The Commons Clause will destroy open source

Drew DeVault · 22 Aug 2018

Others here said this too

Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.

Their wordsWhat should we do about open source maintainers not getting the funding they need? It’s a very real problem, and one Kevin has explicitly asked us to talk about before we criticise his solution to it.

Also said by Thomas Depierre, Filippo Valsorda

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Drew DeVault did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The Commons Clause does not solve open source’s funding problem; it is a framework for turning open source software into proprietary software.

Their wordsBut the Commons Clause doesn’t present a solution for supporting open source software. It presents a framework for turning open source software into proprietary software.
Our reading
Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.

Their wordsWhat should we do about open source maintainers not getting the funding they need? It’s a very real problem, and one Kevin has explicitly asked us to talk about before we criticise his solution to it.
Our reading
A few hundred dollars a month is nothing to a company and transformative to a project, so engineers should be the ones asking their employers to pay it.

Their wordsA $250/mo recurring donation to would be a drop in the bucket of most businesses, but a major boon to any open source project, with which the business will almost certainly see tangible value-add as a result.
Our reading
Handing stewardship of Redis to a company whose goal is extracting profit was a mistake for the project

Their wordsEveryone who has contributed to the now-proprietary Redis modules has had their hard work stolen and sold by RedisLabs under a proprietary license.
Our reading
A contributor licence agreement exists so the company can relicense volunteers’ work, and should neither be signed nor asked for.

Their wordsI do not sign CLAs and I think they’re a harmful practice for this very reason. Asking a contributor to sign them is a slap in the face to the good will which led them to make a contribution in the first place.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.