[dragonwriter]

> Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers

Which, if they really are the dominant beneficiary, they probably will; whoever is making the most money from the software has the most financial interest in maintaining it, and that's the reason so many big corps that benefit from FOSS invest heavily back into those projects, either via sponsorship of projects or paying their own developers to work on the codebase or both.

But that doesn't serve the interests of the investors in the company doing the initial work, who invested in the hopes of capturing the downstream revenue later development of the work would produce. Which is understandable, but they shouldn't attempt to trade on the popularity of open source licenses with their non-open alternatives.

And that, not the “people doing the work”, is what the Commons Clause is about.

[slededit]

Doesn't really happen with Openssh. Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter. With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

[dragonwriter]

> Doesn't really happen with Openssh.

Who is the big player dominating revenue from OpenSSH? Projects with extremely diffuse benefit like that (or, perhaps more clearly, OpenSSL) do often have a problem here, but that's not what Commons Clause claims to be directed at.

> Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter.

Postgres definitely gets lots of support from significant commercializers of Postgres like EnterpriseDB, Postgres Pro, Citus, and Heroku.

MySQL, maybe not, but a GPL arrangement, especially one requiring copyright assignment, discourages third-party commercial contributions, especially when the owner is actively dual-licensing. Who wants to pay for development of IP someone else can sell more freely than you can?

(Permissively-licensed SQLite, OTOH, has huge contributions for downstream commercial users.)

> With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

By design. There are also more givers than with propietary-licensed software, also by design.