, or have since been licensed another way, or both.