Commons Clause stops open-source abuse
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Cloud infrastructure providers, including Amazon, are threatening the position of open-source software (OSS). The author of this article has invested in open-source projects such as: While most major companies fall into the "innovator's dilemma," Amazon continues to grow like a startup, which is remarkable. Amazon executes too well, almost like a startup. This is scary for everyone in the ecosystem. However, Amazon is cruelly providing OSS to its customers without actually owning the license and using its own infrastructure (AWS). For example, they use the software of the most beloved database among engineers, called Redis, but they hardly contribute to the (OSS) developer community and rebrand it as AWS Elasticash. In conclusion, while this use of AWS is not illegal, it is wrong.
\s\sI believe it does not promote a sustainable open source community.\n\s\n\s\sIn early 2018, I gathered representatives from over 20 public companies to discuss what should be done about this issue. As a result, we concluded that instead of making existing open source licenses more complex to prevent practices like Amazon's, we should create clear clauses that prohibit such practices. To accomplish this, we turned to Heather Meeker, a lawyer experienced in open source rights issues.\n\s\n\s\sIn August of 2018, Redis Labs announced that it would add the following paragraph:\n\s\s\sWhile Redis itself remains under the liberal BSD license, a Commons Clause has been added that prohibits selling Redis software as a service without a commercial license.>\n\s\s\s>What Commons Clause prevents is the running of a commercial service with somebody else’s open-source software in the manner that cloud infrastructure providers do.\n\s\s\s>This change met with various reactions from the community, but those who supported it consider it a logical and positive evolution in the discussion of how licenses can make it possible for open-source companies to engage in sustainable business practices while investing in open-source projects. Among them is Michael DeHaan, the developer of Ansible, who particularly articulates a certain aspect in "Why Open Source Needs New Licenses".\n\s\s\s>We see people running open source “foundations” and web sites that are essentially talking heads, spewing political arguments about the definition of “open source” as described by something called “Open Source Initiative (OSI)”, which contains various names which have attained some level of popularity or following. They attempt to state that such a license where the source code is freely available, but use cases are limited, are “not open source”. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.\n