The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by chriswarbo on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @11:28AM (#17819370)

What do you mean by "restrictive" and "openness" here? In particular, how does business and profit affect this? Would it maybe help to distinguish between the goals of Free Software (user freedom) and Open Source (abundance of high quality, royalty free code)?

> AGPL is somewhat successful here, because big corporations already ban its use internally

The word "because" is confusing me here. As far as I'm aware, the goal of AGPL is the same as that of the GPL: protect the freedoms of users (specifically the FSF's "four freedoms"); the difference is that GPL considers "users" to be those who run the software and AGPL also considers those who interact with the software.

There's nothing about preventing business use; although I believe that in dual-licensed projects, the extra stipulations of the AGPL may boost the appeal of the alternative license. Is that what you were getting at?

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by quadrangle on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @11:55AM (#17819587)

I think the AGPL point is to say that there is not a need for an anti-commercial license if the AGPL effectively stops the things you're aiming to restrict.

AGPL isn't perfect, but obviously neither is a non-open, non-free anti-commerce clause.

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by dragonwriter on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @11:57AM (#17819615)

AGPL didn't stop cloud hosting providers from offering hosted serviced with the Redis modules at issue, though, because either they weren't making modifications or they weren't deterred by the requirement to share.

RedisLabs wants money, not sharing, from this kind of downstream use, so AGPL doesn't work.

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by quadrangle on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @02:24PM (#17820741)

I agree that AGPL is not a complete anti-commerce license. It doesn't stop all forms of commercial use nor try to. It's unclear that stopping such use (without separate permissiong) will result in more money for the original project, but that's not impossible.

I was just clarifying the point being made above about AGPL.

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by servilio on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @01:43PM (#17820439)

No license can work where it isn't used, AGPL included. Redis has been licensed under BSD 3-clause since at least version 2.2[1].

[1] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/2.2/COPYING

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by quadrangle on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @02:25PM (#17820746)

I think the point is that there had been separate modules that were AGPL but still being used…?

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by chriswarbo on Thursday August 23, 2018 @07:33AM (#17826326)

Looks like it, according to https://redislabs.com/blog/why-redis-labs-modules-are-agpl

> We wanted to keep our modules open source, so that everyone can freely use them, enhance them and fix issues. On the other hand, we are a commercial entity that invests a lot of time, effort and money developing these modules and verifying they can work under extreme deployment conditions. Therefore, we wanted to make sure no one else can resell them for commercial purposes.

That last sentence is key: it shows the preamble to be a smokescreen, since they're explicitly stating that they're against the literal number 1 criterion of open source (as per https://opensource.org/osd ):

> 1. Free Redistribution

> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

This condition appears before any related to source code. In other words, RedisLabs are pulling the classic "we want our software to be proprietary, but we also want other people to fix our bugs for free" (see also "Shared Source" and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software ).

They thought releasing under the AGPL would strike that balance, but it turns out it didn't so they've now gone to a proprietary license like they always wanted.

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