There's clear distinction and delineation between these. To an outside observer this might seem confusing and nuanced. In which case use the apache 2 licensed software which should unquestionably be open source and free. But otherwise those building businesses around open source technology have to find a way to protect against cloud providers. Licensing innovation is the only path forward right now until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors.
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.
http://deblanc.net/blog/2018/12/13/the-osd-and-user-freedom/
"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.
> software freedom, which in turn is a tool to protect user freedom
is AFAIK an assumption, or has this ever been proven?
I mean, isn't it entirely possible that helping software startups protect their business model of whatever "near-enough" OS/free software they build will help user freedom more than taking a purist OSS stance and leaving it all up for grabs by Amazon, Alibaba etc.? Because of increased choice and competition?
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.
The change applies to making the running code available in certain ways, not to access to the source.
I wonder how "free as in freedom" such software is, though. OTOH AGPL is considered "free software" by GNU, so this likely is, too.
And yes, yes, I know the old saw that "The OSI doesn't have a trademark on Open Source". That's irrelevant. In practical terms, the de-facto definition of "Open Source" is the OSD.
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.
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, but I believe Confluent do have significant influence, but I'm not sure if it's to an extent that could be considered dangerous or not.
The AGPL is that option. It is a copyleft license that explicitly regulates the 'public performance' of software (putting conditions on public performance of a copyrighted work is a right of all copyright owners, there's nothing "exotic" involved here) in order to close the perceived 'service provider loophole' where software that's made available as part of an application services platform is not required to make its complete source code available, including even modifications that are purportedly asserted to be "for internal use".
Say that your SaaS product to share pictures of cats uses database X, which is AGPL licensed. Depending on how you read the license, your SaaS product could have to be licensed as AGPL. Or not.
That ambiguity is why many companies won't touch the AGPL with a mile long pole.
Short answer: 1. AGPL doesn't actually solve this problem. This is why MongoDB just moved away from AGPL. 2. AGPL is quite restrictive for people who want to use the software in proprietary applications but don't want to open source their own code. This is a really large proportion of usage for us and we don't want to restrict people in that way.
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.
What they're doing is changing to a proprietary license and keeping the business model. That's a fine thing for them to do, and lots of their customers are going to choose different software as a result.
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 the software in a server or not being allowed to redistribute the software in a CD, it's just the same kind of restriction for a different medium.
It's not free, it's not open. It's an attack on freedom and openness as usual.
"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.
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?
I agree that it is always sad to see a company closing its (future) source code like this, but such is their perogative.
Yes, kudos to Confluent for at least creating a new license, as opposed to adopting "Commons Clause + Apache" or something.
All of this said, even though I don't particularly like this "you can do everything except build a SaaS of this project" model, if people are going to do this, I hope that eventually things consolidate to where there's one de-facto standard "Shared Source - Non-SaaS" license.