Commons Clause • Hacker News Board

Re: Commons Clause

#371

Post by detaro » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:09 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #112

borland wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, it implies that people like Heroku and others offering hosted Redis is EXACTLY the kind of thing they are trying to prevent with this clause. To quote: "today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to t…

If you read the article, it implies that people like Heroku and others offering hosted Redis is EXACTLY the kind of thing they are trying to prevent with this clause. The thing is, the AGPL already existed for dealing with the whole "cloud vendors turning things effectively proprietary" issue.

But the issue doesn't seem to be "cloud vendors turn things effectively proprietary", but rather "cloud vendors offer the same services we want to offer, so we don't get the income that's paying for our development work". A cloud vendor can just run AGPL software and offer it as a service if they share their modifications (if any). They can't do this with software under this new license.

Re: Commons Clause

#372

Post by mijoharas » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:11 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #266

peterwwillis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this new clause, you may never provide consulting services for a fee if it involves these modules. Still cool?

No, the value of your consulting derives from your skill and effort. Definitely share with them any proposed wording changes that could clarify the matter. I’m sure that’s not their intent. Lawyer friends may be able to help both with interpretation and comments. Think of this as “license r&d” rather than a rush to verdict.

> For purposes of the foregoing, “Sell” means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.

If you consult for a company optimize a bunch of their redis queries, it could easily be argued that your consulting service has value that derives substantially from redis.

This licence worries me somewhat. I would definitely prefer a GPL and ask me if you want to licence it kind of situation as you definitely know where you are.

Guess we'll see what happens with this.

EDIT: IANAL

Re: Commons Clause

#373

Post by catwell » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:15 PM UTC

sonarlunar wrote: post #335

catwell wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salvatore is an employee of Redis Labs since 2015. AFAIK he still owns Redis itself personally, which is a very good thing. That doesn't mean Redis Labs is the only Redis provider you should consider though. For instance, OpenRedis has been founded before Redis Labs (early 2011) by people who have been very involved with the community (contributed the Ruby and Lua clients, the original website...). They are a much sm…

Thanks catwell (saw in your profile you are pchapuis and I'm very appreciative for your work and contribution to Redis, from your content to your weekly newsletter and all). I wasn't aware of OpenRedis and I agree with you that also OpenRedis should be supported. It makes sense to have diversity and all community efforts be supported to be viable and prosper for the benefit of the whole community. Again, thanks for t…

> from your content to your weekly newsletter and all

I am pchapuis but I don't have a weekly newsletter :) Not sure what you are talking about.

I did contribute to Redis a little a long time ago, but for a few years I am mostly just a user.

Re: Commons Clause

#374

Post by sonarlunar » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:20 PM UTC

nijave wrote: post #61

hlieberman wrote: post #37

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.

Curious about vendors like Red Hat as well. Seems like their umbrella support would conflict. Also curious about companies that might want to bundle Redis in their product

I don't think the Redis Labs modules were distributed via Linux package managers, no?

I was under the impression you had to download them from github or something and install yourself.

Redis, which is the whole confusion, has NOT had a license change so Debian and Redhat will continue to have its package as normal.

So there's nothing to talk about regarding Debian or Redhat etc and it's all a confusion about Redis open source and specific Redis modules from Redis Labs that were not distributed via Debian or Redhat anyways.

Re: Commons Clause

#375

Post by filmor » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:32 PM UTC

jaredklewis wrote: post #261

mful wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you willing to release your code, both in the sense of putting it out into the world and emancipating it from your ownership? Do you accept that your code could be renamed, rebranded, repackaged, rented, traded or sold? Would you be happy if your code made someone else rich, famous or successful while you saw no benefit at all? I suspect it's a lot easier to say "yes" to these questions when you're just startin…

I think you are probably right. When starting the project, creators value their work very little, but value any attention given to their project very highly, thus a permissive license makes sense. Only after success hits do they regret it. Even so, if someone was seeking fame and fortune through OSS (a somewhat foolish mission, but whatever), I would still probably recommend they release their software with a permiss…

Facebook got hate for making the patent grant skewed, i.e. you have no right to sue them for /any/ patent of yours that they use in return for not being sued for the /specific/ patents that cover React etc.

Re: Commons Clause

#376

Post by sonarlunar » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:32 PM UTC

catwell wrote: post #373

sonarlunar wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks catwell (saw in your profile you are pchapuis and I'm very appreciative for your work and contribution to Redis, from your content to your weekly newsletter and all). I wasn't aware of OpenRedis and I agree with you that also OpenRedis should be supported. It makes sense to have diversity and all community efforts be supported to be viable and prosper for the benefit of the whole community. Again, thanks for t…

> from your content to your weekly newsletter and all I am pchapuis but I don't have a weekly newsletter :) Not sure what you are talking about. I did contribute to Redis a little a long time ago, but for a few years I am mostly just a user.

Sorry - perhaps confused you for someone else ;-)

Perhaps I know you from Lua community, dunno. Still a userid that I've seen before!

Re: Commons Clause

#377

Post by sonarlunar » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

hashrate wrote: post #276

> if what you sell is basically the functionality of the module [...] Commons Clause does not allow it. Great ! Now the entire industry is accepting the "freemium" model where the core features are free , but not the modules around it. This is a push to milk companies with paid licences on Free Software. This is insane that this is becoming the norm in the industry. Every single day open source is getting less and le…

It's one vendor contributing some modules which now they have a different license.

I don't see how this impacts any other Redis module on github out there.

Either those modules are that good and the vendor decides that cloud providers must pay and not get money from the vendor's work, or those modules are not really that used so who cares.

I have used RedisJSON module which is nice and I assume changes license now. Am I a service provider? Do I care about one module changing license so AWS and other clouds cannot use for their own service?

I couldn't care less and it does not impact Redis open source project at all IMHO

Re: Commons Clause

#378

Post by jgraham » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:40 PM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #208

> Help! Companies are exploiting my open source software for profit! Uh, you told them they could. > Yeah, but they're doing it without contributing back! They're just taking what I wrote and building it into a proprietary product! You told them they could. > But how is it fair that they can make so much money off my code and I never see a cent? You. Told. Them. They. Could. Time and again I see the same sense of hel…

So rather than just blaming authors for their choices, it seems more worthwhile to look at the structural issues that lead people to make certain choices.

The Free Software movement was originally aimed mostly at personal freedom; the freedom to take something you owned and modify it. However in the intervening period it hass become integral to commercial tech. In a commoditise-your-compliments like strategy ("commoditise your dependencies", perhaps), there are now trillions of dollars of businesses that depend on open source software for their operation, but typically extract revenue from something proprietery built on top of that tech (e.g. surveillance advertising). And these companies are eager to release yet more open source software for critical (but not revenue-generating) parts of their stack. This has two key advantages for the company: it enables some of the cost of maintainance to be offloaded on the community, and anchors the cost of that component at zero. Take TensoeFlow, for example. If that's closed source then Google have to do all the work of keeping up with the state of the art, and can suffer if someone creates a superior alternative that can't be integrated into Google products. By opening it up they make it much more likely that new developments will be integrated into TensorFlow rather than into a competitor, and make it that much harder for a dirruptive competitor to usurp their position, because anyone looking to fund the development of such a competitor likely needs some revenue stream other than selling their software to finance the work, since they have to compete with free.

Now look at this from the point of view of someone developing some software. Unless you are targetting some niche market it's hard to make money through your software; by the mechanism above the expected price of such software is anchored at zero. Also many developers are aware that they have benefited from Free Software / Open Source and are keen to give something back. So creating software under an open source license makes sense; if you want your project to succeed the most valuable thing is to attract users who provide both motivation and contributions. In this way choosing a very permissive license is natural. And ususally this isn't a problem. But it does occasionally happen that projects are hugely successful, people want to continue working on them, and the funding available isn't commesurate to the amount of work that entails. In this case projects can be left struggling looking for a business model and a licensing decision that made perfect sense when the project was small can — from the point of view of securing funding — look suboptimal.

None of which is to say that Open Source (or Free Software) is a bad thing; I certainly don't believe that. But it does distort the market for software in an interesting way.

Re: Commons Clause

#379

Post by wiz21c » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:41 PM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #208

> Help! Companies are exploiting my open source software for profit! Uh, you told them they could. > Yeah, but they're doing it without contributing back! They're just taking what I wrote and building it into a proprietary product! You told them they could. > But how is it fair that they can make so much money off my code and I never see a cent? You. Told. Them. They. Could. Time and again I see the same sense of hel…

that's soooooo spot on. The good thing with the GPL is that it's so political that when you (carefully) read it, you understand your own motivation much better. The GPL is as much aggressive as a proprietary license, but it has different goals. Understanding it is so enlightening.

Re: Commons Clause

#380

Post by numbsafari » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 12:46 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #350

erikrothoff wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, you are referring to changes to Disqueue code itself and not any code or service that communicates with with Disqueue via its APIs, or the configuration that I use when launching Disqueue (e.g. my disqueue.conf).

Said another way, if I make a patch to the binary that I compile to, for example, fix a bug that isn't yet in upstream or to add a feature that isn't yet in upstream, I must make those changes available as per AGPL.

Is that understanding correct?