Previously, we mentioned relicensing of MongoDB(#30) and RedisLab(#33), to fight against cloud providers who take open source projects as an offering without contributing back to the community. Confluent, the company commercializing Apache Kafka, has just entered the battlefield and forbidden some Confluent Platform components to be provided as a SaaS offering as depicted below. Note that there is no license change to Kafka, Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect.
The reaction has been mixed.
Flink and Beam committer, Maximilian Michels, believes it's the right move. (He tweeted the other day that AWS Kinesis Data Analytics turned out to be Flink 1.6)
Apache Storm PMC, Taylor Goetz, suggests Confluent to fix their business model instead.
StackOverflow founder, Jeff Atwood, casts doubts over the license change trend.
These companies want it both ways: they want the advantages of open source — the community, the positivity, the energy, the adoption, the downloads — but they also want to enjoy the fruits of proprietary software companies in software lock-in and its concomitant monopolistic rents.
"These companies" are MongoDB, RedisLab and Confluent. He argues that changing license won't address the underlying problem which is these companies don't know how to make money.
their business model isn’t their community’s problem, and they should please stop trying to make it one
and in the end, open source will survive its midlife questioning just as people in midlife get through theirs: by returning to its core values and by finding rejuvenation in its communities
My fundamental belief is that the most effective way for us to keep evolving open source in the age of “Cloud Native” is to approach this evolution with a very federalist view in mind...Just don’t do it alone. Don’t cook up solutions behind closed doors
Interestingly, Confluent CTO and Kafka creator, Jay Kreps, has replied with a quick comment.
99.9999% of users are completely unimpacted, it really only impacts companies wanting to offer, say, KSQL-as-a-service
our goal in all of this is to give away software in as liberal a way as we can sustain
The “open source companies are all failing”-meme isn’t factually correct. Many open source companies are actually doing quite well.
I don’t think the current crop of licenses were handed down from the mountain on stone tablets by our elders to be revered and not questioned.
Be it good or bad, I do think this is a bold move and something has to change.
Previously, we mentioned relicensing of MongoDB(#30) and RedisLab(#33), to fight against cloud providers who take open source projects as an offering without contributing back to the community. Confluent, the company commercializing Apache Kafka, has just entered the battlefield and forbidden some Confluent Platform components to be provided as a SaaS offering as depicted below. Note that there is no license change to Kafka, Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect.
The reaction has been mixed.
Flink and Beam committer, Maximilian Michels, believes it's the right move. (He tweeted the other day that AWS Kinesis Data Analytics turned out to be Flink 1.6)
Apache Storm PMC, Taylor Goetz, suggests Confluent to fix their business model instead.
StackOverflow founder, Jeff Atwood, casts doubts over the license change trend.
Joyent (company behind Node.js) CTO, Bryan Cantrill has written a long critique, Open source confronts its midlife crisis
"These companies" are MongoDB, RedisLab and Confluent. He argues that changing license won't address the underlying problem which is these companies don't know how to make money.
He points to the Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities (SFOSC) project as a positive effort towards viable business model.
His view and emphasis on community can also be found in ASF VP Roman Shaposhnik's earlier Is it time for Cloud Native Open Source?.
Interestingly, Confluent CTO and Kafka creator, Jay Kreps, has replied with a quick comment.
Be it good or bad, I do think this is a bold move and something has to change.