Metafilter Matt's written a nice piece about what the Eldred case and the commons have come to mean to him:
The past 8 years of web development depended upon and blossomed due to sharing code with one another. In the beginning there were no books, only sparse documentation. Then there were a few books and a lot of pages to learn from. Eventually you had new media college programs and books on any aspect of web development imaginable, and they owe their existence largely to the view-source menu option. I've seen perfectly good web technologies die from atrophy, because viewing and sharing code was close to impossible. When viewing others' source isn't possible, code exchanges fill the gap, and without them, the technology would go nowhere.
(via Kottke)
