The “commons clause” is based on false premises and specious reasoning. You could take my word for it, but better to read what Matthew says, so just go read his blog post while I wait here:

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/51177.html

I’ve written both open source and proprietary software, and I’d say if you don’t like the consequences of open source licenses, write proprietary software and don’t pretend that you are writing open source. It’s not the end of the world. But saying that you are writing open source and then attempting to deny one of the most fundamental and defining promises of open source? That’s just telling a lie.

mjg59 | The Commons Clause doesn’t help the commons


Andrew Bradford September 11, 2018 08:33

It’s unclear why the people who embrace the commons clause don’t feel that open source software plus paid-for service contracts is a viable way to have a nice business. Red Hat has worked out pretty well and that’s their business model. Lots of people run Fedora or CentOS to avoid paying but it’s not like Red Hat are shutting those projects down, if anything Red Hat are embracing Fedora and CentOS even more as an easy on-boarding of new customers.

I hope Amazon, Microsoft’s Azure team, and a few other big cloud providers get together and produce a GPL software to replace these commons clause packages, just out of spite and to make a point since their businesses actually do rely on open source and it wouldn’t really cost them very much to do this.


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