[hannob]

For people who haven't followed this: The headline is as misleading as it can be.

The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source, because he doesn't like what that entails (as it also means "amazon enjoys the same freedoms as everyone else"). But they like to confuse it as much as they can.

This would be much less of an issue if these people were upfront: "We don't like Open Source, so we try something else". But they don't want to do that because they know Open Source has a good reputation, so they try confusion and deception.

[Reelin]

> The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source

The situation seems to be much more complex than what you portray (ie "we don't like open source"). Take the SSPL for example - OSI may not recognize it, but as far as I'm concerned it is an open source license. Commons Clause I'm not certain about - is explicitly disallowing sale really inconsistent with open source ideals? I've yet to make my mind up on that one. Then there's the RSAL. That one definitely doesn't seem to be entirely consistent with open source ideals:

> The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine.

[adamson]

I don't see this. Are you saying the author has a bone to pick with Amazon in particular or that he has a stake in seeing OSS-based cloud services become non-OSS because he has money at stake in selling those services? None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software.

[Reelin]

> None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software.

Actually...

The Fair Source License (Sourcegraph, https://fair.io/) explicitly does restrict those things.

The RSAL (Redis, https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-change...) kind of does, but only under some circumstances.

> The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine.

The Confluent Community License (https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat...) only says you can't run it directly as a SaaS offering, which is better but I'm a bit uncertain where the line would be drawn in terms of product functionality.

The Commons Clause (https://commonsclause.com/) explicitly prevents you from selling the software, including hosting, consulting, support, etc. As with the Confluent license it isn't entirely clear where the line is drawn in terms of product functionality.

The SSPL (mongoDB, https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...) is in fact an open source license as far as I'm concerned, but OSI hasn't (won't?) recognize it.

[strken]

Some interesting tests would be Firebase, Airtable, and Google Sheets. Assuming each of those products was built on top of databases available under each license, which would be legal?

[bduerst]

Agreed - this is a but misleading.