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Commons Clause

redislabs.com

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Re: Commons Clause

#151

Post by cookiecaper »

borland wrote: post #108
colinbartlett wrote: post #103

If this clause comes to Redis Core, will it mean Heroku and others cannot offer me the simple hosted Redis they do today? Thesd cloud providers are exactly what makes Redis attractive to me, dramatically reducing the cost of spinning up new infrastructure for projects.

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…

Well, to be fair, it's not that they're trying to prevent it per se. It's just that they want a cut.

Re: Commons Clause

#152

Post by tonetheman »

I too like most commenters here think this is odd or weird and feels not open source.

Someone will just fork redis and remove the common clause is my guess as to what should happen?

weird

Re: Commons Clause

#153

Post by pulisse »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #130
tomnipotent wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software" This single line completely destroys any confidence I have in Commons Clause. I will avoid any project with this license moving forward until this is fixed. It's embarrassing that I'm being told that the time & energy I've invested in deploying this software (redis in particular) will now be rewarded with the ina…

> It's embarrassing that I'm being told that the time & energy I've invested in deploying this software (redis in particular) will now be rewarded with the inability to commoditize that experience through consulting. No thanks. Can you explain the thought process with regards to why it's okay for you to receive compensation for your efforts, but not the OSS developer who invested significantly more time (nine years,…

> Can you explain the thought process with regards to why it's okay for you to receive compensation for your efforts, but not the OSS developer who invested significantly more time (nine years, in the case of Redis) in creating the product?

The consultant isn't selling the product; they're selling a complement to the product: knowledge of how to use the product effectively in the client's circumstances. But complementary goods don't substitute for each other. Paying a consultant for Redis expertise doesn't buy you the functionality of Redis itself.

So if Redislabs deserves to be the only Redis consultancy in existence, the argument has to be that not only do they deserve the exclusive right to profit from the sale of their intellectual property, they also deserve an exclusive right to profit from other people's expertise with their product. But why should anyone accept that?

They might be within their legal rights to impose such a condition in a license (IANAL), but there's not a strong ethical justification for the position.

Re: Commons Clause

#154

Post by desdiv »

cobookman wrote: post #127
justinjlynn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're concerned about brand dilution via resale of "Redis"-as-a-Service RedisLabs could easily trademark the term Redis and prohibit its use in this way. This mechanism is much the same way Mozilla controls the Firefox trademarks. I do wish they hadn't made their Open Source licence a confusing mess and effectively proprietary for certain modules. That's their right, of course - as copyright holders. However, it…

AWS elasticache Gcp memorystore Neither use redis name brand, but both offer a managed redis

Looking at https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis/

Redis is in the URL.

Title of the page is "Amazon ElastiCache for Redis"; it's also the main header. The phrase "Amazon ElastiCache for Redis" appears on the page a total of 24 times.

The "Get Started" button is labeled: "Get started with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis".

Re: Commons Clause

#155

Post by endlessvoid94 »

Trying to understand the motivation here.

In principle, what's the difference between my company taking advantage of open source software (cost savings, huge advantage because I don't have to build everything in-house) and a company that offers a hosted version of said software?

In both cases, I am benefitting economically and not contributing upstream.

Re: Commons Clause

#156

Post by DannyBee »

pvg wrote: post #114
DannyBee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source lawyer, this is definitely not an open source license in any meaningful sense (it meets no definition of open source/free software/DFSG/you name it). No restrictions on fields of endeavor and no discrimination is a pretty basic tenent that goes back a long long time (the DFSG were published in 1997, there are other things saying the same thing that pre-date it). I also know this is what other open s…

The FAQ at https://commonsclause.com says it was drafted by Heather Meeker.

(the FAQ was added after I posted)

That's worse because Heather would have certainly warned them of these issues, and it means they did it anyway.

Re: Commons Clause

#157

Post by MrBingley »

vmbrasseur wrote: post #93
XiZhao wrote: post #58

Hi folks. Kevin from http://fossa.io here. I worked on bringing the Commons Clause to life ( https://commonsclause.com/ ) and led many of the project efforts here. Happy to answer questions here (or on Twitter @kevinverse). I wanted to write a blog post to set some context because the real story is a lot less salacious then "Redis just went proprietary", but here's a quick summary: 1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It'…

Hi, Kevin. VM Brasseur from https://opensource.org here. It's disappointing to see FOSSA, which claims it exists to assist companies with open source management, publish and encourage use of a clause that very clearly removes projects from the pool of open source alternatives. To do so by using the word "Commons" in the title adds insult to injury and borders on wilful deception, removing software from the commons as…

> However, 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 those open source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions dollars in revenues from them. Already, this behavior has damaged open source communities and put some of the companies that support them out of business.

The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers. The OSI has certainly known of this problem since its founding in the late 90s, and as far as I can tell has no intention of helping solve it. For example, most recently Kyle Mitchel developed License Zero [0] as a way for open source developers to make money from their work, and presented it to the OSI for approval. It was rejected. Here is one of the comments from Bruce Perens [1].

> > What does an economically viable open source look like?

> My usual answer for this is that if you have to ask how you're going to make money, you're the wrong person to make Open Source. Nowhere in the mission of OSI is any mandate to provide authors with a viable business method.

[0] https://licensezero.com/

[1] http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...

Re: Commons Clause

#158

Post by endlessvoid94 »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #116

The problem this license is trying to solve is a reasonable one: that cloud providers package up open source products as their own service and capture the majority of the value without adding much themselves. This license might not be the best way around it but the issue should be addressed.

How is this different from a startup using open source software (cost savings) instead of building everything in-house?

In both cases, the startup benefits and the project doesn't receive upstream contributions.

Re: Commons Clause

#159

Post by mchahn »

mindcrime wrote: post #118
mchahn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to license your software under a proprietary license, just license it under a proprietary license. It's not that simple. I'm about to come out with a 3d-printed product that will sell in a similar market to 3d printers. My product is begging to be open-source hardware since anyone with a 3d-printer can create a large part of it and I'd be ecstatic (and richer) if the product developed a community of fol…

So you're planning to bring a proprietary product to market, and make the code "shared source". There's nothing novel about that, and there are already licenses out there specifically for allowing "code available, but you can't redistribute". Using a faux "open source" license like "Apache + Commons Clause" is disingenuous, confusing, and irresponsible.

I need to learn about this. Does shared source actually allow one to arbitrarily use the source? I thought the only distinction was that it didn't allow contributions.

Re: Commons Clause

#160

Post by DannyBee »

CharlesW wrote: post #115
DannyBee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an open source lawyer, this is definitely not an open source license in any meaningful sense (it meets no definition of open source/free software/DFSG/you name it). No restrictions on fields of endeavor and no discrimination is a pretty basic tenent that goes back a long long time (the DFSG were published in 1997, there are other things saying the same thing that pre-date it). I also know this is what other open s…

> As an open source lawyer, this is definitely not an open source license in any meaningful sense… TFA plainly says that it isn't, "at least not by the official definition set forth by the OSD." > I'm sure you can make up another word other than "proprietary" to call it… TFA also answers this: > "Applying the Clause to an open source project will transition the project to 'source-available'."

I was clearly replying to the claim made that this doesn't make redis proprietary. As I said, they just made up a new word for their version of proprietary.

Also, the FAQ was added after I posted. Look at GitHub commits :)

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