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License Changes for Confluent Platform

confluent.io

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Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#2

Post by mindcrime »

This is a really negative trend for Open Source, and I hope it runs its course and dies out soon. License proliferation, bizarre "field of use" restrictions, blurring the line between what is open and what isn't, none of this stuff is a win for anybody. If you want to make something proprietary, make it proprietary, call it proprietary, and let that be the end of it. If you want to make something Open Source, then make it Open Source and don't try to straddle the line.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#5

Post by chuhnk »

mindcrime wrote: post #2

This is a really negative trend for Open Source, and I hope it runs its course and dies out soon. License proliferation, bizarre "field of use" restrictions, blurring the line between what is open and what isn't, none of this stuff is a win for anybody. If you want to make something proprietary, make it proprietary, call it proprietary, and let that be the end of it. If you want to make something Open Source, then ma…

Open source is not synonymous with free software. The world is evolving and so open source should also evolve with it. Confluent have made it abundantly clear that the Apache Kafka project is and always will be Apache 2 licensed. Therefore that's where you go for your completely free solution. The community license is additional features free for use but not for you to provide as a managed service. Enterprise is something you have to pay for.

There's clear distinction and delineation between these. To an outside observer this might seem confusing and nuanced. In which case use the apache 2 licensed software which should unquestionably be open source and free. But otherwise those building businesses around open source technology have to find a way to protect against cloud providers. Licensing innovation is the only path forward right now until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#7

Post by wpietri »

alienreborn wrote: post #3

I kinda expected this after recently revealed AWS Managed Kafka. AWS can afford to release half baked products because platform inertia and that will easily cannibalize whatever traction SaaS offerings of Elastic, Kafka, Mongo etc has.

That's a great point. I can only hope that platform providers who productize open-source packages are giving back a significant chunk of revenue to the project, either in cash or in employees contributing labor.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#9

Post by Conan_Kudo »

boredandroid wrote: post #4

Hi all, I'm Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent and author of that blog post. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Why not just use Affero GNU General Public License v3 for these? It seems like a lot of you guys are using ASL 2.0 (a permissive license) and getting upset when people fork and proprietarize the code for their services and solutions.

Aside from MongoDB, who seems to be changing the license simply to kill off MongoDB's vendor ecosystem to benefit itself, everyone else seems to be using ASL 2.0 and then regretting the natural consequences of doing so.

The usage of the AGPLv3 license seems to be enough to ward off large SaaS competitors (Amazon and Google stay away from areas that are heavily AGPLv3 or similar).

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#10

Post by chuhnk »

boredandroid wrote: post #4

Hi all, I'm Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent and author of that blog post. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Hey Jay. Just want to say good job on the execution on this. It's clearly articulated and goes along way to show the industry how and why this needs to happen.
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