If they do I'd rather they not use the commons name, which (perhaps intentionally) causes confusion alongside Apache Commons:
In software licensing a “permissive license” is a well-established term for a free or open source license that does not restrict downstream derivatives to use the same license (or the license family) for the downstream contributions, as opposed to a copyleft license which does impose such a requirement.
Apache 2.0 is, indeed, a permissive license, and that is a central purpose of its intent.
(Anything) + Commons Clause is not a permissive license, and that too is a central purpose of its intent.
> with one, intentionally very narrow exception.
The restriction in the Common Clause is not “very narrow” (or with very clear boundaries, which makes the area of legal risk larger.)
They clearly intend it to be very narrow it seems.
Can you point out any way it will restrict me or anyone else from using it internally?
BTW: It may seem I think this is all good.
I do not think that.
I do think the cases I've seen so far can be reasonable.
The bigger and more problematic picture I think I see is:
- if every project and its dog applies this that will hurt me if I rely on cloud hosted services
- if the big actors think this is a good idea and start applying thos or something worse to their currently open source software, restricing competition on hosting.
- hollowing out of the open source movement.