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Commons Clause

redislabs.com

91–100 of 496 posts

Re: Commons Clause

#93
post #58

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'…

Hi, Kevin. VM Brasseur from https://opensource.org here. It's disappointing to see FOSSA, which claims it exists to assist companies with open source management, publish and encourage use of a clause that very clearly removes projects from the pool of open source alternatives. To do so by using the word "Commons" in the title adds insult to injury and borders on wilful deception, removing software from the commons as it does.

I encourage FOSSA to contact the Open Source Initiative, Open Tech Strategies, or another reputable free/libre and open source organisation to find a better solution to whatever problem it is that the Commons Clause is intended to address.

Re: Commons Clause

#94

This seems aimed at cloud hosting provider that currently get the tech for free. Makes sense in a way.

Yeah, but its not like they are "getting it for free". It is a ecosystem, and cloud providers have provided many nice things back to the ecosystems. Including jobs to many prominent OSS developers. Not to mention cloud providers do the most important sort of work on any project. That is running it reporting bugs and often submitting patches to those bugs. Larger cloud providers even hire people for the sole purpose to work on said OSS projects simply to improve them.

Re: Commons Clause

#95
post #58

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'…

> "including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software"

This single line completely destroys any confidence I have in Commons Clause. I will avoid any project with this license moving forward until this is fixed. It's embarrassing that I'm being told that the time & energy I've invested in deploying this software (redis in particular) will now be rewarded with the inability to commoditize that experience through consulting. No thanks.

Re: Commons Clause

#97
post #58

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'…

As an open source lawyer, this is definitely not an open source license in any meaningful sense (it meets no definition of open source/free software/DFSG/you name 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 s…

I've never heard of an open-source lawyer. I understand totally how valuable it is to litigate open-source issues, but I'm curious as to who pays for such services? Being able to pay lawyers seems unlikely for a free product.

Re: Commons Clause

#98
post #58

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'…

we should push ourselves to understand what systems are forcing ---companies that monetize the work of--- deeply passionate OSS devs to consider more proprietary options.

Fixed it for you. I'm waiting to read antirez comments.

Re: Commons Clause

#99

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?

Yes it's crazy, most of the people commenting here don't contribute to open source and get paid a comfy salary because someone higher up actually charges for the things they work on. I don't know why there is such a stigma around monetizing the things you work on. These types of comments ignore the reality that you need to monetize somehow. Almost every large open source project has a monetization model.

Almost 100% of my open source contributions have been done on company time. The company makes money in some other way and we use an open source project so working on the project is not competing with the main business. That's how a ton of open source software gets written and it's why the Apache license is so popular.

The hard path has been to found a company with the business model of money directly off an open source project. That's doesn't seem to work out in most cases, and the gates the companies put up to charge money piss everyone off.

Re: Commons Clause

#100

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?

That is allowed and fine. What you can't do is, if you are Amazon, release "AWS Sdejt" which is simply a managed wrapper around Redis.

Why is that allowed and fine? I read this clause to explicitly prohibit that behavior.
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