I’ve had a Flickr account since 2008. My own photostream sits past 4,800 photos now, and for a long stretch of that history it wasn’t just a place I put my own pictures. In February 2009 I wrote a HOWTO on this blog about posting straight from a Nokia S60 phone to Flickr, because, as I put it at the time, “a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching.” I wasn’t a bystander watching open education discover Flickr. I was helping build the on-ramp for it, in a professional life spent almost entirely in EdTech, first at DETAFE, then building learning management systems at Brightcookie for over a decade.

Then, in 2011, I wrote a different kind of post on this blog, “Facebook - good riddance!”, deleting my account and declaring myself done with a company I’d never trusted. I illustrated it with a Creative Commons photo pulled straight off Flickr, credited to a photographer going by cogdogblog. That habit, reaching for a CC-licensed Flickr image whenever this blog needs one, has held for 15 years since, and it’s still the workflow described in this site’s own editorial instructions today.

This isn’t that kind of post. I’m not celebrating anything.

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.

When I wrote LPWAN Meshes: Reticulum, Where I Landed earlier this year, I covered Reticulum as Mark Qvist’s reference Python implementation: rnsd, Sideband, NomadNet, all built on RNS. That was accurate at the time, and it undersold what was already starting to happen underneath it. Reticulum was never meant to be a Python project. It is a protocol, and a protocol with only one implementation isn’t decentralised yet, it’s just a single point of failure with good branding.