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Licensed Companies
In late September , the Open Core Summit was held in San Francisco. At it, participants in the IT community discussed the topic of reselling open source solutions in the form of SaaS by third-party companies. Many are not happy that in this case, the developers of the original libraries remain out of work in terms of income distribution. Therefore, they are moving to new types of licenses.
Last December, the license was modified in Confluent. The KSQL engine for real-time data processing is now distributed under the Confluent Community License instead of Apache 2.0. The new license still allows you to download, modify and distribute the system code, but prohibits offering it as a service on a paid basis.
A similar path was chosen by the Redis authors. They developed the Redis Source Available License ( RSAL ). Company code and solutions can be used for third-party applications. But there is a condition - it cannot be a database, a streaming data processing system or a search / caching engine. Something similar was implemented in MongoDB. Their license - Server Side Public License ( SSPL ) - obliges developers to pay if the company sells modified versions of their DBMS.
The authors of Neo4j, a graph database management system, generally decided to remove the code for the corporate version of the service from open source. And switched to a commercial license last year.
Who thinks it's good
Any open source project needs a business model. Without funding, it cannot exist, develop and scale. Partial commercialization of the code opens up an additional source of income and makes it possible to attract new developers. This practice will help to avoid the fate of Chandler's open calendar manager. It lasted a year - then the developers ran out of money to support it.
Some members of the IT community have gone further. They suggested introducing licenses that would not only prohibit reselling open source code, but would also limit its use to certain companies. A month ago, the developer of a Ruby library that simplifies working with Chef, as a protest, removed his own project from the repository on GitHub when he learned that engineers from the US Immigration Service were using it. This incident briefly disrupted the work of the agency. Experts say that new licenses will prevent the emergence of such situations.
And work in this direction is already underway. In the summer , the PolyForm project appeared, within the framework of which they developed five new licenses for open source. For example, one of them prohibits working with open source software for companies with more than a hundred employees.
Who is convinced otherwise
Most of the IT community, however, opposes any commercialization of open source projects. Bruce Perens, author of the open source definition and Debian Social Contract, says the new licenses of Redis, Confluent, MongoDB and other companies contradict the concept of open source software. The ninth paragraph of the definition states that “a license shall not limit other software products”. One of the residents of Hacker News even proposed to designate projects with restrictive licenses with a new term - Source Visible.
Another HN user also noted that the position of organizations that have changed the terms of the license can be called hypocritical. They themselves offer paid enterprise services, using Linux, GNU, and other open source applications in parallel. However, they do not make any financial contributions in their favor.
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Gordon Haff (Gordon Haff), head of the cloud division of Red Hat, believes that so companies want to "sit on two chairs" - to profit from the sale of modules and be an open source company. His point of view was supported by Thomas Dinsmore, author of Disruptive Analytics . He says that developers have the right to monetize their products, but in this case they must initially choose a commercial license.
It is believed that the massive change of licenses of large projects will destroy the open community. For example, in 2015, FoundationDB was bought by Apple. The company limited the downloads of multimodel DBMS and closed all repositories on GitHub. As a result, the community, formed over five years, began to disintegrate.
Large IT corporations also responded negatively to the practice of changing licenses. They called such decisions hostile to users, as it becomes difficult for them to understand licenses. And they accused the authors of the initiative that their proposals could lead to the complete destruction of the open source world.
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