Rationale

Why a new license?

Existing licenses were designed for a world where the primary question was how freely software could be shared. They assume that more permissiveness is always better. The COMMONS License starts from a different premise: that software ecosystems need sustainable stewardship, and that the interests of individual contributors, organizational users, and the broader public are not automatically aligned.

The COMMONS License is an attempt to articulate a principled alternative to both permissive licenses (which allow unrestricted commercial exploitation) and purely copyleft licenses (which require source release but do not address stewardship or organizational power asymmetries).

The problem with permissive licenses

Permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 allow anyone — individuals, corporations, private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds — to take software, build proprietary services on top of it, and return nothing. This often works acceptably when software is a commodity input. It works less well when the software embodies significant communal effort and when the downstream value flows predominantly to large organizations rather than to the people who built it.

Permissive licenses also create no stewardship obligations. A project can be abandoned, its name trademarked away, or its future direction captured by a single corporate contributor with no recourse for the community.

The problem with copyleft

Strong copyleft licenses like the AGPL require that derivative works and services be released under the same terms. This preserves software freedom for users but does not address the power asymmetry between individual contributors and large organizations. A company with a thousand employees can still use AGPL software under the same terms as a single developer, even though their organizational capacity to extract value from the software is vastly different.

Copyleft also conflates two concerns that can be separated: (1) ensuring that improvements return to the commons, and (2) ensuring that exploitation is subject to meaningful accountability. COMMONS addresses both more directly.

The problem with source-available licenses

Licenses like the Business Source License (BSL) or Commons Clause address organizational exploitation by reserving certain commercial rights, but they typically vest those rights in a single company with no stewardship obligations and no accountability mechanism. The licensor can change the terms, sell the company to a private equity acquirer, or abandon the project entirely, with no recourse for contributors or users.

The COMMONS approach

The COMMONS License rests on four structural commitments:

1. Free access for individuals

Natural Persons — individual human beings — may use, study, modify, and share the software freely and without restriction (other than preserving attribution and license notices). Learning, personal projects, hobbyist use, and individual professional work are all unrestricted.

This is not a concession to practicality; it is a positive commitment to the value of individual autonomy and the importance of individuals being able to understand, adapt, and benefit from the software tools that shape their lives.

2. Accountable stewardship

Every piece of COMMONS-licensed software has a named Steward responsible for maintaining it. The Steward holds the copyright not as private property but in trust, with enforceable obligations to the purposes of the License.

Critically, the Steward cannot sell the copyright for speculative gain or transfer it to an extractive entity. Stewardship can only be transferred to another eligible Steward committed to the same purposes. This makes the license resistant to the most common failure modes of both open source (abandonment, capture) and source-available (sale to extractive capital) models.

3. Negotiated organizational access

Organizations need permission. This is a simple recognition that organizations are not individuals. An organization has legal personality, continuity, resources, and the ability to organize collective action in ways that individuals cannot. Treating them identically to individuals ignores a real structural difference.

The Steward may grant organizational licenses freely, for a fee, or on other terms. The License does not prescribe the terms of organizational access; it merely requires that access be affirmatively granted rather than silently assumed. This gives the Steward the ability to sustain the project's development while keeping individual use free.

Optionally, a Steward may enable a limited Organizational Evaluation in the Steward Record — for example with Production Use not allowed, time-limited, and capped per organization — so organizations can try the software without prior negotiation. That Evaluation is not a general organizational license. It does not change Natural Person rights or stewardship duties. Ongoing or production use still requires Steward permission or an exception.

4. Contributions return to the commons

Any modification that is distributed under the License constitutes a Contribution, and contributors grant the Steward the right to incorporate their work into the canonical Software. This is a lighter-weight version of a contributor license agreement, built directly into the license terms.

This ensures that the software commons grows over time rather than fragmenting into incompatible forks, and that the Steward can maintain a coherent, authoritative version of the work.

What COMMONS is not

COMMONS is not anti-commercial. The Steward may generate revenue from organizational licenses, commercial deployments, and related services. The goal is not to prevent commercial activity but to ensure that commercial activity is subject to the Steward's oversight and aligned with the purposes of the project.

COMMONS is not a cooperative license. Contributors do not gain governance rights by contributing. The Steward retains control over the direction and terms of the project. This is a deliberate design choice: governance by committee tends to produce paralysis, and the accountability mechanism in the License is intended to be a last resort, not a routine governance tool.

COMMONS is not anti-organization. Organizations are welcomed as contributors, users (with permission), and potential future Stewards. The License simply requires that organizational participation be explicit rather than implicit.

Voluntary adoption registry

COMMONS allows anyone to adopt the license text without permission, but it asks adopters to optionally notify the Steward and register their project. The intention is to create a lightweight, voluntary map of adoption so the community can understand how widely the license is used and learn from real-world deployments. Registration is a request, not a requirement, and the absence of registration does not affect license rights.

On the name

The acronym "COMMONS" was chosen to reflect the primary intended use case: software that belongs to a community but requires stewardship to thrive. The word "commons" in the title of the License refers to a resource held collectively and managed for the long-term benefit of its users, not to a particular governance structure.

The expansion — Code Open to Mutuality by Mortals; Organizations Negotiate with Steward — is intentionally a bit awkward. Acronyms that fit too cleanly are usually reverse-engineered from the desired word. This one reflects a genuine attempt to name the thing accurately.

Status and evolution

COMMONS v1.0 is a draft for public review. The license text, stewardship specifications, and supporting materials are works in progress. Feedback is welcome via the project repository.

The goal is to produce a license that is legally sound in major jurisdictions, practically adoptable by small and medium-sized software projects, and philosophically coherent as an alternative to both open source and proprietary models.