An open source project can (and some do) require copyright assignment such that there is a single owner who can re-license at will. It's a fair thing to do: would-be contributors know this is happening and can choose to not participate.

I have no objection to owners taking a codebase proprietary. It doesn't change the fact that earlier versions stay open source and third parties (including the community) can still fork them if they want to. That's because have no objection to proprietary codebases to begin with, even though I appreciate open source, use open source, and prefer to make my code open source.

Open source is not an end for me, but a means to: a) establish/burnish the authors' reputations, b) benefit from third parties' contributions in-kind. Monetization is not so much dependent on whether a codebase is open source or proprietary, nor on its license, but on the codebase's value (to others) including the value of future development on that codebase.

Monetizing infrastructure software can be very difficult, especially when it is a commodity, but SQLite3 has succeeded at that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819950

>An open source project can (and some do) require copyright assignment such that there is a single owner who can re-license at will. It's a fair thing to do: would-be contributors know this is happening and can choose to not participate.

I spoke directly to this point in my article, grep for "CLA".

>but SQLite3 has succeeded

Note that SQLite3 succeeded and is open source.

Yes, I thought both of those points were clear enough. The first I wanted to make here in the comments, and the second I thought I mentioned SQLite3 is in the public domain...

I think inverting the power structure between maintainers and contributors is good for openness. The tradeoff here is it makes the project harder to govern and maintain, which an have its own unintended consequences.

The Clause was drafted as a reactionary move to solve against specific bad behavior. I'm not entirely sure it's my place to call out these actors (I'll leave that to the users of the Clause), but our job was to open up an option that isn't quite "screw this, let's go full closed source".

See the commons clause FAQ for answers to your other questions:

https://commonsclause.com/

No, it's not bad behavior, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of open source economic models, and a desire to have your cake and eat it too.

I will steal an argument from a friend who has been doing free software/open source for 30+ years now.

Y'all created a bunch of open source software, it became valuable. Y'all think that you should get to extract some percentage of that value, and that others being able to do it instead is "bad behavior".

But this is very very wrong, and if that is your understanding of open source, you really should say screw it, and take your ball elsewhere. Try it. See if you can create the same amount of value.

In fact, it is your attempt to "extract your share" that is the bad behavior. You cannot, in fact, have your cake and eat it too. If you and others all get to extract your "fair share", that software will cease to exist. This is not theoretical, this is what has happened every time. That is because the value exists because you made the software free. If you didn't, people would have used something else that was free and worked well enough. Also not theoretical. When i review diligence from companies as part of M&A, the vast majority (90-99%) of software is free software, not commercial software.

This paradox has existed since free/open source/etc software was created. The solution traditionally is for developers to just be happy creating cool software and making a living on it. I have rarely, if ever, seen this fail to work at the scale seen here. It certainly fails in smaller scales, but you are not solving that problem even a little.

Instead these claims of bad behavior only seem to come up when people see a billion dollar ecosystem and think they deserve 50% of it.

You are pretty much never going to get anyone worked up over that. Because they shouldn't be. Of all the injustice in this world, this doesn't even register.

Vaguely similar prior art, similar in motivation, similarly flawed, IMO: Monty's Business Source license.

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-sou...

That received a lot of criticism from its community as well, but also from existing MariaDB Corp customers. I know because I worked for one at the time that was seriously considering stopping the level of collaboration we had. We were quite sad about that at the time and decided to not go that far but instead stopped giving additional funding to the extensions that we were interested in.

Many conditions of a project can change when it goes from being a small community to a business that supports billions of revenue with its software.

Ultimately, the Clause is not meant to transition an open source project with the intention of staying open, it's to keep as much openness as possible when events happen that force a project to close certain things.

I think a lot of the fear is that this will make a lot of open projects close up. This is not the case. Other things are forcing projects to close, and ignoring those forces and blaming it on evil investors and business people is not only disconnected from reality -- it's a really sad an un-empathetic view towards those that _actually_ develop this software (actually = git commit history).

> Other things are forcing projects to close, and ignoring those forces and blaming it on evil investors and business people is not only disconnected from reality -- it's a really sad an un-empathetic view

Please, please clarify what those 'other things' are.

Both the Commons Clause FAQ and your comments here repeatedly imply this is about handling "specific bad behavior", "other things... forcing projects to close", and "the most predatory of use cases". But nowhere is there any clarity about what these dark forces are. What's 'predatory'? Are we talking about harassment by contributors? Extortion by lawsuit? Cloud hosting for a fee? Just contributors undercutting the business offerings?

The only motive explicitly clarified in the FAQ is the need to monetize, which is what Drew's piece challenged. In response there's this suggestion that the clause is actually defensive against some sort of attack by contributors and so it won't affect most people. In the comments here, you've said it's not your place to call out specific actors, but haven't given any example of what sort of behavior you mean.

It sounds like there's a real problem here, deeper than "we want to make money like RedisLabs", but this conversation is hopeless as long as that problem goes unstated. I don't think it's fair to say people are being un-empathetic to actual developers when no one can understand what situation we're supposed to be showing empathy about.

> It sounds like there's a real problem here, deeper than "we want to make money like RedisLabs", but this conversation is hopeless as long as that problem goes unstated. I don't think it's fair to say people are being un-empathetic to actual developers when no one can understand what situation we're supposed to be showing empathy about.

This.

I wish I could upvote this twice. That was well put.

What "bad behavior"? Was anybody doing anything that was prohibited by the terms of the previous license(s)? If not, then the real "problem" is that somebody made a bad choice w/r/t licensing. The solution is to switch to an existing license which has the desired terms, OR - as an absolute last resort - create a new license. Preferably the former, as the latter adds to license proliferation, creates confusion, contributes to FUD around open source, etc.

And if one is going to create a new license, they should just create a complete license, in it's entirety. Creating an "add-on" that can be tacked on the the ALv2 or other licenses, which goes completely against the nature of Open Source, is absurd.

This RedisLabs link explains the kind of bad behavior this clause aims to prevent. As I understand it, the bad guys here are cloud providers.

[1]: https://redislabs.com/community/licences/

So in effect Redis has moved from a traditional community project (by the community, for the community—where RedisLabs is part of that community) to a please-do-my-work-for-me project (by the community, for RedisLabs).

RedisLabs is about to experience in real time just how quickly a community can abandon software and embrace a fork or competitor. Which is stupid, because many other projects have gone through the exact same process.

So cloud providers who take a piece of open source software, install it, upgrade it, and generally maintain its operation in order to provide a service to their customers, billing the service, are now the bad guys?

Sounds like somebody needs to re-evaluate their business model to me, and it's not the cloud providers.

This attempt to have the cake and eat it too is dumb.

Again, what was happening that was a violation of the license terms? As I read it, nothing. That's not "bad behavior". That's "I chose the wrong license for my project".

I agree that this seems like what the Commons Clause is intended for. But it looks to me like it just validates Drew's concerns?

The complaint here is "Redis is only making money for people who host and manage it, not people who develop it". The proposed solution looks to be "ensure these modules are making money for RedisLabs instead". RedisLabs wanted to profit from their work and stop others from doing so, so they adopted a not-OSS license.

Fine, but the framing of bad behavior and a threat to open source doesn't make much sense to me. It looks like exactly what Drew described; funding OSS development is tricky, but RedisLabs responded by giving up on doing OSS. Kevin's FAQ and comments in this thread imply some much darker bad behavior than that, with things like "predatory uses" and "forced to close". If it's just "AWS hosts Redis for a fee", that doesn't seem justified.

> However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects.

The complaint seems to just be masking “Google, AWS, et al. don't give us, a competing cloud provider that took over a pre-existing open source project, money” beyond a smokescreen of misleading generalizations.

>The Clause was drafted as a reactionary move to solve against specific bad behavior. I'm not entirely sure it's my place to call out these actors

Still frustratingly vauge. Without this information I can't assume The Commons Clause is working in good faith. At least you can speak to the types of behaviors, rather than the specific actors, which led to this?

>See the commons clause FAQ for answers to your other questions

I specifically refered to your website in my comment and called out the summary there as insufficient. Can you elaborate on it here on HN?

I share your concern, if the "Commons Clause" (misleading name, IMO) became widespread enough, it could be somewhat of a virus that people may add to their Github projects, possibly causing a lack of clarity what license terms it's really under. It's even worse than a distinct new license in my opinion, as software might be advertised as "being under the Apache license" when it really has additional non-libre terms on it.

I don't know why he doesn't comment on it when it's already written on the Commons Clause FAQ. He thinks the "bad guys" are the cloud providers.

https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/

"However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions dollars in revenues from them. Already, this behavior has damaged open source communities and put some of the companies that support them out of business."

Unless you can describe the bad behaviour in question, it just looks like an attempt to make more proprietary software for personal gain.

The FAQ does not answer the patent comment's good questions.

Why have you chosen a name so similar to Creative Commons, when you seem to prefer the term Source Available from a descriptive point of view?

Frankly, it just sounds like an attempt to pass off software licensed under this abhorrent license term as Creative Commons.

It is often said that if you don't call people out for bad behavior, you enable it, and them.

This?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omert%C3%A0

also called Conspiracy of Silence