In the last post I left a sentence hanging on purpose: durability is a design question, and it matters who’s actually asking it. Here’s the honest version of why, and here’s where this whole run of posts actually lands.

In the last post I named who FediFlick Archive is actually for: people using a photograph to hold onto memory, family, and place, not to make it look better. I ended by promising to explain why the phone, not the desktop, is where this actually starts, and why that’s not the whole story. Here’s that promise kept.

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.

A three-part series on licensing and the economics of digital sovereignty was planned: how the commons got built, how Europe is choosing to defend it, how the AI stack could be governed as one. Then Martin Owens, an Inkscape developer and member of its project leadership committee, replied to part one on Mastodon, in two posts stitched together by the character limit, and pointed straight at something the series had missed entirely.

In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists accusing them of stealing. What they were actually doing was sharing software they had written for each other (modifications, tools, documentation), the way people had shared knowledge since the first person showed another how to do something useful. Gates reframed mutual aid as intellectual property theft. It was not a philosophical claim. It was a property claim, backed by lawyers, Congress, and eventually the World Trade Organization.

Every few months, Australia’s business press discovers a new emergency. Right now it’s the capital gains tax. According to the usual commentators, founders, VCs, and their aligned media, Labor’s move to replace the 50% CGT discount with inflation-adjusted indexation is an act of vandalism against Australian ingenuity. Entrepreneurs will flee. Talent will dry up. The unicorns won’t come.

I’ve been working in and around Australian agtech and startups for the better part of two decades. I’ve watched the same arguments recycled through every policy debate: the R&D tax credit, the ESVCLP scheme, the startup visa. The answer is always the same: give us more upside, or we’ll take our toys elsewhere.

I’ve spent 30 years watching tech cycles come and go, from the first dial-up modems in rural Austria to the mesh networks I’m currently stringing across the Australian bush. Each time a “next big thing” arrives, we see the same pattern: a frantic rush to centralise, followed by a slow, painful enclosure of what should have been a common resource.

The current noise around AI in open source feels different. It feels heavier. There’s a justified fear that AI-generated code is hollowing out our commons. Maintainers are being buried under a drift of unvetted, mediocre pull requests, while a handful of platform monopolies strip-mine decades of community work to feed their proprietary black boxes.

I’m tired. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep or a weekend off the grid can fix. It’s a deeper, more pervasive exhaustion, the fatigue of living in a culture of relentless, performative positivity. In the tech world, we’re told to “crush it,” to “move fast,” and to embrace every new “game-changer” with uncritical enthusiasm. If you’re not a believer, you’re a “naysayer” or, worse, a “blocker” of progress.