Open source confronts its midlife crisis
I can address some of the critiques that seemed aimed at the blog post I wrote announcing the Confluent license change:<p>1. We aren&#x27;t trying to get cloud providers to license our proprietary features. We run a cloud service of our software.<p>2. The book analogy is not very accurate. We have an FAQ here the helps clarify interpretation. The limitations it places are extraordinarily small, 99.9999% of users are completely unimpacted, it really only impacts companies wanting to offer, say, KSQL-as-a-service. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.confluent.io&#x2F;confluent-community-license-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.confluent.io&#x2F;confluent-community-license-faq</a><p>3. We aren&#x27;t trying to &quot;co-opt&quot; the community or open terminology. We actually tried super hard both in the license and in the blog post to be honest and upfront. Whatever else you think you have to agree that Confluent&#x27;s license is _exceptionally_ permissive and the software has a pretty great community of users. How do you describe a license that let&#x27;s you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product?<p>4. Bryan Cantrill is an amazing engineer, but, well, as a lawyer, I think ours are probably better. We&#x27;re quite confident in the enforceability, but it&#x27;s a bit ironic because I remember this being the FUD around GPL that it was &quot;totally unenforceable&quot;.<p>5. The &quot;open source companies are all failing&quot;-meme isn&#x27;t factually correct. Many open source companies are actually doing quite well. MongoDB has gone up in value about 3x over the last year, Elastic was the breakout IPO of the year. There are a handful of other really strong businesses a year or so behind, including Confluent. An open source project is not in-and-of-itself a business model, but it is, just empirically, a big part of some of the recent successes in the infrastructure space. Probably worth noting that the reverse is true too: if you look at some of the really cool up-and-coming open source platform data technologies, a lot of them have the support of a company behind them. Of course there are plenty of sucky open source companies, but that is true of every category of startup.<p>6. I agree that it is silly to moralize about the behavior of the cloud providers. They are following their economic interest. The point is that this behavior does undermine the cycle of investment in some of the more promising hard tech open source projects and to try to change this dynamic.<p>7. This article has a bit of a tone of &quot;Son, new things aren&#x27;t possible, trust me, I tried them and have the scars to prove it&quot;. I have huge respect for Bryan, and I know that to some extent that is his schtick as a public personality, but I&#x27;m not sure that attitude is most likely to lead to improvement. I don&#x27;t think the current crop of licenses was handed down from the mountain on Stone Tablets by our elders to be revered and not questioned. I think CockroachDB, Elastic, MongoDB, and Confluent are building really innovating technology platforms and building pretty cool companies to help fund that. I don&#x27;t think we need dogma. And I still don&#x27;t say &quot;GNU&#x2F;Linux&quot;.