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License Changes for Confluent Platform

confluent.io

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Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#41

Post by Conan_Kudo »

boredandroid wrote: post #15
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

If the goal is to kill off all potential vendors participating in your ecosystem, then yes, AGPL doesn't work. But if the goal is to prevent cloud provider abuse (e.g. Google, AWS, Azure, etc.), it works well enough.

> 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.

If you wanted to avoid that, you could grant an exception to be slightly more permissive for that purpose or to otherwise clarify the grant of use.

I know I personally would appreciate it if vendors who don't like the consequences of using ASL 2.0 would consider this option as an alternative.

And of course, selling full exceptions to AGPL in its entirety is a valid business model option.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#42

Post by yarrel »

andrewshadura wrote: post #22
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually not even that. It is just defined from the other point of view. Open source is free software. Free software is open source. http://deblanc.net/blog/2018/12/13/the-osd-and-user-freedom/

I agree very strongly with the penultimate paragraph there.

"Methods of development are tools being used to protect software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom. User freedom, and what we get from that, is what’s valuable."

But Open Source and Free Software are not synonyms, as the rest of the article shows.

Open Source cannot account for itself or for why anything other than "having the source" is necessary. Free Software cannot accept just "having the source" on locked-down systems.

As the article shows, "Open Source" confuses epiphenomena (source availability) and affordances (collaborative development) of Free Software with its primary goal.

We see that confusion mislead people time and time again. It's doing so elsewhere in this discussion.

So if Open Source was named not to help corporations avoid talking about freedom but to avoid confusing people it has failed in its intended as well as its adopted usage.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#43

Post by yarrel »

nerdponx wrote: post #37
jordigh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same old thing since 1998. It's just a push back against free software as always. It's the same kind of attacks as always, back when Ballmer called the GPL "cancer", except that now that "open" and "community" are part of the lexicon, so they have to be sneakier about how they fight back. They use the same words but introduce the same tired old kind of restrictions. Whether it's about not being able to use t…

Other than the pure ideal of software freedom, what practically is bad about this kind of dual licensing? And how is this in any way tantamount to calling the GPL "cancer" (which, in all fairness, does spread somewhat like cancer throughout a codebase, regardless of whether you think that's a good or bad thing).

In all fairness that isn't true.

"Viral" and "cancer" are catchy memes but the GPL doesn't just inexplicably leap to software that is sat next to it minding its own business.

The GPL is inheritance, not contagion. But it's difficult to talk smack about that without sounding even creepier.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#44

Post by PeterCorless »

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.

I also give it a +1. There's a lot of debate presently around what I call the "Little Red Hen" problem. Everyone wants to "eat the bread" when y'all are done, but very few people want to help grind the grain or knead the dough.

There's a document gathering people's thoughts on the current state of Open Source here, started by Jesse Anderson (formerly Cloudera):

"Viewpoints on Open Source Interview Responses" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tLNerYJ5ce8PjGjGgRFfzKha...

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#45

Post by jaffee »

jordigh wrote: post #34
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…

It's the same old thing since 1998. It's just a push back against free software as always. It's the same kind of attacks as always, back when Ballmer called the GPL "cancer", except that now that "open" and "community" are part of the lexicon, so they have to be sneakier about how they fight back. They use the same words but introduce the same tired old kind of restrictions. Whether it's about not being able to use t…

You can rant about an "attack on freedom" all you want, but how do you propose that Confluent protect its business so that they can continue paying their engineers to keep working on tools for which they publish all the source code?

The alternatives seem to be 1. they keep all their stuff proprietary or 2. they leave it truly open and AWS takes the majority of their market and they slowly suffocate.

Aren't both of those strictly worse than the path they've taken?

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#46

Post by capkutay »

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…

The problem stems from companies that raise $100 million dollars to sell open source software after the project has already been popular for years. Then they complain all their free adoption/marketing from being open source isn't monetarily advantageous for them so they need to change the license. It's really a bait and switch.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#47

Post by thinkmassive »

wpietri wrote: post #7
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.

It's safest to assume they are not giving back anything, unless they provide evidence otherwise.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#48

Post by PeterCorless »

mindcrime wrote: post #23
AlexB138 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

a primary maintainer of the open source project (not sure how that works for Confluent and Kafka). In theory Apache projects are supposed to exist in such a way that one vendor doesn't dominate all the decision making and development. In reality, it's not uncommon for a given vendor to have outsized influence on a given project. See: Ambari and Hortonworks, for example. I don't follow Kafka development super closely,…

It is also far more dependent on personality of project leadership and contributors than pure % of code committed. Jay is well-regarded as a 'good guy' and has the interest of the technology at heart. Such personalities in leadership can change a project greatly though. A bad project leader may lose a great deal of public goodwill in an open source project. That is a key intangible that many do not take into account -- trustworthiness of leadership.

Re: License Changes for Confluent Platform

#50

Post by rywalker »

PeterCorless wrote: post #44
chuhnk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also give it a +1. There's a lot of debate presently around what I call the "Little Red Hen" problem. Everyone wants to "eat the bread" when y'all are done, but very few people want to help grind the grain or knead the dough. There's a document gathering people's thoughts on the current state of Open Source here, started by Jesse Anderson (formerly Cloudera): "Viewpoints on Open Source Interview Responses" https://…

+1 from me as well. Well done.
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