In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course—is it the right move?

'Free and open source software enables the world as we know it in
2019. From Web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining
your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with
runs, at least in part, on free software. And in the larger tech
industry, free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and
enabled the largest software acquisition in the history of the world.

Free software is a gift, a gift that made the world as we know it
possible. And from the start, it seemed like an astounding gift to
give. So astounding in fact that it initially made businesses
unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. These companies
weren't unwilling to use free software, it was simply too radical and
by extension too political. It had to be renamed: "open source."

Once that happened, open source software took over the world.

Recently, though, there's been a disturbance in the open source force.
Within the last year, companies like Redis Labs, MongoDB, and
Confluent all changed their software licenses, moving away from open
source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done
with the software, making it no longer open source software.

The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is a more modern
tech trend: hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also
known as Amazon AWS.

Amazon, for its part, came out swinging, releasing its own version of
the code behind Elastic Search this spring in response to licensing
changes at Elastic (the company behind Elastic Search). And besides a
new trademark dispute over Amazon's naming convention, Elastic has a
very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis—it hasn't said
a word in protest.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/is-the-software-world-taking-too-much-from-the-open-source-community/

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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