

On Corporate Ownership of Open Source - quarterto
https://medium.com/@mikeal/on-corporate-ownership-of-open-source-786ebd15847e

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dalke
> I find this scenario inevitable and have recently dedicated myself to
> investing in commons that aren’t owned by any particular company.

Mozilla is a company. It's a non-profit company, but still a company. So is
the Python Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and other
copyright/trademark holders to community developed projects.

I think this means the author will not be supporting those companies.

> However, if a company owns the project in any way (trademark, website,
> project governance) there is an incentive for them to extract value from the
> project rather than create it.

Isn't this also true for people? Consider Firefox. If the community (I'll say
90% of the developer and user base) decides that it needs a trademark, in
order to have a legal means to go after people who sell "Firefox" browsers
with built-in spyware, then someone needs to control that trademark.

If it's a single person, then certainly there can also be an incentive for
that person to extract value from the project.

I think the analogy to a corporate owned/publicly maintained park applies even
here. Exactly the same thing could happen if the park were owned by a person
instead of a company.

In practice though, we have some experience with that sort of situation. These
sorts of parks are set up as "privately owned public spaces". For example,
Zuccotti Park in NYC, heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, is a POPS,
which meant that the owners of the land didn't have the right to do certain
actions.

There are other, old examples too, like easements. If part of privately held
land has been used for, say, a road or beach access, then the owner of the
land cannot simply close it off. Perhaps that might be a way to consider the
topic, rather than simply ownership or control of a monopoly right.

