Parachute Commons License — Open Licensing That Shows Its Work
A modular license framework that makes sustainability tradeoffs explicit—designed to be read, forked, and adapted.
Most People Don’t Read Their License
MIT. Creative Commons. Apache. People slap these on projects because they’re defaults, not because they’ve thought through what they’re consenting to. What protections are you forgoing? What extraction are you enabling? Most open licenses hide these tradeoffs behind legalese and good vibes.
The Parachute Commons License starts from a different premise: a license is governance infrastructure. It should be legible, opinionated, and designed for the people actually using it.
Graduated Sustainability
The core mechanism is a revenue threshold. Below it, the license is fully permissive—use it, fork it, build on it. Above it, you contribute back. This encodes a simple fairness norm: if you’re extracting significant value from commons-built work, you participate in sustaining it.
This isn’t “open vs. proprietary.” It’s graduated commons—permissive at small scale, contributory at large scale. The sustainability logic is baked into the legal infrastructure instead of relying on goodwill.
Designed to Be Forked
The license is modular by intent. PCL-0 strips the revenue threshold for contexts where it doesn’t apply—game systems, creative works, community projects. Other variants can add domain-specific language for research outputs, datasets, or physical infrastructure.
The core logic stays consistent:
- Attribution: credit flows back through the chain
- Share-alike: derivatives stay open
- Legibility: the tradeoffs are explicit, not buried
Why This Matters
A license is choice architecture for future derivative creators. You’re making decisions now about how accountability and value will flow later. Most licenses punt on this. Parachute Commons makes it the point.
This is governance infrastructure in its most literal form: a legal mechanism that shapes how people interact with shared resources, encodes fairness norms into structure, and stays legible enough that people actually understand what they’re agreeing to.