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.

Ask most people when farmers started cooperating and they will picture the grain co-op down the road, or a barn raising in a period drama: something quaint, something that grew up alongside the tractor and the telephone. The real answer is older than writing. For most of the roughly nine thousand years since people first settled down to grow food, cooperation was not a value farmers held. It was the machinery. A shared irrigation channel, a shared plough team, a shared calendar for who grazes which pasture and when: none of it worked without a standing agreement among neighbours about who did what, when, and what happened if someone broke the rule. Take the agreement away and the technology stops functioning, not because anyone lacked the tools, but because nobody had a way to run them past the scale of a single household.

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.