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Commons Clause

redislabs.com

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Re: Commons Clause

#341

Post by erikrothoff »

antirez wrote: post #338
erikrothoff wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hijack this thread, but am I understanding correctly that Disque will be AGPL? Does that mean that building a SaaS using Disque would require me to open source the code that uses Disque? Is that the reasoning why you are choosing AGPL? Thanks for your awesome work btw.

Hello, yes indeed Disque will be AGPL and all the changes operated in order to create an SaaS related to Disque will have to be open sourced as well. The reason of the license switch is that I do no longer consider acceptable for cloud providers to take the value generated elsewhere and monetize without providing anything back. I was a big BSD supporter but it no longer works in the cloud era for system software IMHO…

Our use-case would be installing Redis with Disque on our servers (VPS) to run it for our own infrastructure. Job queues n such. Not sell it to other users as ”hosted disque” etc. Is that a use case you are against too?

Re: Commons Clause

#342

Post by Xylakant »

slavak wrote: post #308
bigiain wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're spamming this everywhere, I'll repeat _my_ concerns. 1) Some of us no longer trust the company not to bait-and-switch again. 2) It's almost guaranteed that at least future useful developments will happen under the proprietary and consulting-encumbered license. I'll admit the company has every right to execute on #2 - t is 100% without doubt going to have me reconsidering our use of redis here, and keepin…

Re. 1, that's a fair point. For what it's worth, the blog post does explicitly promise, in writing, that Redis itself will remain BSD-licensed forever. Take that for what you will, since I certainly don't have any more info on their intentions than you do (and probably would be prohibited from talking about it if I did), and you have no reason to trust me any more than the blog. I believe a written commitment under a…

> believe a written commitment under a company's official domain should at least have some legal weight, though IANAL.

It doesn’t. It’s a promise made by someone who just reneged on another implicit promise.

Re: Commons Clause

#343

Post by [deleted] »

erikrothoff wrote: post #341
antirez wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, yes indeed Disque will be AGPL and all the changes operated in order to create an SaaS related to Disque will have to be open sourced as well. The reason of the license switch is that I do no longer consider acceptable for cloud providers to take the value generated elsewhere and monetize without providing anything back. I was a big BSD supporter but it no longer works in the cloud era for system software IMHO…

Our use-case would be installing Redis with Disque on our servers (VPS) to run it for our own infrastructure. Job queues n such. Not sell it to other users as ”hosted disque” etc. Is that a use case you are against too?

[deleted]

Re: Commons Clause

#344

Post by another-cuppa »

rplnt wrote: post #311
another-cuppa wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad that the GPL has essentially "gone out of fashion". It's sad that developers would be driven merely by fashion rather than careful consideration. The fact that we have free software at all is largely thanks to the GNU and the GPL.

It's not just fashion. It's a question of "Do I want someone to use my software?", because with GPL the answer would be no for a lot of projects.

Why do you think that? Linux is the most widely used operating system in the world and it's licensed under GPL. People don't choose not to use software because it's GPL. Why would they?

Re: Commons Clause

#345

Post by [deleted] »

erikrothoff wrote: post #341
antirez wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, yes indeed Disque will be AGPL and all the changes operated in order to create an SaaS related to Disque will have to be open sourced as well. The reason of the license switch is that I do no longer consider acceptable for cloud providers to take the value generated elsewhere and monetize without providing anything back. I was a big BSD supporter but it no longer works in the cloud era for system software IMHO…

Our use-case would be installing Redis with Disque on our servers (VPS) to run it for our own infrastructure. Job queues n such. Not sell it to other users as ”hosted disque” etc. Is that a use case you are against too?

[deleted]

Re: Commons Clause

#346

Post by macspoofing »

XiZhao wrote: 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'…

>Happy to answer questions here

You didn't answer many (any) questions.

Here's mine, why is this needed? Redis could have adopted AGPL as the base license which would have effectively prevented any cloud vendors from using it as a manged service. For those companies, Redis could have provided a paid proprietary option.

Why even bother with this?

Re: Commons Clause

#347

Post by anyzen »

skrebbel wrote: post #331
another-cuppa wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad that the GPL has essentially "gone out of fashion". It's sad that developers would be driven merely by fashion rather than careful consideration. The fact that we have free software at all is largely thanks to the GNU and the GPL.

I've always wondered why GPL dual licensing isn't more popular. In particular, I've always wondered why "GPL or ask me for permission" isn't being explored more. That still allows you to be extremely permissive but you get the make the call. Eg if I were coding a database like Redis, maybe I'd be totally cool with people freely using it in their moonshot VC-funded trike sharing site, but not with cloud providers offe…

> In particular, I've always wondered why "GPL or ask me for permission" isn't being explored more.

Maybe because then you need to have CLA's (Contributor License Agreements)? Otherwise, who is "you" that they need to ask? It's not just your code, it is based on work of many other contributers.

Re: Commons Clause

#348

Post by amckinlay »

omeid2 wrote: post #50
mmastrac wrote: post #7

This is the license below. I'm pretty sure this is going to be vague enough to cause problems with a ton of legal departments. They want to be the only ones hosting it and the the only ones you call in to help with it. I get where the Redis folks are coming from, but this is basically a nail in the product and guarantees a fork if they don't turn back. === 8 The Software is provided to you by the Licensor under the L…

Not to mention the problem with people who want to provide support and consulting for Redis. No longer legal going forward. A fork is bound to happen if Redis doesn't reconsider this move.

I think that licensing restriction only applies if you provide the source to the client.

Re: Commons Clause

#349

Post by buybackoff »

I'm not a lawyer but the first reaction to this was if it is enforceable at all? There is a [rich choice] (https://tldrlegal.com/) of licenses backed by court history and many years of practical usage.

For my OSS project I spent some time to pick a right license and changed it couple of times (LGPL -> GPL -> MPL 2.0). My final choice was mainly due to the blog post by author of ZeroMQ Peter Hintjens ["How to Make Money from Open Source"] (http://hintjens.com/blog:27) , where he described a story of "Patrick" who "told big companies that they could" rip him off and they did - in the spirit of the top comment here.

I have faced a troll on GitHub who opened an issue on almost every project related to data analytics and asked authors to change any reciprocal license to MIT/BSD/Apache. I've never seen him contributing anything substantial back. This was a refreshing reminder that as soon as I publish my code as MIT et al. all valuable parts from it will be ripped apart immediately and I'll unlikely see any contributions back. Yet I wanted to share my code and see contributions back. In the [issue thread](https://github.com/Spreads/Spreads/issues/6) Peter Hintjens joined and commented that "MPLv2 gives us [ZeromMQ] the same benefits with less angst for corporate users" vs (L/A)GPL.

Many licenses are carefully crafted by lawyers and any change to it makes software not an open source anymore. It feels to me that OSS with a proper license is very close to a legal entity a la trust, and maintainers are just trustees. So if I want to remain any control I would rather choose uncool APGL.

Re: Commons Clause

#350

Post by antirez »

erikrothoff wrote: post #341
antirez wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, yes indeed Disque will be AGPL and all the changes operated in order to create an SaaS related to Disque will have to be open sourced as well. The reason of the license switch is that I do no longer consider acceptable for cloud providers to take the value generated elsewhere and monetize without providing anything back. I was a big BSD supporter but it no longer works in the cloud era for system software IMHO…

Our use-case would be installing Redis with Disque on our servers (VPS) to run it for our own infrastructure. Job queues n such. Not sell it to other users as ”hosted disque” etc. Is that a use case you are against too?

No the end goal is not to go against your use case, but as a side effect AGPL will actually remand even this use case to make the changes available.
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