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I think you're misreading the parent. They are not claiming that the Commons Clause is open source in any way. They're claiming that the portions being moved to the Commons Clause are not "Redis" but rather, some "enterprise modules".

> 1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It's only some enterprise modules. The Commons Clause is mostly used to temporarily transition enterprise offering counterparts of OSS projects to source-available.

Redis itself remains under BSD. From the article:

> The Redis core is, and always will remain, an open source BSD license. Certain modules, however, are now licensed as “Apache 2.0 modified with Commons Clause.”

I think the parent agrees with you, explicitly referring to those modules as "proprietary" and "source available".

Yes, further from the article:

> Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition.

> 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 :)

I understood the claim as saying that redis itself isn't using the commons clause, and that it's only some enterprise redis modules that are adding the clause to their license.

But this _doesn't_ make Redis proprietary, because Redis is and will always remain BSD-licensed, THAT is what the claim you're referring to is talking about.

I've never heard of an open-source lawyer. I understand totally how valuable it is to litigate open-source issues, but I'm curious as to who pays for such services? Being able to pay lawyers seems unlikely for a free product.

You might want to start here: https://www.softwarefreedom.org/

It's just a lawyer who is conversant with issues surrounding software under open source licenses.

As real world application of open source licenses is rather complex (I would say: A nightmare) you definitely should consult a lawyer if you want to put sth. Open Source. Btw. it gets even more complex if you think about application under local laws of multiple countries.

Any company that either uses open source code or releases open source code needs competent advice. Asking for such advice from a lawyer unfamiliar with open source is probably pretty expensive.

10 out of 10 of the largest tech firms in the world release significant opensource software: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Intel, Oracle, Samsung and Baidu. They turnover more then $1 trillion and use many lawyers.

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.

I'm guessing she's a well-known practitioner in this field. Why would one be involved in such a thing, given it's so problematic? The whole thing seems super-confusing and half-baked.

Yes, Heather is very well known and very smart. She's a hired gun (with no offense meant).

She is neither good nor bad IMHO. Though depending on your viewpoint, she's lawful neutral, true neutral, or chaotic neutral :P.

She has both defended accused open source license violators and helped open source foundations defend against baseless lawsuits.

Given how long she has been doing this, I would simply not believe that she missed any of the issues I mentioned (the ambiguity, the AGPL/GPL/etc issues). She's too good to have not advised them of these issues, and in fact, also probably advised them that the kind of response you have seen in this thread is a high probability.

But like any lawyer, when she is paid to advise, she advises. What people do with that advice is up to them.

Thanks, that makes sense. It seems like an awful lot of effort to put into such a transparent (even without the legal issues) and pointless bit of dissembling. Lots of people plainly sell open source + proprietary parts products without much fuss from anyone.

> Given how long she has been doing this, I would simply not believe that she missed any of the issues I mentioned (the ambiguity, the AGPL/GPL/etc issues).

Agreed on that, based on just reading one of her books. I wonder why didn't they choose AGPL.

It looks like they were using AGPL before, but now they are switching to Commons Clause. See the history of the RedisSearch license, for example.

https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/RediSearch/commits/maste...

Yep, now I see this vague explanation on https://commonsclause.com :

> Why not AGPL?

> The AGPL was drafted in a different era where Cloud ecosystem was not nearly as well-developed. After deep legal analysis, many of the AGPL’s features were determined to be insufficient towards some of the requirements modern projects face.

> For example, much of the value for cloud-based software comes outside of the actual code (i.e. hosting) thereby nullifying many of the incentives to enforce source-availability. In addition, many of the AGPL's features can be more restrictive towards an end user that wishes to incorporate software into a new work, which makes a source-available license with additional grants more permissive.

> Why would one be involved in such a thing, given it's so problematic?

That is when you hire the lawyer!

There is a very bizarre story behind Neo4j Inc's behavior and what lead to them adding the commons clause to the enterprise AGPL license.

They seem to be ready to go closed source, which they should have just done in the first place instead of behaving like they did. Adding the commons clause is just the tip of the iceberg - there is a very entertaining story behind everything that is happening. A single person, not a huge corporation, is behind this.

I will write a blog post about what happened/is happening in the upcoming months - complete with supporting documents such as FOIA requests, etc.

The appeal to authority is to whatever authority OSI, Debian, or FSF may have, not to legal authority. Licensing lawyers often know those definitions, or at least know of them. But they're terms of branding, terms of politics, not legal terms of art, and not strong trade or service marks.

Granted, I think it's safe to say Commons Clause wouldn't meet the old definitions you mentioned, or please the people who wrote them. But I don't think it's my place, as a lawyer, to tell coders what "open source" should mean.

As for the old definitions, I've consistently overestimated how much devs care. Frankly, I've overestimated definitions focusing on license terms as a general proposition. Partly as a result, I've reassessed how I channel those projects, and my desire to belong among those invested in them, through my practice. Clients assume what I say is legally grounded. My job is to hear them and help them. Not to cite them under someone else's client's PR program, or scare them straight with the hiss of a hot "proprietary" brand.

The Open Source ecosystem rests on top of the OSI definition of "Open Source". Those with an interest in preserving the meaning of "Open Source" are broad, numerous and diverse; those with an interest in subverting it to confuse "open source" with "source available" are few, and destructive.

Dont think this is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. The emergence of cloud providers + hosted solutions and the ongoing disappearance of on premise computing means its increasingly hard to figure out a business model for infrastructure tech. Multiple database companies with excellent products (Rethinkdb et al) have faced significant challenges commercializing software that is open source. We need credible monetization strategies for building infrastructure level open source software. I do not fully agree with the Commons clause implementation, but I understand the need for it to exist and welcome efforts in this area.

DISCLAIMER: Views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent my employer in any way.

I would very much like to see those companies succeed. But when a company forces me to choose between their survival and the survival of Open Source as an institution, my choice is made.

Hyperbole for hyperbole: When an institution can't respond to urgent needs, or privileges one side of a balance over the other until it tips, there is nothing you can do for it.

I've read messages on OSI's mailing list that if you have to ask how your're going to make money making open source, you're the wrong person to make open source, and ought to make proprietary software, instead.

> The emergence of cloud providers + hosted solutions and the ongoing disappearance of on premise computing means its increasingly hard to figure out a business model for infrastructure tech.

The fact that open source works to the benefit of the largest providers of software-related services by commoditizing software itself is not new with the rise of the cloud as a new and popular domain of software-related services. And the source available and free non-commercial and selective commercial use, but negotiate a separate license for commercial use that we want to monopolize model is not an innovative solution to that problem, and generally isn't all that successful of a solution, especially as a switch for software which already has open source versions available that third parties can fork and commercially exploit even after the change.

Licensing choices dont exist in a vacuum, they are made with a business climate in mind. I think many projects picked liberal licenses in a climate where the assumption was that you could make your money selling integration / consulting on top of the software. I think we are no longer living in that world. In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc).

> I think many projects picked liberal licenses in a climate where the assumption was that you could make your money selling integration / consulting on top of the software. I think we are no longer living in that world.

The anti-consulting provision in th Commons Clause license pretty clearly indicates that it's crafters do think that we are living in that world, and that (as numerous people have observed for at least a couple of decades) the advantage in that market with open source isn't necessarily with the developer but often with the entity with the most developed professional services organization and relationships.

> In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc).

I don't think that's actually a problem, nor do I think that, to the extent it is a problem, the Commons Clause really addresses it in any general way. Software with such a clause ab initio simply would not get wide adoption in “the cloudy world” you refer to; what the Commons Clause aims to solve is the problem of ”how to capture revenue via technical lock-in after first building broad adoption through the attractiveness of open source when you as a development firm haven't developed the capacities that would leave you well positioned to capture associated services sales with open source”. But it doesn't seem all that likely to be successful in more than the short term, since it incorporates the main problems of classic proprietary software in the cloud domain.

If you read the shutdown blog post for RethinkDB, licensing was not among their problems. Instead, they were market positioning, reputation, and developing products suitable for their market in a timely fashion. In other words, business execution.

Believe it or don't, no license, no matter how clever, will allow you to be financially successful if you blow the business execution.

Let's turn this on its head: what was the business plan that RedisLabs re-invented itself under? Was it a good business plan? Is is vulnerability to Amazon/MS that made it fail, or was the plan flawed from the start?

Some experiences of open source rest on the OSD, but not all. If your experience does, that doesn't invalidate your experience. But your experience doesn't invalidate others', either. Browbeat or excommunicate all the heretics, I think you'll find yourself preaching to a much smaller choir.

Granted: OSD, or rather the OSI-approved license list, rules in enterprise procurement at a particular and fairly common level of sophistication. At the same time, I've had conversations with sponsoring companies, prolific contributors, investment types, and others, mentioned OSD, received blank stares, explained, and then heard they don't care. Not relevant. Does not resonate. Different experiences.

I have never seen any good evidence to back your claim of a quiet OSI majority, except if you count open source consumers as an inevitable majority over open source producers, and ascribe the former to OSI. My own direct experience of open source licensing news and work has been a constant drumbeat of interest in refining and expanding licensing models. HESSLA. Fair Source. Now Commons Clause. Experiments. They're coming faster and faster.

Many of the folks advancing those proposals, like the one linked here, are also creating relevant software. From their point of view, claims that their work is "destructive" ring hollow, since they're constructing lots of code for others to use. They're especially irked by criticism in consumer-centric terms, like those of the OSD. After all, the OSD isn't a _license_ compatibility guide, but an _institutional_ compatibility list. It doesn't tell you which code you can get into an open project. By corporate handbook fiat, it tells you which code you can get into your company.

What's the point of preaching to a larger choir, if they don't speak the same language? You're just straining your voice in vain.

HESSLA and Fair Source both clearly state they are not open source, so I don't see how they go against rectang's point; the problem is not the existence of different models, but muddling the language to conflate them with the preceding one. That's essentially an EEE attack, and it's no wonder that existing OSS developers refuse to participate in it.

We invoke "open source" in many more ways and places than dry terms like "express patent license" and "copyleft license". The latter have near-zero community, marketing, or ideological meaning. They aren't the names of movements to identify with.

The push and pull between what doing open source is and what open source is supposed to mean has always gone two ways. If the status quo serves your needs, it's natural to cast "open source" as a rigorously bounded definitional category in the vein of "copyleft", and to downplay its social aspects. From a frustrated developer's point of view, it's natural to cast "open source" as a community first and foremost, and elide theory.

One point of view says, "We have this great definition to reference and rely upon, and you're trying to skim value and prestige off it." The other says, "We have all these people to celebrate and work with, and you're trying to claim their support while ignoring their needs."

Two extremes.

Meh. We've been through this phase before.

Like anything, I do actually think it's reasonable to say "i understand the history of why things are the way they are now, but i want to see if they still should be that way"[1].

It may even be a reasonable time to see if that's the case given how much people have forgotten. It's been 20+ years since the last go around.

However, i do think ATM we will arrive at the same outcome we have in the past - after all the kerfuffles, i don't see things like the commons clause sticking. I also personally wish they would try innovative things, instead of old, tired things, but such is life.

Otherwise, yeah, i agree that pretty much no business gives a shit in the end about the licensing term difference between open source/free software/what have you.

I also agree that your job is to advise people. I do feel comfortable complaining about what they do with that advice, however ;)

[1] I don't believe most of the folks involved in this understand the history, but that's secondary.

> I also personally wish they would try innovative things

I am all for that. Do you have examples of what you are thinking of here?

Thanks for your comment. I think we understand each other better.

I don't have great hope for Commons Clause, either, at least at the moment. But I've had a few think-throughs, and I've yet to hear from those whose views I really need to feel complete on it.

As for old, tired things, I imagine some still await their time, with a bit of adaptation. Changed circumstances and all that. But I will also hold your comment on "innovative things" in my pocket. Should the HN beast come lumbering after any more of my own little licensing experiments, I may need it!