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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

The biggest change here is the name. Instead of "Apache 2 modified with Commons Clause", which risked causing confusion with Open Source software, and with Creative Commons licenses, we get the much clearer "Redis Source Available License". "Source available" is standard terminology for this type of proprietary software license, so nobody should be mislead. I approve.

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Was very happy to see the rename. I participated in the review threads at the OSI and whilst I have a lot of sympathy for Redis, Mongo and others (I’m a closed source software CEO myself) I felt strongly that open source is not a business model and the definition of open source licenses should be kept strict to the OSD freedoms defined by the OSI.

Well done to Redis for making this clear

I recently quit the OSI lists, and am glad I did.

I once believed that the OSD did a good job of defining the criteria for open source licenses. That changed by experience of how it's actually applied, how it fails, and how OSI fails to redress.

The more I dug into available mailing list archives, the clearer it became that the problem isn't new. It's not just strong copyleft licenses and the constant stream of human rights licenses. It's the FRAND standards patent problem. It's the license-or-contract confusion.

The situation now, as I see it, is that OSD is largely window dressing for OSI. The OSD is vague and incomplete, but sounds official and technocratic. So it functions as window dressing for the prerogative of those with sway at OSI, to call it as they see it.

Thanks for pointing that out. That is a clearer name for their proprietary license.

On that note, the title of the article is misleading. Redis hasn't changed its open source license. Redis remains BSD-licensed. This article is about the change in the proprietary license of certain Redis Modules.

The title isn’t misleading, but the name of Redis Labs is. I would wager that far less confusion and hand wringing would have gone on with this if the company were named something else, like sbaL sideR.

Rule 1 of open source licensing journalism: The title must be misleading. Otherwise, who would read this stuff?

That helps me understand what's different this time, thank you.

I think it's still open-source, it's just not free (as in freedom) software. I'm annoyed how suddenly redis, even when source is available, is put into the same bin as say MSSQL, with rest of the "proprietary software".

The usual definition of open source is the Open Source Definition,[1] which was adapted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines[2]. The sixth item prohibits discrimination against fields of endeavor, which this new license would violate.

It's more like an especially generous version of shared source than open source.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd [2] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

I do not agree that some organization can define what open source is and everyone else can't. That's not free.

Because there is minimal value in being able to read but not use the source

Not sure the value is minimal. Many people read the .net framework source to get a better understanding even though you weren't allowed to do anything with it

It’s worth noting (and Redis Labs has attempted to note in the body of the article) that Redis (the database) remains open source, as it always has been. Neither the “Common Clause” change or this change affect the database, just the modules published to extend Redis, by Redis Labs.

They are the same. The full .NET framework effectively had the full source code available to read as the "Reference Source" but there was never any doubt it was proprietary.

https://referencesource.microsoft.com/

You can mince words and make inconsequential adjustments to proprietary software licenses but they are still proprietary.

The current iteration of the .NET Framework, .NET Core, is proper Open Source under the MIT license. .NET Framework 4.x above is a different beast all-together and requires Mono for cross-platform compatibility. I am guessing you are fully aware of the difference, but worth pointing out for readers who might not be :)

.Net Core is not an iteration of .Net framework.

.Net Core and .Net Framework are separate implementations of .Net Standard.

Though the argument is that because all of the innovation is happening in .NET Core (and indeed the .NET Standard 1.x versions were a game of .NET Core implementing things first and backports eventually made to .NET Framework), the clear indicator seems to be that .NET Core is the present-future platform (ie, the "current iteration") for .NET and .NET Framework the backwards-compatible past. Though Microsoft has walked that messaging back, somewhat, it's very much the case that greenfield projects today are best on .NET Core, and even brownfield projects are welcome on .NET Core (.NET Core 3.0 "Desktop Pack" is now the best way to build and run WinForms and WPF applications).

You can ask Microsoft for access to Windows source code. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ Any definition of "open source" that includes Windows is so vague as to be useless.

But that's asking, it's closed until "opened", not "open" per se.

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