Re:License Changes for Confluent Platform
by nine_k on Friday December 14, 2018 @11:55AM
(#18682264)
Why, the source is open. You can use it to look for bugs, to make your own optimized / customized / verified build, etc.
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.
Re:License Changes for Confluent Platform
by mindcrime on Friday December 14, 2018 @12:08PM
(#18682403)
"Open Source" has a very specific meaning[1], that goes beyond the mere availability of the source code. And these terms violate article 6 of the OSD, meaning that code licensed this way is not Open Source.
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.
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.