Earlier this month, Confluent announced that they would be changing the license on some portions of their platform from Apache2 to The Confluent Community License. This comes on the heels of AWS' recent launch at Re:Invent 2018 of a managed Kafka service. Their move follows similar moves from other open source infrastructure companies including RedisLabs' move to a Commons Clause license for certain plugins and MongoDB's relicensing from AGPL to the Server Side Public License. Prior to that, CockroachDB announced that some of their software would fall under CockroachDB Community License. All of these moves have the same thing in common: they are intended to enable these companies to hold a monopoly on hosted services for any future versions of the components that fall under the new licenses. These are direct responses to the threat of public cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure to these companies' commercial viability.
In this post, I'll attempt to distill the different arguments and outrage that these moves have stirred up and provide my critique on the various viewpoints. Finally, I'll argue that permissive OSS licenses plus closed commercial products represent a more ideal approach for how open source is commercialized by companies that are the primary developers of open source projects. This last bit might not be that much of a surprise given that it's the same approach that we're taking at InfluxData, but it hasn't always been this way and I've gotten more clarity on this topic while watching it play out with other open source vendors, projects, and communities. As always, these opinions evolve over time so what I'm writing now represents my current thinking. Future Paul may come to call present Paul an idiot, or he may praise his prescient viewpoint on open source, the cloud, and building a business. With my caveat emptor out of the way, let's travel back in time...
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