Common Sense License (CSL)
civic license for a techno-feudal world
Details
- External ID
- 45951606
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Common Sense License (CSL)
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Nov. 17, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.0982532751091703
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
The CSL is an attempt to rethink software licensing in a way that balances freedom, sustainability, and fairness. It’s inspired by the idea that our digital infrastructure increasingly mirrors feudal systems: concentrated power, obligations flowing upward, and everyday users left vulnerable. The license is designed to give creators a practical alternative to proprietary or exploitative models, while encouraging transparency, collaboration, and equitable distribution. I’d love to hear thoughts from developers, legal experts, and anyone experimenting with bootstrapped projects.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer tools and specialized utilities
- Vertical
- Government
- Function
- Compliance & governance
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- civic license framework
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No This is a legal document and software licensing framework, not software code; it requires specialized legal and intellectual property expertise to draft enforceably.
What it would actually take: Creating a viable open-source or source-available license requires specialized legal counsel in contract law, IP law, and software licensing precedents. Key challenges include avoiding unintended copyright loopholes, ensuring enforceability across international jurisdictions, and resolving compatibility conflicts with common permissive/copyleft licenses.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Ambiguous revenue definition (what counts as 'attributable revenue'), Fixed USD revenue threshold doesn't account for inflation or currency variations, Revenue threshold can be evaded through corporate restructuring and subsidiaries, Unclear labor measurement criteria and approval process, Adds accounting and management overhead to open source projects
Feature requests: Adjustable indexing for revenue thresholds over time, Support for multiple currencies and clear exchange rate rules, Anti-evasion clauses for corporate structure manipulation, Clearer labor measurement and approval criteria
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 8 launches clear the similarity bar.
Attention rank: #8 of 9 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- FreeTrust · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Foliox License · ph · 2026-09-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Total Reciprocity Public License · hn · 2025-11-28 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- World Developers League (WDL) · ph · 2026-09-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Certo · hn · 2026-08-07 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- ANWIN · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- Carbon Credit · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.31
- CEL by Example · hn · 2026-02-18 · 84 upvotes · similarity 0.30
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a compliance & governance tool for Media & entertainment yet.