Every few years a piece of infrastructure I care about gets a new licence, and the reason given is some version of the same sentence: we need to stop the big players strip-mining this. I have written that sentence myself, more than once. The instinct is sound. A digital commons that nobody defends gets enclosed, and the people doing the enclosing rarely announce themselves.

So when Mark Qvist, the person behind the Reticulum mesh networking stack, replaced its MIT licence with a custom one built to keep the project out of corporate AI training sets and out of weapons systems, I understood the motivation completely. I just think it was the wrong move, and that the tool he actually needed was already on the shelf, tested, and free.