No restrictions on fields of endeavor and no discrimination is a pretty basic tenent that goes back a long long time (the DFSG were published in 1997, there are other things saying the same thing that pre-date it).
I also know this is what other open source lawyers are saying as well (in fact, i haven't seen one who believes it is anything else).
I'm sure you can make up another word other than "proprietary" to call it, but ...
As for questions: The main commons clause page makes the claim "Initiated by a coalition of top infrastructure software companies to protect their rights"
Care to list them?
Additionally, even ignoring the significant vagueness in the clause, there are plenty of combinations of licenses with which this clause makes literally no sense. It seems there is no guide or policing of these. Truthfully, this all does not feel well thought out. Who actually participated in the drafting?
Here is one that exists in practice:
neo4j is commons clause + AGPLv3
AGPLv3 section 7: If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.
...
GPLv3 is identical in this respect, and LGPLv3 is a set of permissions on top of GPLV3 that does not revoke this clause.
This seems to make commons clause incompatible with a lot of software.
> 1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It's only some enterprise modules. The Commons Clause is mostly used to temporarily transition enterprise offering counterparts of OSS projects to source-available.
Redis itself remains under BSD. From the article:
> The Redis core is, and always will remain, an open source BSD license. Certain modules, however, are now licensed as “Apache 2.0 modified with Commons Clause.”
I think the parent agrees with you, explicitly referring to those modules as "proprietary" and "source available".
> Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition.
TFA plainly says that it isn't, "at least not by the official definition set forth by the OSD."
> I'm sure you can make up another word other than "proprietary" to call it…
TFA also answers this:
> "Applying the Clause to an open source project will transition the project to 'source-available'."
Also, the FAQ was added after I posted. Look at GitHub commits :)
That's worse because Heather would have certainly warned them of these issues, and it means they did it anyway.
She is neither good nor bad IMHO. Though depending on your viewpoint, she's lawful neutral, true neutral, or chaotic neutral :P.
She has both defended accused open source license violators and helped open source foundations defend against baseless lawsuits.
Given how long she has been doing this, I would simply not believe that she missed any of the issues I mentioned (the ambiguity, the AGPL/GPL/etc issues). She's too good to have not advised them of these issues, and in fact, also probably advised them that the kind of response you have seen in this thread is a high probability.
But like any lawyer, when she is paid to advise, she advises. What people do with that advice is up to them.
Agreed on that, based on just reading one of her books. I wonder why didn't they choose AGPL.
https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/RediSearch/commits/maste...
> Why not AGPL?
> The AGPL was drafted in a different era where Cloud ecosystem was not nearly as well-developed. After deep legal analysis, many of the AGPL’s features were determined to be insufficient towards some of the requirements modern projects face.
> For example, much of the value for cloud-based software comes outside of the actual code (i.e. hosting) thereby nullifying many of the incentives to enforce source-availability. In addition, many of the AGPL's features can be more restrictive towards an end user that wishes to incorporate software into a new work, which makes a source-available license with additional grants more permissive.
That is when you hire the lawyer!
They seem to be ready to go closed source, which they should have just done in the first place instead of behaving like they did. Adding the commons clause is just the tip of the iceberg - there is a very entertaining story behind everything that is happening. A single person, not a huge corporation, is behind this.
I will write a blog post about what happened/is happening in the upcoming months - complete with supporting documents such as FOIA requests, etc.
Granted, I think it's safe to say Commons Clause wouldn't meet the old definitions you mentioned, or please the people who wrote them. But I don't think it's my place, as a lawyer, to tell coders what "open source" should mean.
As for the old definitions, I've consistently overestimated how much devs care. Frankly, I've overestimated definitions focusing on license terms as a general proposition. Partly as a result, I've reassessed how I channel those projects, and my desire to belong among those invested in them, through my practice. Clients assume what I say is legally grounded. My job is to hear them and help them. Not to cite them under someone else's client's PR program, or scare them straight with the hiss of a hot "proprietary" brand.
Like anything, I do actually think it's reasonable to say "i understand the history of why things are the way they are now, but i want to see if they still should be that way"[1].
It may even be a reasonable time to see if that's the case given how much people have forgotten. It's been 20+ years since the last go around.
However, i do think ATM we will arrive at the same outcome we have in the past - after all the kerfuffles, i don't see things like the commons clause sticking. I also personally wish they would try innovative things, instead of old, tired things, but such is life.
Otherwise, yeah, i agree that pretty much no business gives a shit in the end about the licensing term difference between open source/free software/what have you.
I also agree that your job is to advise people. I do feel comfortable complaining about what they do with that advice, however ;)
[1] I don't believe most of the folks involved in this understand the history, but that's secondary.
I don't have great hope for Commons Clause, either, at least at the moment. But I've had a few think-throughs, and I've yet to hear from those whose views I really need to feel complete on it.
As for old, tired things, I imagine some still await their time, with a bit of adaptation. Changed circumstances and all that. But I will also hold your comment on "innovative things" in my pocket. Should the HN beast come lumbering after any more of my own little licensing experiments, I may need it!
I am all for that. Do you have examples of what you are thinking of here?
DISCLAIMER: Views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent my employer in any way.
Believe it or don't, no license, no matter how clever, will allow you to be financially successful if you blow the business execution.
Let's turn this on its head: what was the business plan that RedisLabs re-invented itself under? Was it a good business plan? Is is vulnerability to Amazon/MS that made it fail, or was the plan flawed from the start?
I've read messages on OSI's mailing list that if you have to ask how your're going to make money making open source, you're the wrong person to make open source, and ought to make proprietary software, instead.
The fact that open source works to the benefit of the largest providers of software-related services by commoditizing software itself is not new with the rise of the cloud as a new and popular domain of software-related services. And the source available and free non-commercial and selective commercial use, but negotiate a separate license for commercial use that we want to monopolize model is not an innovative solution to that problem, and generally isn't all that successful of a solution, especially as a switch for software which already has open source versions available that third parties can fork and commercially exploit even after the change.
The anti-consulting provision in th Commons Clause license pretty clearly indicates that it's crafters do think that we are living in that world, and that (as numerous people have observed for at least a couple of decades) the advantage in that market with open source isn't necessarily with the developer but often with the entity with the most developed professional services organization and relationships.
> In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc).
I don't think that's actually a problem, nor do I think that, to the extent it is a problem, the Commons Clause really addresses it in any general way. Software with such a clause ab initio simply would not get wide adoption in “the cloudy world” you refer to; what the Commons Clause aims to solve is the problem of ”how to capture revenue via technical lock-in after first building broad adoption through the attractiveness of open source when you as a development firm haven't developed the capacities that would leave you well positioned to capture associated services sales with open source”. But it doesn't seem all that likely to be successful in more than the short term, since it incorporates the main problems of classic proprietary software in the cloud domain.
Granted: OSD, or rather the OSI-approved license list, rules in enterprise procurement at a particular and fairly common level of sophistication. At the same time, I've had conversations with sponsoring companies, prolific contributors, investment types, and others, mentioned OSD, received blank stares, explained, and then heard they don't care. Not relevant. Does not resonate. Different experiences.
I have never seen any good evidence to back your claim of a quiet OSI majority, except if you count open source consumers as an inevitable majority over open source producers, and ascribe the former to OSI. My own direct experience of open source licensing news and work has been a constant drumbeat of interest in refining and expanding licensing models. HESSLA. Fair Source. Now Commons Clause. Experiments. They're coming faster and faster.
Many of the folks advancing those proposals, like the one linked here, are also creating relevant software. From their point of view, claims that their work is "destructive" ring hollow, since they're constructing lots of code for others to use. They're especially irked by criticism in consumer-centric terms, like those of the OSD. After all, the OSD isn't a _license_ compatibility guide, but an _institutional_ compatibility list. It doesn't tell you which code you can get into an open project. By corporate handbook fiat, it tells you which code you can get into your company.
HESSLA and Fair Source both clearly state they are not open source, so I don't see how they go against rectang's point; the problem is not the existence of different models, but muddling the language to conflate them with the preceding one. That's essentially an EEE attack, and it's no wonder that existing OSS developers refuse to participate in it.
The push and pull between what doing open source is and what open source is supposed to mean has always gone two ways. If the status quo serves your needs, it's natural to cast "open source" as a rigorously bounded definitional category in the vein of "copyleft", and to downplay its social aspects. From a frustrated developer's point of view, it's natural to cast "open source" as a community first and foremost, and elide theory.
One point of view says, "We have this great definition to reference and rely upon, and you're trying to skim value and prestige off it." The other says, "We have all these people to celebrate and work with, and you're trying to claim their support while ignoring their needs."
Two extremes.
I encourage FOSSA to contact the Open Source Initiative, Open Tech Strategies, or another reputable free/libre and open source organisation to find a better solution to whatever problem it is that the Commons Clause is intended to address.
I'm pretty sure that problem is that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others have hosted Redis solutions, and even if they do contribute some code, they are undoubtedly making significant profit off of Redis, of which RedisLabs sees little if any. And since these companies have an oligopoly on cloud hosting, it is very difficult for RedisLabs to compete with these hosted solutions directly.
I know that Elastic has had similar issues.
I'm curious what better solutions you would have suggested would be. Clearly such solutions are not widely known among companies that produce open source software. https://opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php has a couple of paragraphs on how to monetize open source projects , but maybe OSI should publish more detailed strategies, as well as case studies of what has worked for different kinds of products, and what hasn't worked.
I don't love the Commons Clause, but I do understand the prbolem it is trying to solve. Maybe, (hopefully) all this backlash will lead to a better solution for RedisLabs and similar companies.
One last note: Perfect can be the enemy of good. Apache with Commons Clause might not be as good as the Apache 2 license, but it's still better than completely proprietary with no access to source. Perhaps the Commons Clause will be used (as it seems to be with Redis) for open-core style business models, where the core is under a more open OSI-approved license, but enterprise add-ons are licensed with the Commons Clause (or perhaps dual licensed) rather than the usual propriatary only license.
They chose a much more straightforward solution: some addons are clearly marked as commercial. No weasel words. We can debate whether the featureset of the core product vs. addons is a good one, but at least the message is clear. With this situation that redis got themselves into, the situation is much less clear.
What weasel words? They don't claim their license is FOSS. They do admit they are trying to make money. The wording of the license is a little vague, but I think the intent is pretty clear.
I think RedisLabs is going to be disappointed if they think making certain enterprise modules proprietary going forward is going to change that dynamic in a way which positively impacts their bottom line in the long term. While, sure, if everything remains he same except big cloud vendors pay some share of their revenue to RedisLabs for the use of those modules, that will be great for RedisLabs, I don't think that's the most likely outcome: forks (especially dangerous, a dominant single community fork with support from multiple cloud vendors and a broader community of contributors than the now-proprietary first-party version) from the last open version become a threat, as does lack of uptake of the affected modules and Redis in general by downstream developers, cloud providers, and end users, with people being driven to alternative solutions to the business problem.
Dual licensing as commercial and AGPL.
The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers. The OSI has certainly known of this problem since its founding in the late 90s, and as far as I can tell has no intention of helping solve it. For example, most recently Kyle Mitchel developed License Zero [0] as a way for open source developers to make money from their work, and presented it to the OSI for approval. It was rejected. Here is one of the comments from Bruce Perens [1].
> > What does an economically viable open source look like?
> My usual answer for this is that if you have to ask how you're going to make money, you're the wrong person to make Open Source. Nowhere in the mission of OSI is any mandate to provide authors with a viable business method.
[1] http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...
This is far from true in the case of Redis. Salvatore worked for VMware from 2010-2013 and Pivotal from 2013-2015. It was funded by these "large companies" that you speak of.
To my understanding, this was a sponsorship, ie a support contract to debug and improve an open source product VMware and Pivotal (same people, different name) were using and depending upon for their products.
AWS, on the other hand... With Elasticsearch and Redis... ;-)
That by itself is not necessarily a problem. There's lots of people using open source software without contributing back, and lots of open source contributors completely fine with it.
The problem, the one that Commons Clause appears to try to solve, is when the "freeloading" companies also threaten the viability of the company supporting the project. For example, if a project is developed by a company financing itself through providing commercial support for that project, then that only works if that company is the main player that companies in need of commercial support would go through (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat).
License Zero was rejected because it's not open source. It is, in fact, a business model for a specific startup (and, I'd argue, not for the writers of the code either).
Kyle had some other interesting ideas for licensing that could have been approved as open source, but was uninterested in pursuing them if they didn't support License Zero the business.
The last draft of License Zero Reciprocal posted to license-review works perfectly well on its own, without any dual licensing, and without any relationship to the business I formed. Its language wasn't any more coupled to a particular business model, or any business model at all, than AGPL's. If someone told you otherwise, they told you wrong.
I released the source code for licensezero.com itself under a successor to L0-R, without offering to sell any private licenses whatsoever. Anyone could use the terms similarly.
"License Zero was rejected because it's not open source" is tautological. And, alas, that's mostly in line with my experience of the license-review process. Some great folks offered back-and-forth, and were willing to explore. But that was largely drowned out by bare conclusions, and the drama that flared up whenever I tried to probe them.
In summary: "Open source" is not a business model and is not concerned with them. For information and guidance on business models, check with Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan, and other reputable business publications.
Specifically the problem of multi-billion dollar companies profiting from open-source software without giving anything back in a parasitic relationship.
Nothing exists in isolation, and open-source isn't a magical exception to that.
The same that is gained by not selling cat meat labelled as hare. Clear concepts protect everyone, both developers and users. Muddling them only helps scammers. New models are great - as long as it's clear that they're new.
Edit: Or rather, incentivized contributions, or disincentivized a lack of contribution
Redis Labs is not a sponsor (but is welcome to become one). Despite that, had they come to OSI looking for assistance with this issue we could have helped open discussions between them and their largest users. They did not ask us for help, to the best of my knowledge. Redis Labs' post does not mention what, if any, attempts they made to engage these large users and encourage more contributions before they made the decision to put this software under a proprietary license, and only implies that a lack of contributions was the motivator for the move.
Giving OSI money isn't giving Redis Labs money. I don't imagine OSI will be sending any of that money Redis Labs' way. On the other hand, OSI's activities will benefit its sponsors. One way: by constraining approved terms to licenses, like ancient permissive licenses, with poor upstart-business potential, but all the permission grants established enterprises require to mulch the remains of dead startups that result.
I'd be willing to bet Redis Labs is contemplating return to ash pretty seriously these days.
More contributions will not solve the problem. They may defer RL's trip into liquidation, but at the expense of a quicker boot out of the top spot on their own project. That, in turn, bodes ill for acquisition. Even if outsiders reduce maintenance and development cost to $0, that's savings, not earnings or recoupment.
If Redis Labs folds, that's sad for them and I'm sure I'll end up writing some references for people.
But it's only a concern for open source if Redis stops being maintained as a result. Which I seriously doubt would happen; Salvatore built Redis before Redis Labs existed, and I'm sure would land a job at one of those "established enterprises" if they fold.
Maybe we should be more focused on how the VC-funded startup model is actually reinforcing the power of established players, instead of messing around with licenses?
VC-funded startups produce a substantial amount of open source. If what we see at the tail end of this funding boom is a bunch of startups doing open source fail structurally, rather than merely by falling short of numbers, VCs will notice. There will be less funding for startups on any kind of open source model. And therefore less open source.
When we look at projects and define success only in terms of project continuity, and not individual outcomes, we dodge the question of why folks should get involved in the first place. Some baseline motivation will always be there from the bottom, from hobbyists, activists, and the obsessed, and the top, where enterprises use open source for cost reduction and cost sharing. Whether anyone shows up in the middle has a huge effect on what open source achieves, as a movement. And to what extent open source represents a viable opportunity to proprietary products and services.
This single line completely destroys any confidence I have in Commons Clause. I will avoid any project with this license moving forward until this is fixed. It's embarrassing that I'm being told that the time & energy I've invested in deploying this software (redis in particular) will now be rewarded with the inability to commoditize that experience through consulting. No thanks.
I'm also a bit unclear on whether this would prevent you from selling consulting services for products licensed under this clause that the paying customer deployed themselves or were deployed by someone other than you.
Full disclosure: Am a Redis Labs employee, although not here in any official capacity.
> Consequently, we decided to add Commons Clause to certain components of open source Redis
Are these components distributed with open source redis core that I can download & compile from @antirez/redis? This whole bit is confusing an doesn't answer what components are covered and in what distributions e.g. source vs. packaged.
If there's anything we should have learned from the React licensing fiasco, it's that the open source community doesn't screw around when it comes to the critical software systems we've adopted on the good faith of the licenses they included.
The new clause is mainly used for some of the add-on Redis modules developed by Redis Labs (https://github.com/RedisLabsModules), all of which you would need to pull in manually and intentionally.
I totally get the confusion. The good news is that, at least as far as I can see, you should never find yourself accidentally pulling in something without meaning to that brings along this restriction clause.
Can you explain the thought process with regards to why it's okay for you to receive compensation for your efforts, but not the OSS developer who invested significantly more time (nine years, in the case of Redis) in creating the product?
What will you do as a technology practitioner if more projects move to this model to provide some semblance of financial support for their devs? Write your own RDBMS? Your own in-memory caches? I won't discount these paths as impossible, but it increases your costs and time to market significantly.
Standing on the shoulder of giants is both efficient and convenient when building your product/stack by bolting together existing tooling (what products aren't using Redis/Memcached, MySQL/MariaDB/Postgresql, ElasticSearch, etc), but it should have a cost; those shoulders aren't free, and it's not reasonable that those enjoying easy revenue (AWS, for example) by providing managed services with these tools don't have to share that revenue. You can't freeload forever.
The consultant isn't selling the product; they're selling a complement to the product: knowledge of how to use the product effectively in the client's circumstances. But complementary goods don't substitute for each other. Paying a consultant for Redis expertise doesn't buy you the functionality of Redis itself.
So if Redislabs deserves to be the only Redis consultancy in existence, the argument has to be that not only do they deserve the exclusive right to profit from the sale of their intellectual property, they also deserve an exclusive right to profit from other people's expertise with their product. But why should anyone accept that?
They might be within their legal rights to impose such a condition in a license (IANAL), but there's not a strong ethical justification for the position.
Your issue is not with my attitude, it is with copyright law and property rights. Someone's right to license their software any way they see fit is not "toxic". You take issue to an erosion of rights that do not exist, and your participation in an ecosystem is voluntary. At it's core, you are demanding the ability to govern your use of property that is not yours.
EDIT: I don't believe the law to be unjust as to how it relates to copyright, code ownership, and licensing. We've reached an impasse.
EDIT: Since you've edited your comment to elaborate I'll respond in kind:
If by default I have the legal right to reverse engineer your software, and you can strip this from me with a 'contract' that amounts to a checkbox with text that nobody reads and therefore has no marginal cost to add enforceable boilerplate to, that is a basic perversion of the intent of contract law. Contract laws start from the premise that a contract should protect both parties. One sided contracts are in general antithetical to the goals of contract law:
https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-an-un...
A boilerplate click through disclaimer should not be able to prevent me from taking actions that the vendor finds inconvenient but are otherwise legal and nonviolent.
EDIT 2: To clarify, the portion cited as an "edit" above:
"EDIT: I don't believe the law to be unjust as to how it relates to copyright, code ownership, and licensing. We've reached an impasse. "
Was not the full extent of editing of the parent comment, which had significant text added between me replying and its present state.
Such a suggestion is preposterous and should kill any company adopting it immediately.
You could go build your own infrastructure software, of course, that is a valid path forward. But will it be of the same quality at the same (or similar) cost? Most likely not. Will someone provide an alternative to Redis out of disdain for this? Probably. But it will take years, if not longer, to reach feature, stability, and therefore market parity.
And in the interim, cloud providers will pay or have to front the costs to build their own. And that's what this is all about: internalizing the externality of providers getting a free ride.
They absolutely are. And I'm free to say that their license is ridiculous and do my best to warn others about the potential pitfalls of their license.
>You could go build your own infrastructure software, of course, that is a valid path forward. But will it be of the same quality at the same (or similar) cost?
Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't matter. If Redis continues down this path, then enough developers are going to stop using Redis that any free alternative, even though it might start off weaker, will quickly become the superior option. Look at MySQL vs. MariaDB. Or OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. In both cases, Oracle (no coincidence that it's Oracle in both cases) took over a very popular, well established open source project and engaged in license shenanigans. In both cases, the community rebelled, forked the project, and the fork quickly superseded its parent.
>Will someone provide an alternative to Redis out of disdain for this? Probably. But it will take years, if not longer, to reach feature, stability, and therefore market parity.
Not true. You have to remember that the new license only applies to Redis going forward. I'm free to take my copy of the old Redis codebase, fork it into something, say, NuCache, and hack on that to try to keep up with and surpass Redis. That's exactly what happened with the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork. That's exactly what happened with MySQL/MariaDB fork. And if redis continues with its ill-advised policy, that's what will happen here.
At the risk of repeating myself all over this thread, I feel the need to emphasize that the new license does _not_ apply to Redis proper, which, in the words of the post, "is, and always will remain, an open source BSD license."
Full disclosure: Am a Redis Labs employee, although not here in any official capacity.
Your boss has bait-and-switched once now. That's enough for everybody who cares to start risk managing future similar behaviour.
True! But that means today's Redis is in maintenance mode, with all new commercially-relevant features covered under the new license.
Moreover, that assumes that said commercially relevant features are compelling enough for people to upgrade from the unencumbered version of redis that they have to the encumbered version.
Monetization shouldn't be a four letter word. People need to pay their rent and eat.
But I can't imagine sitting down one day thinking "you know, nobody else should be allowed to do what I did". It's a big world with a lot of potential clients and employers out there. There's room for anyone who wants to get good with Django to put that knowledge to use to make a living, and I don't see any justification for trying to stop them.
If this were the standard sort of "we trademarked the name, and you can't use it as the name of your product" that a lot of larger open-source projects do (including Django, FWIW), I'd be more sympathetic. But trying to forbid people offering consulting or hosted "I set it it up for you" type services? That's a massive grab of other people's knowledge and labor, and I can't support it even a little tiny bit.
And now that the open source community has done all the hard work of making libraries available in every language, fighting to get it adopted within our organizations, recommending it to our friends & peers, writing blog posts & tutorials, evangelizing it to our clients, and creating so much demand that AWS & GC both offer it, suddenly this company with ZERO responsibility for its success now wants to try and profit from an ecosystem it had no hand it creating.
I'm more than happy to pay for good commercial software that helps me run my business and have happily spent many tens of millions over the years doing so. But I'm not going to tolerate this bait-and-switch bullshit from a company that's trying to pretend it invented redis just because it employs antirez.
That makes it the most overreaching of any software license I have ever encountered, including those from Oracle.
Imaginary property has nothing to do with property rights. Those are about real property.
I know someone who have had their life ruined by having their projects monetized out from beneath them by others; there is emotion behind those comments that shouldn't have been there. It happens to the best of us. I apologize for disappointing, and understand if I've lost your respect.
So if this license had existed from the beginning, Redis Labs wouldn't exist. See the problem?
Why would you intentionally give birth to such an abomination? This adds no value to the world whatsoever and is just going to confuse people and harm the overall Open Source ecosystem. I'd encourage you to retract this whole idea, stuff it in a hole, "salt and burn it" and try to pretend this whole thing never happened.
If you care about putting pressure on Cloud providers vis-a-vis use of F/OSS, there is always the tried and true "AGPL or commercial license" combination. Why not just use that?
Let's say the Apache Foundation adopts this for all of its projects. Now what?
Personally, people can use whatever license they want for their copyrighted works; that's cool. But the other important issue is: don't call it the "Apache-whatever license", because it is NOT the #Apache-2.0 license. Call it the "Redis License" or whatever else you want, just don't bring the ASF's name into it.
In the longer run, there will need to be a happy middle ground for people to
Fixed it for you. I'm waiting to read antirez comments.
If the goal is to monetize the Redis Labs modules, why not just put them under straightforwards proprietary licenses? This is a well-trodden and well-understood path.
This Commons Clause combines the twin mistakes of being both offensive and ineffective. It will get Redis pulled out of many OSS repositories, decreasing your distribution and mindshare. At the same time, I can see Amazon and Microsoft lawyers laughing at it now; it will do zero to prevent them from building their own cloud offerings.
I really have to wonder about the quality of advice that FOSSA is providing to its clients if it went ahead with this. You say 'OSS-savvy companies aren't dumb' but it seems like the consultants of FOSSA are, or they are counting on everyone else in the industry being gullible.
(and before you play the "consider the poor OSS developer" on me, I worked on Postgres for 18 years, and we never pulled this kind of nonsense)
Microsoft already tried this with its "Shared Source" nonsense, an attempt to reap the marketing benefits of Open Source while actually opening anything. If Microsoft couldn't pull it off with their $billions in marketing funds, why on Earth do you think Redis Labs can?
(yes, the Shared Source program still exists, but it's no longer Microsoft's answer to Open Source, but just a way of handling required government disclosure of their older proprietary products. It's pretty clear to anyone who follows MS now that they consider Shared Source to have been a complete flop)
You didn't answer many (any) questions.
Here's mine, why is this needed? Redis could have adopted AGPL as the base license which would have effectively prevented any cloud vendors from using it as a manged service. For those companies, Redis could have provided a paid proprietary option.
Why even bother with this?
Did you completely fail to learn from experience, or are you pretending? https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/nextcloud/
Does an artist stop painting because they aren't selling enough paintings? Did Linus stop making the kernel because he "created a lot of value" that big companies didn't compensate him for? He should be a billionaire by now, but he did fine for himself, so he didn't care that people were making billions off his creation. He made it because he needed it, but also because he loved programming. Deeply passionate people just do.
Not everyone can be passionate. But please don't pat these developers on the back for being capitalists.Right now they're just upset that they aren't making more cash, and are sticking it to the cloud providers out of spite.
Google didn't have to open source Kubernetes. They did it because they knew the power of open source is in the community. [1] If Docker had a "commons clause", imagine how limited the technology we use would be today.
The fact that this license stifles contribution to and use of the software is important, because it will probably evolve until no commercial use is allowed at all - without a paid license. Back to the good 'ol days of proprietary software companies.
And even if you're not a company, but you're a consultant who gets paid to set up a cluster for someone else, this license could be construed as preventing that consultant from getting paid for setting up the software. I'm not willing to be taken to court, so I'm not touching this software with a ten foot pole. If a company uses it, I won't work with that company.
[1] https://www.computerworlduk.com/cloud-computing/why-did-goog...
They open sourced it for pragmatic reason. In some sense, kubernetes is an open source cloud infra, and in this way it prevents AWS from monopolizing the market.
FYI, think you have a typo, shouldn't it be "Common Clause" not "Common Cause".
2. In fact the GPLv3 is the improved and recommended variant of the APGL. They should have switched to the GPLv3 instead, and would have avoided this misleading and wrong headed discussions, where people are mostly mixing up redis with RedisLab modules and have no idea about APGL vs GPLv3.
Just to name a few :
- Elastic
- Docker
- CockRoachDB
This licence is a disguised "Oracle" intellectual property.
This what Oracle has been doing for years and bring them billions in revenue.
It ensure that one way or another you'll pay $$$ to the vendor of the tech.
Most of these companies quoted above are not profitable and are trying to find a way to be profitable.
With this licence it allows them to charge $$$ and to have full control over the IP for and become the sole allowed provider for consulting / support / training and basically anything that is related to this technology.
This is proprietary software with an "unlimited trial" edition and source code hosted on Github.
Software which uses this model is not open source, plain and simple. This is a disgrace on our community and I am sorely disappointed in you and in Redis.
What pushes OSS devs to cease being OSS devs is an important problem to solve, but one I think we were making great progress on. "Solving" it with the destruction of open source is a despicable thing.
The commons "clause" isn't a clause at all, it's a rape of an otherwise good license. I fear you've already let it into your head that your cause is a noble one and that you'll be unwilling to undo the damage you've done, but if you have a conscience I urge you to shut down this bastardization of open source.
Happy to answer questions here (or on Twitter @kevinverse).
I wanted to write a blog post to set some context because the real story is a lot less salacious then "Redis just went proprietary", but here's a quick summary:
1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It's only some enterprise modules. The Commons Clause is mostly used to temporarily transition enterprise offering counterparts of OSS projects to source-available.
2/ OSS projects are mainly funded by some proprietary offering or service on top of it. Anything to help the ability to monetize this layer is really good, as the fate of the project is directly tied to this revenue stream. A quick reminder, companies like Redis sink 10s of millions into RnD and are usually contributing over 99% of the code to these repos.
3/ OSS-savvy companies aren't dumb. They understand the optics of any licensing announcement and carefully consider what it will mean. Before we react, we should push ourselves to understand what systems are forcing deeply passionate OSS devs to consider more proprietary options.