Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source
by marcinzm on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @10:46AM
(#17819034)
Reminds me of Databricks, the company founded by the Apache Spark creators. More and more of what they do is fully proprietary and at least one their previously OSS module is now proprietary (Redshift integration). They also boast of how much faster their cloud offering (running on top of AWS) is than other Spark cloud versions (running on top of AWS) which makes me suspect there's performance improvements that they're not open sourcing.
Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source
by rectang on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @11:40AM
(#17819461)
Since Spark is a project at Apache, though, if someone wants to contribute a Redshift integration module to Spark, no one cannot stop them.
Projects at the ASF are governed by a Project Management Committee drawn from the wider community -- not a single company, not a steering committee where seats are bought.
The ASF is a 501(c)(3) charity, which means that monetary contributions are tax-deductible and therefore very limited in what they can be used for. The ASF cannot unduly privilege any particular commercial entity.
Credit to companies, like Databricks, who choose to participate in ASF projects under these constraints.
The current development path does seem to favor modules - a slim core with the functionality added as modules.