Thanks for clarifying! I think I got hung up on the part where you were saying that licenses cannot give us the kind of community we want. (Which I agree with

Thanks for clarifying! I think I got hung up on the part where you were saying that licenses cannot give us the kind of community we want. (Which I agree with.) In my utopian fantasies, every software project has a constitution as well as a license, defining how the project is governed, who may participate, what participation looks like, what obligations you undertake by using the software, how the constitution itself may be changed, provisions for an afterlife if the project is abandoned. Real-world voluntary organizations like grocery co-ops have long operated on this model, and some software projects, notably Debian, actually have constitutions. The Debian model, however, doesn't place any obligations on Debian's users, doesn't even acknowledge their existence. Their specific constitution has a lot of other weaknesses in terms of its ability to generalize, but the existence of the constitution seems like a very good idea.