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For the record, this license is obviously incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines; I suspect it is non-free enough to not even be shipped by Red Hat and the other semi-commercial *nix's.
Hi folks. Kevin from http://fossa.io here. I worked on bringing the Commons Clause to life ( https://commonsclause.com/ ) and led many of the project efforts here. Happy to answer questions here (or on Twitter @kevinverse). I wanted to write a blog post to set some context because the real story is a lot less salacious then "Redis just went proprietary", but here's a quick summary: 1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It'…
No restrictions on fields of endeavor and no discrimination is a pretty basic tenent that goes back a long long time (the DFSG were published in 1997, there are other things saying the same thing that pre-date it).
I also know this is what other open source lawyers are saying as well (in fact, i haven't seen one who believes it is anything else).
I'm sure you can make up another word other than "proprietary" to call it, but ...
As for questions: The main commons clause page makes the claim "Initiated by a coalition of top infrastructure software companies to protect their rights"
Care to list them?
Additionally, even ignoring the significant vagueness in the clause, there are plenty of combinations of licenses with which this clause makes literally no sense. It seems there is no guide or policing of these. Truthfully, this all does not feel well thought out. Who actually participated in the drafting?
Here is one that exists in practice:
neo4j is commons clause + AGPLv3
AGPLv3 section 7: If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.
...
GPLv3 is identical in this respect, and LGPLv3 is a set of permissions on top of GPLV3 that does not revoke this clause.
This seems to make commons clause incompatible with a lot of software.
Hi folks. Kevin from http://fossa.io here. I worked on bringing the Commons Clause to life ( https://commonsclause.com/ ) and led many of the project efforts here. Happy to answer questions here (or on Twitter @kevinverse). I wanted to write a blog post to set some context because the real story is a lot less salacious then "Redis just went proprietary", but here's a quick summary: 1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It'…
This is untrue for the simple reason that you will be unable to apt-get install this software directly from Linux distros with a policy of including only FOSS.
Or, more generally - the value of FOSS is in the opportunities for public collaboration and redistribution. If you think you're doing the vast majority of the development work anyway and you want people to get packages from you anyway, great, there's no need for an open-source license at all: just provide source, allow people to make private modifications, and allow people to send fixes back to you. If you value the open source ecosystem, though, cutting yourself off from it is a bad plan.
Any software with a restrictive license of any kind will eventually be replaced by software with a more liberal license.
Who would waste thousands of man hours to write a Redis replacement for free, only to have it taken by large tech companies to rake in revenue through managed offerings?
So if you're a cloud provider that provides generic cloud VMs, with a button to "Install Redis onto VM", is that allowed? What if it's one of hundreds of similar buttons to install various software onto the VM? What if there's no button, but a user can run `apt-get install redis`? Is that in violation?
Yikes, the wording around consulting seems especially worrisome - are they effectively prohibiting third parties from providing redis technical support? This move will likely kill the project as it is today.
On the other hand, it will definitely scare away users of their software who will be concerned that their CRUD app derives "substantial" value from it and is thus infringing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would waste thousands of man hours to write a Redis replacement for free, only to have it taken by large tech companies to rake in revenue through managed offerings?
It's an in-memory key-value store. Its primary function is to let transient processes not have to hit the disk to update state. Go ahead and write one this weekend, in that shiny new language that you're interested in, and then finish it up by adjusting the redis bindings of a popular CMS to work with your daemon as well.
Wow, so many negative comments here. I for one applaud the move -- a license like this has been needed for a long time. Slightly (un)related, but I don't understand why in a forum full of software developers it is the consensus that all infrastructure software must be free (as in beer)? What are you guys planning to live off once that dream has finally been realised?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how the core Linux folks make money? Or the organization running node?