The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source
Kevin Wang here. Thanks Drew for the thoughtful post.<p>I can accept that you might not appreciate my work on the Commons Clause, but I&#x27;m glad to see you acknowledge why funding OSS is so difficult.<p>I think it&#x27;s okay to fear the world of open source becoming a bit more closed.  I do too.  Whether that&#x27;s a better world or not is up to debate, but I certainly don&#x27;t think so.<p>I think where we might disagree is what the greatest threat to &quot;open-ness&quot; is.  Sometimes people do bad things to open source projects, and force them to go closed.  The license choice will inevitably follow -- and when they do, they can choose to close the source entirely or choose a licensing scheme that makes it available.<p>Licensing follows intent, and I certainly don&#x27;t think the Clause inspires people to close their source.  But sometimes people need to change their license -- and I think it&#x27;s unrealistic to say that this doesn&#x27;t happen.