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If they do I'd rather they not use the commons name, which (perhaps intentionally) causes confusion alongside Apache Commons:

https://commons.apache.org/



I'd rather they didn't use the Apache trademark, too; just write a clear license of your own rather than trying to hijack a license with a radically different purpose but existing goodwill and then reversing it's meaning with an add-on clause.


It is not a radically different purpose as far as I understand; it is the same purpose: an extremely permissive and business friendly license with one, intentionally very narrow exception.


> an extremely permissive and business friendly license

In software licensing a “permissive license” is a well-established term for a free or open source license that does not restrict downstream derivatives to use the same license (or the license family) for the downstream contributions, as opposed to a copyleft license which does impose such a requirement.

Apache 2.0 is, indeed, a permissive license, and that is a central purpose of its intent.

(Anything) + Commons Clause is not a permissive license, and that too is a central purpose of its intent.

> with one, intentionally very narrow exception.

The restriction in the Common Clause is not “very narrow” (or with very clear boundaries, which makes the area of legal risk larger.)


> The restriction in the Common Clause is not “very narrow” (or with very clear boundaries, which makes the area of legal risk larger.)

They clearly intend it to be very narrow it seems.

Can you point out any way it will restrict me or anyone else from using it internally?

BTW: It may seem I think this is all good.

I do not think that.

I do think the cases I've seen so far can be reasonable.

The bigger and more problematic picture I think I see is:

- if every project and its dog applies this that will hurt me if I rely on cloud hosted services

- if the big actors think this is a good idea and start applying thos or something worse to their currently open source software, restricing competition on hosting.

- hollowing out of the open source movement.


I've seen you post. I know you're smart. So answer me this: other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?


Honestly, it seems like a pretty clear intention to co-opt a term ("commons") which has usually meant "let's share things!" to mean something entirely different. (And shame on them for doing that.)


I think Creative Commons licenses are much better known than Apache Commons. (This is the first time I've heard of the latter, for example.)




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