“It is time to reexamine the ethos of open source,” Salil Deshpande, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures and investor in companies like Redis Labs, provided in an email to SD Times. “Our view is that open-source software was never intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and run as a service, keep the profits, and give very little back.
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I find this interesting, Redis used a weak BSD type licence and are upset that bigger companies are taking their software and doing what they want with it turning a profit.
It seems odd to me that anyone would be shocked by this, the only time big corps will be altruistic is when they can see that it is in their own self-interest e.g. Microsoft and Linux.
What I don’t quite get (well, I kind of do) is why Redis simply does not adopt a strong copyleft licence that forces the corporates to submit their changes/enhamcements (I suspect they fear adoption would drop if the GPL v2/v3 were used).
The adoption of the commons clause to me basically says it is now closed, even if you can view the code.
Anyone else looked into this, do you think other projects could go the same way?
This is why the AGPL exists. But you have to have wanted people to have open source libre code, they do not. Sounds like they want people to think they are open source but not let anyone else use their code.
BSD is a kind of good and bad for this as it doesn’t guarantee you get access to the code.
I’ve come across a lot of projects where the core remains OSS but the ‘Enterprise’ add ons that the parent company also produces are closed e.g. MySQL and Kafka. I’ve just not seen a project change it licence in this manner (apart from Solaris when Oracle took over Sun).
Given the rapid expansion/adoption of cloud platforms it made me wonder if we will see more of this?
There’s also middle ground licenses like CDDL that allow developers to give their stuff away as open source, for free, for personal use, development, academics/education, but charge licensing fees for commercial for-profit activities.
I’m not sure there is a definite clause that prevents commercial use but it has some copyleft properties. I think if it had a clause that definitively prohibited commercial usage then it it would longer be considered a free licence - which is precisely what has happened to Redis.
A quick check on FSF.org says the CDDL is a free licence but is incompatible with the GPL hence the problems integrating ZFS into the Linux kernel.
Overall I think the moment any licence tries to control what you do with the code (including making a profit from it) it no longer meets the criteria to be considered fully Open Source or Free. I am aware that there are projects out there that use dual licenses e.g. the code is nominally under a strong copyleft licence, but if you pay you can have it under a weak copyleft license. I wonder if the Redis project considered that approach?