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The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

drewdevault.com

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Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#71

Post by rectang »

marcinzm wrote: post #34
falcolas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presumes that functionality of Redis is not subsequently moved into modules, and that new functionality is not only done in modules. The current development path does seem to favor modules - a slim core with the functionality added as modules.

Reminds me of Databricks, the company founded by the Apache Spark creators. More and more of what they do is fully proprietary and at least one their previously OSS module is now proprietary (Redshift integration). They also boast of how much faster their cloud offering (running on top of AWS) is than other Spark cloud versions (running on top of AWS) which makes me suspect there's performance improvements that they'…

Since Spark is a project at Apache, though, if someone wants to contribute a Redshift integration module to Spark, no one cannot stop them.

Projects at the ASF are governed by a Project Management Committee drawn from the wider community -- not a single company, not a steering committee where seats are bought.

The ASF is a 501(c)(3) charity, which means that monetary contributions are tax-deductible and therefore very limited in what they can be used for. The ASF cannot unduly privilege any particular commercial entity.

Credit to companies, like Databricks, who choose to participate in ASF projects under these constraints.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#72

Post by sqrt17 »

vertere wrote: post #41
fh973 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake news, according to the man himself: http://antirez.com/news/120 The whole thing is evidently not about Redis, but modules that were developed by Redis Labs.

Seems like a good case study in poor communication then. It doesn't excuse people spreading misinformation without a decent attempt to ascertain the facts, but it seems Redis Labs mainly have themselves to blame. Their page [0] starts out: "Initiated by a coalition of top infrastructure software companies to protect their rights...". So they're trying to make it sound like a Big Deal, and beyond just for Redis. Then…

> Oh, and the confusing name. Why is it called "Commons Clause"?

Exactly. What is in effect crossing the boundary between open source and shared source (as Microsoft called the first source release of the .Netruntime) is made to sound like an afterthought. So, instead of AGPL (widely recognized as off-limits for corporate users), you could claim it's "Apache plus Commons Clause" which sounds nice as long as you squint really hard.

It's ok to put software under a BSD-inspired or Apache-inspired noncommercial-only license - in fact plenty of people are doing this already - but it's disingenuous to use the name of the open source license you took inspiration from in the hope to profit from the open source halo for non-open-source software.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#73

Post by igol »

marcinzm wrote: post #4

Another problematic aspect of this is that to me the Redis situation seems like a corporate grab of open source software after the fact. By that I mean, Redis Labs are not the creators of Redis. They are a consulting agency that then hired the creator of Redis. In other words, they only exist because the original Redis was not Commons Clause. Now they want to build a moat so others can't do what they did. Not a good…

That is part of the right you grant people when you use a permissive license. That is the whole point of the license being permissive.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#74

Post by StaticRedux »

zzzcpan wrote: post #52

Maybe open source is just not keeping up with the real world, a few things could destroy it: lack of open source license choices restrictive enough and clear enough and enabling openness so much that most businesses can't profit in any significant way from software under those licenses; lack of standardized proprietary licenses for dual-licensed open source project; lack of standardized open source CLAs and CLA integ…

Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are huge open source contributors specifically bc they can get a return on their investment. While your intentions may be noble, I think you'll find that more restrictive licenses will have the exact opposite effect and open source projects and contributions will be quickly whither and die.

Open source was never about preventing people from making money on the works they create, it is about preventing companies from telling people what they can and can't do with that code. It is about insuring forward progress and the ability to build on what other people do, making it better, and ensuring that that future is not meddled with. Or restricted.

And there are plenty of licenses that accomplish that, the GPL and it's offshoots chief among them.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#75

Post by wrs »

_jal wrote: post #45
foundry27 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t usually post here (more interested in the articles than the discourse over them), but this is something that really resonated with me. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of engineering. We don’t know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about…

> censoring the mere _idea_ Nobody is censoring anything, in either a precise or a fuzzy sense[1]. Conflating criticism and censorship is (a) a category error, (b) a really pernicious notion, and (c) confuses people and derails discourse. A core principle of free speech is that the answer to bad speech is more speech. Mislabeling criticism censorship attempts to delegitimize that answer, and thus paradoxically attack…

Normally I’d agree, but in fact this post is not just criticism, it’s a demand for self-censorship. That is, stop talking about this, and don’t ever talk about it again.

>The only solution is to bury the Common Clause project. Kill the website and GitHub repository, and we can try to forget this ever happened.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#76

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

XiZhao wrote: post #65

Kevin Wang here. Thanks Drew for the thoughtful post. I can accept that you might not appreciate my work on the Commons Clause, but I'm glad to see you acknowledge why funding OSS is so difficult. I think it's okay to fear the world of open source becoming a bit more closed. I do too. Whether that's a better world or not is up to debate, but I certainly don't think so. I think where we might disagree is what the grea…

Hi Kevin, Drew here. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I appreciate your response, but I find it frustratingly vauge. What kinds of bad things happen to open source projects that drive them to this? If you are fearful of open source becoming more closed, why are you promoting that very approach?

Did you consider promoting alternatives like AGPL first? Before I see an option violating one of the four essential freedoms I would really like to see a detailed exposition on why the AGPL or other approaches discussed in my article are not suitable. I don't think that the brief summary on AGPL on your website is detailed enough - it doesn't have any specific criticisms of AGPL.

The problem with "needing to change their license" is that it's really just a few people who "need" to change it. In reality, open source projects are community works, and even the maintainers don't have the (certainly moral, and usually legal) right to change the license.

I think your Commons Clause gives vulnerable people (open source maintainers struggling to make ends meet) an easy but despicable option for their projects. Especially in cases like Redis, where a company has ulterior motives and employs the maintainers, they can strongarm maintainers into making choices which are not in the best interests of the project.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#77

Post by kup0 »

Regardless of whether or not it is harmful to open source, I find the choice to use two words beginning with C (thus CC as an acronym) flawed, as that abbreviation is typically used to refer to Creative Commons, and Commons Clause and Creative Commons sound quite similar too since they both use the word Commons.

I would hope this was not an intentional choice to sow confusion.

Edit: obvious spelling error :)

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#78

Post by justinjlynn »

XiZhao wrote: post #65

Kevin Wang here. Thanks Drew for the thoughtful post. I can accept that you might not appreciate my work on the Commons Clause, but I'm glad to see you acknowledge why funding OSS is so difficult. I think it's okay to fear the world of open source becoming a bit more closed. I do too. Whether that's a better world or not is up to debate, but I certainly don't think so. I think where we might disagree is what the grea…

My fundamental issue with the clause is that it fundamentally changes the nature of the licences it infects. It is just as disingenuous to say "we're an Open Source plus Common Clause project (Apache + Common Clause)" as it is to say "We host Redis (we mean Redis + Proprietary add-ons we use under the AGPL from Redis Labs, that you can't have, which make us incompatible with Open Source Redis)". There's nothing new or controversial about relicensing your project. I'd bet what most people have a problem with is the "open sources but not open source" angle the clause pulls. Given the confusion it creates by piggy backing on existing well-known licence brands, I see why they have a problem with it.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#79

Post by driverdan »

marcinzm wrote: post #4

Another problematic aspect of this is that to me the Redis situation seems like a corporate grab of open source software after the fact. By that I mean, Redis Labs are not the creators of Redis. They are a consulting agency that then hired the creator of Redis. In other words, they only exist because the original Redis was not Commons Clause. Now they want to build a moat so others can't do what they did. Not a good…

You seem to be misunderstanding which Redis projects are changing licenses. Redis is not changing. Some of Redis Labs' extensions are. While I agree this is highly problematic it's not changing the core software's license.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#80

Post by quadrangle »

chriswarbo wrote: post #60
zzzcpan wrote: post #52

Maybe open source is just not keeping up with the real world, a few things could destroy it: lack of open source license choices restrictive enough and clear enough and enabling openness so much that most businesses can't profit in any significant way from software under those licenses; lack of standardized proprietary licenses for dual-licensed open source project; lack of standardized open source CLAs and CLA integ…

What do you mean by "restrictive" and "openness" here? In particular, how does business and profit affect this? Would it maybe help to distinguish between the goals of Free Software (user freedom) and Open Source (abundance of high quality, royalty free code)? > AGPL is somewhat successful here, because big corporations already ban its use internally The word "because" is confusing me here. As far as I'm aware, the g…

I think the AGPL point is to say that there is not a need for an anti-commercial license if the AGPL effectively stops the things you're aiming to restrict.

AGPL isn't perfect, but obviously neither is a non-open, non-free anti-commerce clause.

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