When Open Source Software Comes With a Few Catches

'As open source software grows more popular, and important, developers
face an existential question: How to make money from something you
give away for free? An anonymous reader shares a report:

The Open Source Initiative standards body says an open source license
must allow users to view the underlying source code, modify it, and
share it as they see fit. Independent developers and large companies
alike now routinely release software under these licenses. Many coders
believe open collaboration results in better software. Some companies
open their code for marketing purposes. Open source software now
underpins much technology, from smartphone operating systems to
government websites.

Companies that release software under open source licenses generate
revenue in different ways. Some sell support, including Red Hat, which
IBM acquired for $34 billion earlier this month. Others, like cloud
automation company HashiCorp, sell proprietary software based on the
open source components. But with the rise of cloud computing,
developers see their open source code being bundled into services and
sold by other companies. Amazon, for example, sells a cloud-hosted
service based on the popular open source database Redis, which
competes with a similar cloud-hosted service offered by Redis Labs,
the sponsor of the open source project. To protect against such
scenarios, companies behind popular open source projects are
restricting how others can use their software. Redis Labs started the
trend last year when it relicensed several add-ons for its core
product under terms that essentially prohibit offering those add-ons
as part of a commercial cloud computing service.

That way, Amazon and other cloud providers can't use those add-ons in
their competing Redis services. Companies that want the functionality
provided by those add-ons need to develop those features themselves,
or get permission from Redis Labs. [...] Analytics company Confluent
and database maker CockroachDB added similar terms to their licenses,
preventing cloud computing companies from using some or all of their
code to build competing services. Taking a slightly different tack,
MongoDB relicensed its flagship database product last year under a new
"Server Side Public License" (SSPL) that requires companies that sell
the database system as a cloud service also release the source code of
any additional software they include.'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/08/01/1522211

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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