10 ms·

A EULA in FOSS clothing?

205 points by bcantrill 8y ago

hlieberman 8y ago
I think it goes without saying that the Confluent Community License is in violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines for a whole multitude of reasons. I don't think it deserves the title "open source", but I can't imagine anyone considering to call it free software.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  They don’t claim to meet those guidelines though do they? Not sure it’s reasonable to say they ‘violate’ something nobody claims applies to them.
  - hannob 8y ago
    > They don’t claim to meet those guidelines though do they? The problem of this whole discussion is that they try to confuse as much as they can by using terminology that surely sounds like they're doing "Open Source". Read this: https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat... Yeah, they don't write "The Confluent Community License is an Open Source License", but they use the term a whole lot and they also don't clearly write the accurate thing: "We're no longer using an Open Source license." I think this whole thing would be much less of a controversy if some companies just said clearly: "We tried the Open Source way, it didn't work for us, now we do something different." But they don't want to be that company, instead they use all kinds of confusing terminology to obscure that fact and try to be the "We no longer use open source, but we surely want you to believe that we still do"-company.
    - gunnarmorling 8y ago
      > The problem of this whole discussion is that they try to confuse as much as they can by using terminology that surely sounds like they're doing "Open Source". Dunno, they are very clear about this in the FAQ (https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq): "Is Confluent Community License open source? -- Strictly speaking it is “source-available.” Many people use the phrase “open source” in a loose sense to mean that you can freely download, modify, and redistribute the code, and those things are all true of the code under the Confluent Community License. However, in the strictest sense “open source” means a license approved by the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) which meets a particular set of criteria. The Confluent Community License is not approved by the OSI and likely would not be as it excludes the use case of creating a SaaS offering of the code. Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source." I totally see how people have different opions on whether that move is good or bad for the community and/or Confluent themselves, but I don't see where they are being confusing intentionally; IMO it's the opposite, the announcement is very clear and open what it is and what it isn't. Compare that to "Commons Clause", which indeed is a super-confusing term.
      - hannob 8y ago
        Scroll a bit down in the comments here and you'll see the CEO of Confluence talk about "our Open Source" referring to the new license.
        toomanybits 8y ago
        Are you sure? he seems to be using the past tense: "written so that software products like Landoop were free to embed our open source"
      - webmaven 8y ago
        "Strictly speaking" is an attempt to confuse. They could have just said "No". Same for the whole "many people" portion, which could instead have been more honestly written as "Many people misuse the term "Open Source". We won't do that, but we really wish we could."
techdragon 8y ago
I’m not a lawyer but the amount of law (and legal history) I do know makes me deeply concerned by this.
kemitchell 8y ago
This is fundamentally a legal topic. And not a particularly new one for lawyers in the industry. For those interested, I'd recommend two cases. Vernor v. Autodesk Why didn't 17 USC 117 save the defendant? What are "notable use restrictions"? Artifex v. Hancom Did terms end up a license or a contract? Why?
hiro_protag 8y ago
If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software? The copyright to the software resides with Confluent, because of the copyright assignment clause that all contributors must sign. This is no different than Apache projects, which also require copyright assignment. For example, if you git clone Apache Hadoop, you do not acquire the copyright to Hadoop. Does Bryan really not understand how copyright assignment works? To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! Why do any of those foundations need to review the license or EULA that Confluent chooses? Confuent isn't claiming that their license is OSI compatible (in fact they explicitly state that it is not.) If you don't like the license, don't use the software. Or use Amazon's software, which does require a EULA (see https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ ).
- the_gipsy 8y ago
  > If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software? > The copyright to the software resides with Confluent, because of the copyright assignment clause that all contributors must sign. “who owns it when I fork it?” - still not answered by Jay nor this account that seems to work for Confluent.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    Insinuating that anybody disagreeing with you must be corrupt (I. e. have a financial interest) is the sort of assumption of bad faith that destroys any serious discussion.
    - the_gipsy 8y ago
      Just pointing out that the question about ownership (freedom of usage) is countered with an answer about copyright, which was specifically addressed as not being questioned at all.
jamesblonde 8y ago
It's interesting to see the change in tone from Bryan's previous blog, which was one of 'you can challenge opensource, but it will win out': "open source will survive its midlife questioning just as people in midlife get through theirs" to the more recent entry, which is that open-source is facing an existential crisis: "we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!" I don't see how Confluent can respond directly to Bryan's 3 questions, though. They have the bigger social network, so i expect them to ignore him and just talk to their cool-aiders. It is a risk to ignore Bryan, though, as he's massively influential.
- hiro_protag 8y ago
  I truly don't understand the panicked tone. There are always going to be lots of projects licensed under all the existing licenses. If you don't like the new license, don't use it. Or start your own competing project. Greybeard says, people using $LICENSE are filthy heathens. You should use $OTHER_LICENSE instead. Film at 11.
  - robert_foss 8y ago
    These a company backed projects that portray themselves as open source while actually being nothing of the sort due to licensing. It's a ruse. If MongoDB or CockroachDB for example want to describe their project as open source they should also act accordingly.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      > portray themselves as open source They don't! "The Confluent Community License is not approved by the OSI and likely would not be as it excludes the use case of creating a SaaS offering of the code. Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source."
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
boredandroid 8y ago
This is Jay Kreps, I'm the CEO of Confluent. The license is actually not a EULA, that is a misunderstanding. We have added this item to our FAQ: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq
- DannyBee 8y ago
  I don't think you should give this the short shrift you are - in particular, right to use vs other rights is not the defining characteristic of EULA's. There are EULA's for redistributable components and have been for a very long time (for example, the MSVC runtime libraries). The most defining characteristic of a EULA is usually the "licensed but not sold" part. I suspect adding this particular entry does more harm than good for you - it makes you look like you ignoring the meaningful argument here. Personally, I'd remove it until you have some reasonable response.
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    EULA has no specific meaning in industry. It's been used for so many different kinds of terms, in so many different contexts, that it's lost nearly all meaning. Like "OEM". > The most defining characteristic of a EULA is usually the "licensed but not sold" part. Public licenses for software, say MIT or BSD, also arguably license, rather than sell. But they still include disclaimers of warranties, like merchantability and fitness for particular purpose, implied by the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs contracts. Huh? At least under the US law I've seen, from Jacobsen to Hancom, there's no hard, meaningful legal distinction between contract and license, as some activists theorized early on. Even when those activists drafted licenses, like the GPLs, that explicitly claimed to be licenses and not contracts, they still included contract-like disclaimers and limits on liability. Realistically, license and contract rules coexist and overlap. How do we interpret license terms? By rules of contract construction. What claims do plaintiffs make for violations? Copyright infringement and breach of contract. What makes a license irrevocable without consideration? Promissory estoppel, a contract doctrine.
- bcantrill 8y ago
jamesblonde 8y ago
Spare a thought for poor Landoop (https://www.landoop.com/ https://www.landoop.com/), not AWS. They built up their business around Confluent's open-source tools - like the schema registry, ksql, kafka streams. I guess they will have to fork from the latest version and try and develop competing versions of Confluent's tools now. Maybe they could bootstrap a community effort around this?
- boredandroid 8y ago
  This is Jay, the CEO of Confluent. No, actually quite the opposite. We took pains to ensure that the license was written so that software products like Landoop were free to embed our open source and compete with us in that way. This FAQ covers the competition in more detail: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq
  - jamesblonde 8y ago
    I am no expert on this, but based on Bryan's analysis, if Landoop were to release a SAAS offering of their product, they would be in breach of the license. As Landoop are pushing Kafka on Kubernetes, I assume that is their strategy - to have a SAAS offering at some stage (we are all going to the cloud, i thought?).
    - jamesblonde 8y ago
      That's why you use the word "product", Jay. Yes? That's weasel -speak, IMO.
  - shabbyrobe 8y ago
    > Embed our open source I thought the FAQ said you wouldn't refer to it as such: > Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source.
    - nl 8y ago
oliwarner 8y ago
This is way too hung-up on the idea of ownership. Software licensing seems like a beast unto its own but what do you suppose would happen if you bought a car, a camera, a kettle, a pair of glasses, duplicated it 1:1 and tried to sell those copies? You'd fall foul of a thousand protected designs and trademarks. IP is everywhere. It's not about what you own. It's about what rights are granted to you. Software is only strange in this regard because as developers we're [often painfully] explicit about what you can do. It isn't yet obfuscated behind decades of evolving law. Please stop throwing "ownership" around as something you expect when you download something. It's silly to expect it. The same works in reverse. You own your modifications. Nobody else owns (or has right to) them without your grant. But could well be compounded into a license, or more commonly a contributor agreement... But it has to be explicit. Edit: After getting a couple of downs, I assumed my pre-coffee acidity may have burned through, so edited it to be softer... but I've had another since. If you've got a point to make, please leave a comment.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I think Cantrill's point is that by owning a copy of a copyrighted work, you have a bunch of rights granted by law, which EULAs try to claw back.
- IAmEveryone 8y ago
  I believe this comment neatly goes at the heart of this discussion. I have absolutely no horse in this particular fight, having never even used any software by confluence, as far as I know. Coming into this discussion as somewhat of a blank slate, I stumbled over this somewhat nebulous concept of “ownership” just like the parent, plus some mild dismay at seeing the only two threats meaningfully engaging with what IMHO is the core of this dispute being flagged into oblivion. To reiterate: I have no earthly idea nor opinion if Confluence is the confluence of everything that’s wrong with earth and beyond. I just think the argument would benefit from a sharp pencil more than a pitchfork, for now.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    > I stumbled over this somewhat nebulous concept of “ownership” just like the parent, A lack of clarity about what sort of transaction or license terms give rise to ownership of a copy of software is not justification for entirely rejecting the notion of ownership of a copy. The existence of that ownership status is rigidly established by statute, as are some of the consequences. It's only the prerequisites that are nebulous or at least very complicated, but that doesn't make ownership status any less important of a question. In legal disputes, the tricky questions are usually more important than the ones with obvious answers.
runn1ng 8y ago
I don't get why are these weirdo licenses needed If you want to prevent Amazon to use your software for SaaS, just license it with Affero GPL, it was invented for this usecase (as far as I know) edit: okay I was wrong, see replies.
- jclulow 8y ago
  That wouldn't prevent them from using it to provide a service, it would merely require that they share any modifications they make to the code while doing so.
  - runn1ng 8y ago
    I wrongly belied that Affero forces you to open source everything on the backend, which is not the case here. I was wrong
- abrookewood 8y ago
  I assume you are talking about this section? "13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software." I'm not sure that it prevents anyone from offering a SaaS version of your product - just that they have to make the code available if they modify it.
  - runn1ng 8y ago
    indeed! I was wrong then, I thought the entire backend had to be open sourced, not just the modified version. I stand corrected then
    - webmaven 8y ago
      That depends on how (and how much) the backend is tied to the modified version (IANAL, don't ask me for specifics, it's REALLY gnarly, and there are various contradicting legal opinions).
SwertresResult 8y ago
https://swertresresultz.com/lottery/swertres-result/ https://swertresresultz.com/lottery/swertres-result/
skrebbel 8y ago
I'm new to this particular controversy, but as a startup founder considering to open up their stack, I think what Confluent is doing here is very reasonable. From their own FAQ: > Is Confluent Community License open source? Strictly speaking it is “source-available.” .. So if Bryan's analysis holds up and indeed, you don't own your copy and instead you merely were given the right to use and modify it, as long as you abide by rules X, Y and Z, then.. well, isn't that okay too? Isn't that better than nothing? Is there some sort of hidden rule somewhere that if you sell (or give away) the right to read and modify your proprietary software, that then you're suddenly evil? I think I must be missing something, but what's the core argument here? This sort of thing makes the rounds on HN frequently, but I get the feeling that all but the most avid FSF-supporters are okay with 100% closed, proprietary, SaaS, etc software existing, and also okay with 100% OSI-approved open source. But somehow people get super angry about anything that falls in the middle. Why is that? Why is proprietary software nothing to worry about, but proprietary software with a "here's the source, have fun" notice tacked onto it totally evil? To be honest, I don't always buy the argument about muddying the definition of "open source". Yes, there have been companies that called their thing open source even though it wasn't, by the OSI definition, and that's a shitty move. But my impression is that Confluent is not one of those companies.
- bo1024 8y ago
  Well it just doesn't make sense to me. If I were to clone the repo for example or receive the code in some other way, then I've never entered into any sort of contract or legal relationship with this company yet they're suddenly asserting all sorts of control and limits on my rights (far beyond cppyright law).
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    > (far beyond copyright law) I don't know your jurisdiction, but in the US, this isn't just a matter of copyright law, and copyright law itself has developed to support rules about use in license terms. Many old open source licenses came from legal activists who opposed the application of contract law to public license terms and conditions or restrictions on use under license, for whatever reason. Overall, US law hasn't gone their way.
jordigh 8y ago
Did Confluent use Node? Python? Ruby? Django? Flask? Linux? Did they manage to avoid using any free and open source software? Would they have liked it any of the things that they used said "you're not allowed to put this on a server and make money off it"? I wager they wouldn't. People are saying that Confluent have every right to be doing this. They certainly do, but it's not very reciprocal of them to do so. If we're going to be so worried about Confluent's income, we should also be worried about the income of all the forgotten software developers that Confluent has likely based their business on, and I don't think the answer is for everyone to start forbidding making money on servers unless they wrote all of their money-making server software themselves. These new breeds of licenses with anti-AWS clauses trying to make sure that Amazon doesn't make too much money are also harming in their wake many other developers. Software development as a whole is going to be getting poorer if enough people want to forbid making money on a server.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dhimes 8y ago
  My understanding is that you can use Confluent's software to run your own stack and offer a service, and you can do that for free. You just can't offer a service that competes directly with theirs. It's like if Google said, "Here's our search algorithm. You are free to use it on your website behind your paywall to give your users a better experience, but you are NOT allowed to use it to establish a competing search service on the broader internet. I don't really have a problem with it- I think it's fair. I think the question of whether it should be allowed on Github is fair- can someone accidentally find themselves legally bound? But it's probably an edge case.
  - a3n 8y ago
    In the 90s microsoft prohibited you from selling a compiler built with their compiler. Edit: microsoft
newaccoutnas 8y ago
For a moment I thought the article was going to be about actual clothing (smart? clothing). Perhaps a copy of the GPL will need to be shipped with all future clothing articles that have a GPL licensed parts of it's embedded system?
dahart 8y ago
> I’m not asking who owns the copyright (that part is clear, as it is for open source) — I’m asking who owns the copy of the work that I have modified? Not a copyright lawyer, but honest question: what would it mean to “own” a digital copy? How would you define that ownership? Is it attached to specific devices? Should it make exception for multiple temporary copies? What tangible rights or advantages would that give the owner above and beyond the rights that copyrights currently provide to someone who acquires a legal copy? I’m asking because it makes some sense to me that digital assets are handled differently than physical copies, because digital copies don’t transfer the same way. With digital assets, you don’t automatically relinquish a copy when you give yours to someone else. It can be incredibly hard to know exactly where your digital copies are physically located. It can be easy to have two or three or four copies sitting around and not know it. Perhaps one consumer advantage that licensing has over some notion of ownership is that you can legally have multiple copies, even make multiple copies, without violating copyright law.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
This a commonplace tactic. The goal is to deny you common rights and privileges under the law by overriding it with a contract. The use of a contract to deny ownership is becoming increasingly common.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

205 points by bcantrill 8y ago

I think it goes without saying that the Confluent Community License is in violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines for a whole multitude of reasons. I don't think it deserves the title "open source", but I can't imagine anyone considering to call it free software.

chrisseaton 8y ago
They don’t claim to meet those guidelines though do they? Not sure it’s reasonable to say they ‘violate’ something nobody claims applies to them.
- hannob 8y ago
  > They don’t claim to meet those guidelines though do they? The problem of this whole discussion is that they try to confuse as much as they can by using terminology that surely sounds like they're doing "Open Source". Read this: https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat... Yeah, they don't write "The Confluent Community License is an Open Source License", but they use the term a whole lot and they also don't clearly write the accurate thing: "We're no longer using an Open Source license." I think this whole thing would be much less of a controversy if some companies just said clearly: "We tried the Open Source way, it didn't work for us, now we do something different." But they don't want to be that company, instead they use all kinds of confusing terminology to obscure that fact and try to be the "We no longer use open source, but we surely want you to believe that we still do"-company.
  - gunnarmorling 8y ago
    > The problem of this whole discussion is that they try to confuse as much as they can by using terminology that surely sounds like they're doing "Open Source". Dunno, they are very clear about this in the FAQ (https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq): "Is Confluent Community License open source? -- Strictly speaking it is “source-available.” Many people use the phrase “open source” in a loose sense to mean that you can freely download, modify, and redistribute the code, and those things are all true of the code under the Confluent Community License. However, in the strictest sense “open source” means a license approved by the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) which meets a particular set of criteria. The Confluent Community License is not approved by the OSI and likely would not be as it excludes the use case of creating a SaaS offering of the code. Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source." I totally see how people have different opions on whether that move is good or bad for the community and/or Confluent themselves, but I don't see where they are being confusing intentionally; IMO it's the opposite, the announcement is very clear and open what it is and what it isn't. Compare that to "Commons Clause", which indeed is a super-confusing term.
    - hannob 8y ago
      Scroll a bit down in the comments here and you'll see the CEO of Confluence talk about "our Open Source" referring to the new license.
      - toomanybits 8y ago
        Are you sure? he seems to be using the past tense: "written so that software products like Landoop were free to embed our open source"
    - webmaven 8y ago
      "Strictly speaking" is an attempt to confuse. They could have just said "No". Same for the whole "many people" portion, which could instead have been more honestly written as "Many people misuse the term "Open Source". We won't do that, but we really wish we could."

techdragon 8y ago

I’m not a lawyer but the amount of law (and legal history) I do know makes me deeply concerned by this.

kemitchell 8y ago

This is fundamentally a legal topic. And not a particularly new one for lawyers in the industry. For those interested, I'd recommend two cases. Vernor v. Autodesk Why didn't 17 USC 117 save the defendant? What are "notable use restrictions"? Artifex v. Hancom Did terms end up a license or a contract? Why?

hiro_protag 8y ago

If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software? The copyright to the software resides with Confluent, because of the copyright assignment clause that all contributors must sign. This is no different than Apache projects, which also require copyright assignment. For example, if you git clone Apache Hadoop, you do not acquire the copyright to Hadoop. Does Bryan really not understand how copyright assignment works? To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! Why do any of those foundations need to review the license or EULA that Confluent chooses? Confuent isn't claiming that their license is OSI compatible (in fact they explicitly state that it is not.) If you don't like the license, don't use the software. Or use Amazon's software, which does require a EULA (see https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ ).

the_gipsy 8y ago
> If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software? > The copyright to the software resides with Confluent, because of the copyright assignment clause that all contributors must sign. “who owns it when I fork it?” - still not answered by Jay nor this account that seems to work for Confluent.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Insinuating that anybody disagreeing with you must be corrupt (I. e. have a financial interest) is the sort of assumption of bad faith that destroys any serious discussion.
  - the_gipsy 8y ago
    Just pointing out that the question about ownership (freedom of usage) is countered with an answer about copyright, which was specifically addressed as not being questioned at all.

jamesblonde 8y ago

It's interesting to see the change in tone from Bryan's previous blog, which was one of 'you can challenge opensource, but it will win out': "open source will survive its midlife questioning just as people in midlife get through theirs" to the more recent entry, which is that open-source is facing an existential crisis: "we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!" I don't see how Confluent can respond directly to Bryan's 3 questions, though. They have the bigger social network, so i expect them to ignore him and just talk to their cool-aiders. It is a risk to ignore Bryan, though, as he's massively influential.

hiro_protag 8y ago
I truly don't understand the panicked tone. There are always going to be lots of projects licensed under all the existing licenses. If you don't like the new license, don't use it. Or start your own competing project. Greybeard says, people using $LICENSE are filthy heathens. You should use $OTHER_LICENSE instead. Film at 11.
- robert_foss 8y ago
  These a company backed projects that portray themselves as open source while actually being nothing of the sort due to licensing. It's a ruse. If MongoDB or CockroachDB for example want to describe their project as open source they should also act accordingly.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    > portray themselves as open source They don't! "The Confluent Community License is not approved by the OSI and likely would not be as it excludes the use case of creating a SaaS offering of the code. Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source."
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

boredandroid 8y ago

This is Jay Kreps, I'm the CEO of Confluent. The license is actually not a EULA, that is a misunderstanding. We have added this item to our FAQ: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq

DannyBee 8y ago
I don't think you should give this the short shrift you are - in particular, right to use vs other rights is not the defining characteristic of EULA's. There are EULA's for redistributable components and have been for a very long time (for example, the MSVC runtime libraries). The most defining characteristic of a EULA is usually the "licensed but not sold" part. I suspect adding this particular entry does more harm than good for you - it makes you look like you ignoring the meaningful argument here. Personally, I'd remove it until you have some reasonable response.
- kemitchell 8y ago
  EULA has no specific meaning in industry. It's been used for so many different kinds of terms, in so many different contexts, that it's lost nearly all meaning. Like "OEM". > The most defining characteristic of a EULA is usually the "licensed but not sold" part. Public licenses for software, say MIT or BSD, also arguably license, rather than sell. But they still include disclaimers of warranties, like merchantability and fitness for particular purpose, implied by the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs contracts. Huh? At least under the US law I've seen, from Jacobsen to Hancom, there's no hard, meaningful legal distinction between contract and license, as some activists theorized early on. Even when those activists drafted licenses, like the GPLs, that explicitly claimed to be licenses and not contracts, they still included contract-like disclaimers and limits on liability. Realistically, license and contract rules coexist and overlap. How do we interpret license terms? By rules of contract construction. What claims do plaintiffs make for violations? Copyright infringement and breach of contract. What makes a license irrevocable without consideration? Promissory estoppel, a contract doctrine.
bcantrill 8y ago

jamesblonde 8y ago

Spare a thought for poor Landoop (https://www.landoop.com/ https://www.landoop.com/), not AWS. They built up their business around Confluent's open-source tools - like the schema registry, ksql, kafka streams. I guess they will have to fork from the latest version and try and develop competing versions of Confluent's tools now. Maybe they could bootstrap a community effort around this?

boredandroid 8y ago
This is Jay, the CEO of Confluent. No, actually quite the opposite. We took pains to ensure that the license was written so that software products like Landoop were free to embed our open source and compete with us in that way. This FAQ covers the competition in more detail: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq
- jamesblonde 8y ago
  I am no expert on this, but based on Bryan's analysis, if Landoop were to release a SAAS offering of their product, they would be in breach of the license. As Landoop are pushing Kafka on Kubernetes, I assume that is their strategy - to have a SAAS offering at some stage (we are all going to the cloud, i thought?).
  - jamesblonde 8y ago
    That's why you use the word "product", Jay. Yes? That's weasel -speak, IMO.
- shabbyrobe 8y ago
  > Embed our open source I thought the FAQ said you wouldn't refer to it as such: > Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source.
  - nl 8y ago

oliwarner 8y ago

This is way too hung-up on the idea of ownership. Software licensing seems like a beast unto its own but what do you suppose would happen if you bought a car, a camera, a kettle, a pair of glasses, duplicated it 1:1 and tried to sell those copies? You'd fall foul of a thousand protected designs and trademarks. IP is everywhere. It's not about what you own. It's about what rights are granted to you. Software is only strange in this regard because as developers we're [often painfully] explicit about what you can do. It isn't yet obfuscated behind decades of evolving law. Please stop throwing "ownership" around as something you expect when you download something. It's silly to expect it. The same works in reverse. You own your modifications. Nobody else owns (or has right to) them without your grant. But could well be compounded into a license, or more commonly a contributor agreement... But it has to be explicit. Edit: After getting a couple of downs, I assumed my pre-coffee acidity may have burned through, so edited it to be softer... but I've had another since. If you've got a point to make, please leave a comment.

icebraining 8y ago
I think Cantrill's point is that by owning a copy of a copyrighted work, you have a bunch of rights granted by law, which EULAs try to claw back.
IAmEveryone 8y ago
I believe this comment neatly goes at the heart of this discussion. I have absolutely no horse in this particular fight, having never even used any software by confluence, as far as I know. Coming into this discussion as somewhat of a blank slate, I stumbled over this somewhat nebulous concept of “ownership” just like the parent, plus some mild dismay at seeing the only two threats meaningfully engaging with what IMHO is the core of this dispute being flagged into oblivion. To reiterate: I have no earthly idea nor opinion if Confluence is the confluence of everything that’s wrong with earth and beyond. I just think the argument would benefit from a sharp pencil more than a pitchfork, for now.
- wtallis 8y ago
  > I stumbled over this somewhat nebulous concept of “ownership” just like the parent, A lack of clarity about what sort of transaction or license terms give rise to ownership of a copy of software is not justification for entirely rejecting the notion of ownership of a copy. The existence of that ownership status is rigidly established by statute, as are some of the consequences. It's only the prerequisites that are nebulous or at least very complicated, but that doesn't make ownership status any less important of a question. In legal disputes, the tricky questions are usually more important than the ones with obvious answers.

runn1ng 8y ago

I don't get why are these weirdo licenses needed If you want to prevent Amazon to use your software for SaaS, just license it with Affero GPL, it was invented for this usecase (as far as I know) edit: okay I was wrong, see replies.

jclulow 8y ago
That wouldn't prevent them from using it to provide a service, it would merely require that they share any modifications they make to the code while doing so.
- runn1ng 8y ago
  I wrongly belied that Affero forces you to open source everything on the backend, which is not the case here. I was wrong
abrookewood 8y ago
I assume you are talking about this section? "13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software." I'm not sure that it prevents anyone from offering a SaaS version of your product - just that they have to make the code available if they modify it.
- runn1ng 8y ago
  indeed! I was wrong then, I thought the entire backend had to be open sourced, not just the modified version. I stand corrected then
  - webmaven 8y ago
    That depends on how (and how much) the backend is tied to the modified version (IANAL, don't ask me for specifics, it's REALLY gnarly, and there are various contradicting legal opinions).

SwertresResult 8y ago

https://swertresresultz.com/lottery/swertres-result/ https://swertresresultz.com/lottery/swertres-result/

skrebbel 8y ago

I'm new to this particular controversy, but as a startup founder considering to open up their stack, I think what Confluent is doing here is very reasonable. From their own FAQ: > Is Confluent Community License open source? Strictly speaking it is “source-available.” .. So if Bryan's analysis holds up and indeed, you don't own your copy and instead you merely were given the right to use and modify it, as long as you abide by rules X, Y and Z, then.. well, isn't that okay too? Isn't that better than nothing? Is there some sort of hidden rule somewhere that if you sell (or give away) the right to read and modify your proprietary software, that then you're suddenly evil? I think I must be missing something, but what's the core argument here? This sort of thing makes the rounds on HN frequently, but I get the feeling that all but the most avid FSF-supporters are okay with 100% closed, proprietary, SaaS, etc software existing, and also okay with 100% OSI-approved open source. But somehow people get super angry about anything that falls in the middle. Why is that? Why is proprietary software nothing to worry about, but proprietary software with a "here's the source, have fun" notice tacked onto it totally evil? To be honest, I don't always buy the argument about muddying the definition of "open source". Yes, there have been companies that called their thing open source even though it wasn't, by the OSI definition, and that's a shitty move. But my impression is that Confluent is not one of those companies.

bo1024 8y ago
Well it just doesn't make sense to me. If I were to clone the repo for example or receive the code in some other way, then I've never entered into any sort of contract or legal relationship with this company yet they're suddenly asserting all sorts of control and limits on my rights (far beyond cppyright law).
- kemitchell 8y ago
  > (far beyond copyright law) I don't know your jurisdiction, but in the US, this isn't just a matter of copyright law, and copyright law itself has developed to support rules about use in license terms. Many old open source licenses came from legal activists who opposed the application of contract law to public license terms and conditions or restrictions on use under license, for whatever reason. Overall, US law hasn't gone their way.

jordigh 8y ago

Did Confluent use Node? Python? Ruby? Django? Flask? Linux? Did they manage to avoid using any free and open source software? Would they have liked it any of the things that they used said "you're not allowed to put this on a server and make money off it"? I wager they wouldn't. People are saying that Confluent have every right to be doing this. They certainly do, but it's not very reciprocal of them to do so. If we're going to be so worried about Confluent's income, we should also be worried about the income of all the forgotten software developers that Confluent has likely based their business on, and I don't think the answer is for everyone to start forbidding making money on servers unless they wrote all of their money-making server software themselves. These new breeds of licenses with anti-AWS clauses trying to make sure that Amazon doesn't make too much money are also harming in their wake many other developers. Software development as a whole is going to be getting poorer if enough people want to forbid making money on a server.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dhimes 8y ago
My understanding is that you can use Confluent's software to run your own stack and offer a service, and you can do that for free. You just can't offer a service that competes directly with theirs. It's like if Google said, "Here's our search algorithm. You are free to use it on your website behind your paywall to give your users a better experience, but you are NOT allowed to use it to establish a competing search service on the broader internet. I don't really have a problem with it- I think it's fair. I think the question of whether it should be allowed on Github is fair- can someone accidentally find themselves legally bound? But it's probably an edge case.
- a3n 8y ago
  In the 90s microsoft prohibited you from selling a compiler built with their compiler. Edit: microsoft

newaccoutnas 8y ago

For a moment I thought the article was going to be about actual clothing (smart? clothing). Perhaps a copy of the GPL will need to be shipped with all future clothing articles that have a GPL licensed parts of it's embedded system?

dahart 8y ago

> I’m not asking who owns the copyright (that part is clear, as it is for open source) — I’m asking who owns the copy of the work that I have modified? Not a copyright lawyer, but honest question: what would it mean to “own” a digital copy? How would you define that ownership? Is it attached to specific devices? Should it make exception for multiple temporary copies? What tangible rights or advantages would that give the owner above and beyond the rights that copyrights currently provide to someone who acquires a legal copy? I’m asking because it makes some sense to me that digital assets are handled differently than physical copies, because digital copies don’t transfer the same way. With digital assets, you don’t automatically relinquish a copy when you give yours to someone else. It can be incredibly hard to know exactly where your digital copies are physically located. It can be easy to have two or three or four copies sitting around and not know it. Perhaps one consumer advantage that licensing has over some notion of ownership is that you can legally have multiple copies, even make multiple copies, without violating copyright law.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

This a commonplace tactic. The goal is to deny you common rights and privileges under the law by overriding it with a contract. The use of a contract to deny ownership is becoming increasingly common.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]