Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

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@richardartoul > Yesterday there were significant "commercial changes" to the OSS project Benthos, so today we're announcing Bento, the 100% MIT licensed fork of the project formerly known as Benthos.

@emaxerrno > it's sad to see you leave when you can already host 99.1% of them on your site. You just have to call it Redpanda Connect. Additionally, I am not sure about the content copyrights of the docs. I'd double check. My proposal would be to have this work for multiple vendors. /2

@emaxerrno > There is plenty of money to be made in streaming, lots of exciting tech. If you decide to change your mind, we'll be here.

@emaxerrno > last the emphasis on "really hard not to fork" is hard to believe when you never reached out. again, happy to have multiple ppl charge and embed this in their own product for the apache 2 license connectors which is 223/225, just gotta be called Redpanda Connect.

Except for the implicit accusation in the first sentence of the last tweet, I completely don’t get what’s being said here. Maybe that’s fair given how little I know about the history here, it’s just been quite some time since I was so baffled by a piece of (supposedly conversational) English.

>@emaxerrno > last the emphasis on "really hard not to fork" is hard to believe when you never reached out. again, happy to have multiple ppl charge and embed this in their own product for the apache 2 license connectors which is 223/225, just gotta be called Redpanda Connect.

I don't know who's who here, but I do maintain an open source project, so do have a general interest in the topic. Yeah, it would be interesting to hear from the project which created the fork, how hard they tried not to fork. They claimed they worked really hard at it, but what did the hardship entail? It seems Redpanda says they was basically zero effort. Someone is not exactly being honest here...

From WarpStream’s (the forker’s) communications, I can’t tell if this is a hard fork or if they intend to pull changes and keep plugin compat. Perhaps they don’t yet know themselves, which would be nonideal but understandable under the circumstances. And I think that’s the only way we could really measure “trying not to fork” here, so saying that they had tried not to fork before eventually doing so sounds confused on their part.

On the other hand, I am saying all of that because I don’t think not forking at all is really an option in this situation. When the new maintainer is willing to relicense [EDIT: parts of] a piece of FOSS whose previous maintainer they acquired, when they are further trying to impose some weird Orwellian retcon on the name of said piece of FOSS and deleting all of its older resources, this seems to me like a degree of active hostility that wouldn’t be wise to tolerate, and the correct attitude would be “fool me twice, shame on me.” So a fork it is, now we’re just haggling over the hardness.

you may have not read the blog post i wrote. the engine remains MIT because we had customers that had embedded this in their app and it made sense to keep that. it is 100% about not having to call it "redpanda x" https://redpanda.com/blog/redpanda-connect

at the end of the day, there is plenty of ppl that are making money on this that is not us and that's cool too. we just need to retain the brand of the code we maintain. that's really the thing that matters.

> it is 100% about not having to call it "redpanda x"

It sounds frivolous, but these kinds of trademark shenanigans are a pretty big deal IMO. Mozilla's trademark policies already push the boundaries of what's acceptable in open source--people maintain forks like GNU IceCat just to get around them. Redpanda's forced rebranding goes a lot farther, and personally, it would make me think twice about using your stuff in anything I ship.

> we just need to retain the brand of the code we maintain. that's really the thing that matters.

This is... not really possible with most open source licenses? It's probably possible for you to ban me from using the name "Benthos", but I could almost certainly take your code and distribute it as "Frank's No-Name Blob Thingy" if I retained your copyright notices and license text. I mean that's what this fork is doing, after all.

let's call it what it is. warp never reached out. they do not want to have the name "redpanda" in their UI. that's all. They can* make money on 223 out of 225 connectors. More over the engine* remains MIT.

Let's call it what it is: Redpanda took a valuable OSS property, hard renamed it, and applied an arbitrary trademark restriction that did not exist the day before‡ and is not strictly controlled by the open source licence in question — in addition to relicensing part of the repository.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I have never used Benthos. But if someone started what Redpanda with a project that I use — commercially or otherwise — I would instantly fork it. I might not make a big announcement about it the way that Warp did, but I would absolutely be "keeping my powder dry" to see what other nonsense who did the first steps would pull.

You may not like what's happened, and Warp's incentives are certainly not pure, but they are reasonable considering what more than a few corporations have done, including Terraform, Elastic, and Mongo. Please stop pretending that you’re the good guys here.

‡ This is similar to Firefox's trademark restrictions resulting in Iceweasel, etc. There are some people who find Mozilla's restrictions applied to choosing different build settings to be excessive. Are you really surprised that people find your renaming and insta-trademark enforcement to be reminiscent of NewSpeak? Doubleplusungood.

Not sure that you care, but you are doing an absolutely terrible job representing RP in nearly every comment I’ve seen you make on the topic. You need a coach I guess.

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