This article is a decade old. I wonder if the author still agrees with it given how the software and corporate landscape has changed over the past ten years.

While I have always used maximally permissive licenses on my own open source software, I've been rethinking that stance in the past couple of years. I'm not sure where I stand now, but I don't fully agree with this post.

In particular, perhaps my number one fear about the world at large is that the untethered effects of economies of scale are clearly leading to a net transfer of power into the hands of fewer and fewer corporate leaders.

Permissive licenses are arguably agnostic to that effect: anyone can use the software, corporation or not. But given that large corporations already have significant economies of scale, the emergent effect is that a corporation can extract more value out of a piece of open source software than you or I can. If your goal is to discourage a handful of oligarchs eating the world, a permissive license may be opposed to that.

It's sort of like breeding fish and dropping them in a lake. Sure, anyone can then grab their rod and reel and catch a few, so you aren't privileging the commercial fisheries industry by doing so. But once the trawler shows up, they're going to harvest a hell of a lot more fish than the dude with a bamboo rod.

You may be thinking this analogy doesn't work because software isn't like fish. Copying a piece of software doesn't remove a fish from the lake for others to catch. But think about this at one level of abstraction higher.

Copying software accomplishes nothing. It's just bits sitting on a disk. It's software being used by humans that matters. When a corporation takes a piece of open source software and puts it in front of users, time a user spends using that corporation's code is time not spent doing anything else.

While software itself isn't a consumptive good, human attention is.

Notice how all of the biggest, fastest growing corporations understand this. Attention is the ultimate economic commodity. Any company who can mine it effectively wins and any company that fails loses. This is why in the past decade we've seen seemingly weird business moves like Apple producing movies, NVIDIA doing game streaming, Amazon shipping games, Walmart selling video streaming, etc.

We are shambling towards a post-material world where the most valuable good, the thing that produces the most value, is human attention. And, unfortunately, a few people figured this out sooner than the rest of us and a gobbling up all of that mental real estate and leaving nothing for anyone else.