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Comment by boredandroid | Hacker News Reader

This is Jay, the CEO of Confluent. No, actually quite the opposite. We took pains to ensure that the license was written so that software products like Landoop were free to embed our open source and compete with us in that way. This FAQ covers the competition in more detail: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq

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> Embed our open source

I thought the FAQ said you wouldn't refer to it as such:

> Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source.

I believe the trademarked term is “Open Source” (with capitals) and they are avoiding that.

IMO it’s a deliberately deceptive technique to try to confuse the market and dilute open source.

The quoted passage from the FAQ says "open source" in lowercase.

> dilute open source.

I think you mean "dilute Open Source" with capitals :P

More seriously: most terms dilute over time, and it takes a lot of effort to prevent that. I wouldn't assume every instance is malicious

There is no trademark on "Open Source", whats trademarked is "OSI Certified".

> were free to embed our open source

Source available. Your license is not open source as understood by OSI or free software as understood by FSF.

I am no expert on this, but based on Bryan's analysis, if Landoop were to release a SAAS offering of their product, they would be in breach of the license. As Landoop are pushing Kafka on Kubernetes, I assume that is their strategy - to have a SAAS offering at some stage (we are all going to the cloud, i thought?).

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