Nobody is saying that it is.
The community license is additional features free for use but not for you to provide as a managed service.
IOW, "not Open Source". And that's fine... a company has a right to create software using any licensing terms they want. But making something that's "almost OSS, but not quite" and trying to steal the sheen of respectability that comes from being OSS, while not actually being OSS, is disingenuous and misleading.
Additionally, license proliferation in general is a Bad Thing because it muddles the issue around what's really Open Source and what isn't, especially for new-comers.
The world is evolving and so open source should also evolve with it.
Not all evolutionary steps are good things, in real life, or in metaphor-space.
until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors.
There have always been people who used OSS without contributing back. There's nothing novel about this w/r/t cloud providers. And it's very questionable how you can consider somebody a "bad actor" for using a project under the terms that it was explicitly licensed under.
The change applies to making the running code available in certain ways, not to access to the source.
I wonder how "free as in freedom" such software is, though. OTOH AGPL is considered "free software" by GNU, so this likely is, too.
And yes, yes, I know the old saw that "The OSI doesn't have a trademark on Open Source". That's irrelevant. In practical terms, the de-facto definition of "Open Source" is the OSD.
Some of these projects wouldn't exist without commercial support, so it's not a clear cut issue, but I get why people are bothered by it.
In theory Apache projects are supposed to exist in such a way that one vendor doesn't dominate all the decision making and development. In reality, it's not uncommon for a given vendor to have outsized influence on a given project. See: Ambari and Hortonworks, for example.
I don't follow Kafka development super closely, but I believe Confluent do have significant influence, but I'm not sure if it's to an extent that could be considered dangerous or not.
This is literally the point of Open Source. It is "Free Software" repackaged for business people who hate ideals and morals as part of the story for the development of software.
http://deblanc.net/blog/2018/12/13/the-osd-and-user-freedom/
"Methods of development are tools being used to protect software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom. User freedom, and what we get from that, is what’s valuable."
But Open Source and Free Software are not synonyms, as the rest of the article shows.
Open Source cannot account for itself or for why anything other than "having the source" is necessary. Free Software cannot accept just "having the source" on locked-down systems.
As the article shows, "Open Source" confuses epiphenomena (source availability) and affordances (collaborative development) of Free Software with its primary goal.
We see that confusion mislead people time and time again. It's doing so elsewhere in this discussion.
So if Open Source was named not to help corporations avoid talking about freedom but to avoid confusing people it has failed in its intended as well as its adopted usage.
> software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom
is AFAIK an assumption, or has this ever been proven?
I mean, isn't it entirely possible that helping software startups protect their business model of whatever "near-enough" OS/free software they build will help user freedom more than taking a purist OSS stance and leaving it all up for grabs by Amazon, Alibaba etc.? Because of increased choice and competition?
There's clear distinction and delineation between these. To an outside observer this might seem confusing and nuanced. In which case use the apache 2 licensed software which should unquestionably be open source and free. But otherwise those building businesses around open source technology have to find a way to protect against cloud providers. Licensing innovation is the only path forward right now until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors.