Yes, Heather is very well known and very smart. She's a hired gun (with no offense meant).

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.

> 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).

Agreed on that, based on just reading one of her books. I wonder why didn't they choose AGPL.

It looks like they were using AGPL before, but now they are switching to Commons Clause. See the history of the RedisSearch license, for example.

https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/RediSearch/commits/maste...

Yep, now I see this vague explanation on https://commonsclause.com :

> 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.

Thanks, that makes sense. It seems like an awful lot of effort to put into such a transparent (even without the legal issues) and pointless bit of dissembling. Lots of people plainly sell open source + proprietary parts products without much fuss from anyone.

> Why would one be involved in such a thing, given it's so problematic?

That is when you hire the lawyer!