License Changes for Confluent Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#11

Post by ah- » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

I'm not sure what else they could do about this.

I'm as sad as you are about licensing complications, but I can totally see why they're doing it. And I'd say it's miles better than these parts being closed.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#12

Post by Conan_Kudo » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

chuhnk wrote: post #5

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 some…

> Open source is not synonymous with free software.

This is literally the point of Open Source. It is "Free Software" repackaged for business people who hate ideals and morals as part of the story for the development of software.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#13

Post by boredandroid » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

I agree that the proliferation of new licenses is annoying. But I think the reason you see changes in licensing from Elastic, MongoDB, etc is that the world has changed pretty dramatically since most of the original licenses were created. This proliferation existed early on in the days of open source and eventually died down to a set of standard things that solved the problems most people had. But the reality is the public cloud has dramatically changed the dynamic and many of the people who want to make code available with a permissive license don't have an option that is common and well understood and that protects them. I believe such a thing will likely emerge and will allow us all to standardize.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#14

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

chuhnk wrote: post #5

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 some…

Open source is not synonymous with free software.

Nobody is saying that it is.

The community license is additional features free for use but not for you to provide as a managed service.

IOW, "not Open Source". And that's fine... a company has a right to create software using any licensing terms they want. But making something that's "almost OSS, but not quite" and trying to steal the sheen of respectability that comes from being OSS, while not actually being OSS, is disingenuous and misleading.

Additionally, license proliferation in general is a Bad Thing because it muddles the issue around what's really Open Source and what isn't, especially for new-comers.

The world is evolving and so open source should also evolve with it.

Not all evolutionary steps are good things, in real life, or in metaphor-space.

until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors.

There have always been people who used OSS without contributing back. There's nothing novel about this w/r/t cloud providers. And it's very questionable how you can consider somebody a "bad actor" for using a project under the terms that it was explicitly licensed under.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#15

Post by boredandroid » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #9

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…

This is a great question. Many people think the AGPL solves this problem but it absolutely does not. This is why MongoDB, which was AGPL licensed, just changed to a custom license.

The other reason we don't want to use AGPL is that it can be quite aggressive in making you open source your own code if you want to embed our code in a proprietary application. We actually think building proprietary applications is a fine use of our software, and is one of the major use cases for this kind of infrastructure. This is addressed in more depth along with many other questions in this FAQ: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#16

Post by boredandroid » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

chuhnk wrote: post #10

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.

Thanks!

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#17

Post by ensignavenger » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

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…

At least in this case, they are being more clear about what they are doing and not claiming their new license is Open Source or trying to poison an existing Open Source license, the way some other companies are doing things.

I agree that it is always sad to see a company closing its (future) source code like this, but such is their perogative.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#18

Post by samstokes » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

The submission title is misleading (“License Changes for Confluent Platform (Kafka)” at time of commenting) - the license changes do not apply to Kafka itself, as the article specifically states.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#19

Post by WoodenChair » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

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.

The first sentence of your blog post reads:

"We’re changing the license for some of the open source components of Confluent Platform from Apache 2.0 to the Confluent Community License."

This implies that the components are still open source. However, as you probably know from the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated your new license does not qualify as "open source" by the most commonly understood definition because it violates article 6 "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor." Specifically, you're not allowing your software to be used in a capacity similar to how you use it yourself.

Wouldn't it be less disingenuous to write "We’re changing the license for some of the previously open source components of Confluent Platform from Apache 2.0 to our own partially proprietary Confluent Community License." Or maybe instead of partially proprietary, shared source, or choose your own word for not really open source?

Edit: My original comment was based on the original blog post, which has now changed. Props to the author for being responsive to feedback.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#20

Post by AlexB138 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

chuhnk wrote: post #5

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 some…

The only time I have an issue with this sort of setup is when the commercial entity employs, or directly is itself, a primary maintainer of the open source project (not sure how that works for Confluent and Kafka). It creates an incentive structure that is counter to the community at large. e.g. a PR is issued to the open source project that makes a piece of the commercial product irrelevant. For the community that's good, for the maintainer it threatens their livelihood.

Some of these projects wouldn't exist without commercial support, so it's not a clear cut issue, but I get why people are bothered by it.