
License Changes for Confluent Platform - abd12
https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform
======
mindcrime
This is a really negative trend for Open Source, and I hope it runs its course
and dies out soon. License proliferation, bizarre "field of use" restrictions,
blurring the line between what is open and what isn't, none of this stuff is a
win for anybody. If you want to make something proprietary, make it
proprietary, call it proprietary, and let that be the end of it. If you want
to make something Open Source, then make it Open Source and don't try to
straddle the line.

~~~
chuhnk
Open source is not synonymous with free software. The world is evolving and so
open source should also evolve with it. Confluent have made it abundantly
clear that the Apache Kafka project is and always will be Apache 2 licensed.
Therefore that's where you go for your completely free solution. The community
license is additional features free for use but not for you to provide as a
managed service. Enterprise is something you have to pay for.

There's clear distinction and delineation between these. To an outside
observer this might seem confusing and nuanced. In which case use the apache 2
licensed software which should unquestionably be open source and free. But
otherwise those building businesses around open source technology have to find
a way to protect against cloud providers. Licensing innovation is the only
path forward right now until the cloud providers start to philosophically
realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad
actors.

~~~
mindcrime
_Open source is not synonymous with free software._

Nobody is saying that it is.

 _The community license is additional features free for use but not for you to
provide as a managed service._

IOW, "not Open Source". And that's fine... a company has a right to create
software using any licensing terms they want. But making something that's
"almost OSS, but not quite" and trying to steal the sheen of respectability
that comes from being OSS, while not _actually_ being OSS, is disingenuous and
misleading.

Additionally, license proliferation in general is a Bad Thing because it
muddles the issue around what's really Open Source and what isn't, especially
for new-comers.

 _The world is evolving and so open source should also evolve with it._

Not all evolutionary steps are good things, in real life, or in metaphor-
space.

 _until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back
with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors._

There have always been people who used OSS without contributing back. There's
nothing novel about this w/r/t cloud providers. And it's very questionable how
you can consider somebody a "bad actor" for using a project under the terms
that it was explicitly licensed under.

~~~
nine_k
Why, the _source_ is open. You can use it to look for bugs, to make your own
optimized / customized / verified build, etc.

The change applies to making the running code available in certain ways, not
to access to the source.

I wonder how "free as in freedom" such software is, though. OTOH AGPL is
considered "free software" by GNU, so this likely is, too.

~~~
mindcrime
"Open Source" has a very specific meaning[1], that goes beyond the mere
availability of the source code. And these terms violate article 6 of the OSD,
meaning that code licensed this way is not Open Source.

And yes, yes, I know the old saw that "The OSI doesn't have a trademark on
Open Source". That's irrelevant. In practical terms, the de-facto definition
of "Open Source" _is_ the OSD.

[1]: [https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd-
annotated)

------
sauceop
Speaking as someone who makes a living contributing to open source, it's a
frustrating trend that the major cloud providers (Amazon being the worst
offender) have decided that it's in their interests to take open source
projects and never contribute back or even interact with the community.

It's less clear to me whether this is rational on their part - whether the
incentives have actually changed. It's generally been in companies' best
interest to contribute back to open source projects they are building products
around, because:

You need to contribute to projects to influence the direction of them.

And you _will_ need to make changes or fixes to your version of the project,
and the maintenance cost of an upstreamed patch is much lower than the cost of
maintaining an ever-growing stack of custom patches.

I've seen companies before make the bet that they are better off forking a
large project because they can "move faster". And it is true for the first
year or two, but after a while the burden of keeping up with the backporting
of changes from upstream takes multiple engineers spending large chunks of
their time to keep up with.

In some cases you might be able to offset this just by hiring more engineers,
but how many of the best engineers really want to work on backporting changes
to a bizarro fork of an open source project? I suspect this is the bet the
cloud providers are making - that they can grow the product fast enough to the
point where they can throw money at it. We'll see how that works out for them.

~~~
_msw_
Hi,

I work for Amazon Web Services, and I will risk responding to the first and
only comment from a brand new account.

Amazon does contribute back and does interact with open source communities.
You can find information on AWS's open source activities here:
[https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/](https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/)

The page hasn't been updated for some of the latest news, such as releasing
the Firecracker virtualization technology as open source:
[https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/](https://firecracker-
microvm.github.io/)

------
boredandroid
Hi all, I'm Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent and author of that blog post. I'm
happy to answer any questions.

~~~
chuhnk
Hey Jay. Just want to say good job on the execution on this. It's clearly
articulated and goes along way to show the industry how and why this needs to
happen.

~~~
PeterCorless
I also give it a +1. There's a lot of debate presently around what I call the
"Little Red Hen" problem. Everyone wants to "eat the bread" when y'all are
done, but very few people want to help grind the grain or knead the dough.

There's a document gathering people's thoughts on the current state of Open
Source here, started by Jesse Anderson (formerly Cloudera):

"Viewpoints on Open Source Interview Responses"
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tLNerYJ5ce8PjGjGgRFfzKha...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tLNerYJ5ce8PjGjGgRFfzKhanFK0hwHHXdBPqI4t-48/edit#heading=h.8rsq5d34nuoy)

~~~
rywalker
+1 from me as well. Well done.

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alienreborn
I kinda expected this after recently revealed AWS Managed Kafka. AWS can
afford to release half baked products because platform inertia and that will
easily cannibalize whatever traction SaaS offerings of Elastic, Kafka, Mongo
etc has.

~~~
wpietri
That's a great point. I can only hope that platform providers who productize
open-source packages are giving back a significant chunk of revenue to the
project, either in cash or in employees contributing labor.

~~~
thinkmassive
It's safest to assume they are not giving back anything, unless they provide
evidence otherwise.

------
samstokes
The submission title is misleading (“License Changes for Confluent Platform
(Kafka)” at time of commenting) - the license changes do not apply to Kafka
itself, as the article specifically states.

~~~
sctb
Yes, we've dropped the mention of Kafka. Submitters: please, if you follow the
guidelines by not editorializing titles we won't have this confusion.

~~~
Nullabillity
The way it was mentioned in the title was misleading, but mentioning Kafka at
all was useful. How about `License Changes for Confluent Platform (Kafka
distribution)`?

------
PeterCorless
ScyllaDB's Dor Laor weighs in with his opinion on the new Confluent license:
[https://www.scylladb.com/2018/12/15/saas-vs-oss-fight-or-
fli...](https://www.scylladb.com/2018/12/15/saas-vs-oss-fight-or-flight-
round-2/)

------
dominotw
Is aws now in violation of the license if they ever upgrade kafka version?

~~~
boredandroid
No, this has no effect on Kafka, which is part of the ASF and under the Apache
2.0 license. This just impacts things like KSQL that are part of Confluent
Platform.

~~~
dominotw
oh ok. I was confused by "(kafka)" in the title. Mods can you please remove
kafka from the title.

~~~
sctb
Done.

