A software license towards a world beyond capitalism.
An Anti-License Manifesto
software licenses are unavoidably a legal tool. the legal system, in the US and approximately everywhere else, is not a machine that leads to justice. therefore, software licenses do not lead to justice.
en:license [CoopCycle]
This License grants rights to study, execute, modify and redistribute the Software or its derivatives to any Licensee, but reserve the commercial use of these rights to the only entities defined in Article 3. Any redistribution or online interaction with the Software or its derivative must be done accordingly to the License’s conditions.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
Sustaining Open Source Software
The ‘open source sustainability’ debate continues with yet-another-company relicensing their product away from an open source license to…
Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
Cory Doctorow: IP
You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay attention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little ab…
Mx. Aria Stewart (@aredridel@kolektiva.social)
I knew it was this way but it's really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.
An Open Licensing Organization for Open Source Software
What if open source software had an organization like ASCAP for distributing royalties?
Why We Can't Have Nice Software - Andrew Kelley
The problem with software is that it's too powerful. It creates so much wealth so fast that it's virtually impossible to not distribute it.