> I don't understand the view that MIT and Apache 2.0 make it possible for corporations to somehow destroy or enclose the commons. Code is code. It can't be destroyed, its cost of duplication is effectively zero. If I take some open source code, add my changes and distribute a paid, closed-source, version, nothing has been removed/lost.
You are technically correct in this, and technically speaking perhaps I should have put what I said in terms of the free rider problem, not necessarily enclosure of the commons, but two things: first, I do think what corporations do with open source software is to some degree more analogous to such an enclosure, since in a free rider problem we typically imagine a few or even very large number of lazy individuals just not paying for something, whereas in the enclosure of the commons it is the rich and large corporations benefiting from the work of more common folk, and the power dynamics of what happens in software look more like the latter than the former. Second, you're forgetting embrace, extend, extinguish, which very much does have the effect of destroying things by commercial cooption and absorbtion.
> Certainly they make it hard/impossible to build a business from Open Source code. Unfortunately in an economic system designed to maximise the reward for value capture at the cost of value creators this is a common problem. But I believe the answer to that is more communism, not more licenses with more convoluted requirements creating jobs for legal departments for shared code.
I sort of view licenses that require contributing any improvements you've made to something back to the collective pool from which you got it as a form of communism, even if in this case it is embedded in and enforced by a capitalist system.