INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Salil Deshpande
Contributor
Salil Deshpande serves as the managing director of Bain Capital Ventures
He focuses on infrastructure software and open source.
More posts by this contributor
Let define &container-native
After the
Satoshi Roundtable, is there a way to bridge the bitcoin divide
There a dark cloud on the horizon
The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source.
During 13 years as a venture
investor, I have invested in the companies behind many open-source
projects:
Spring
Mule
RubyRails
Groovy
Grails
Maven
Gradle
Redis
SysDig
Hazelcast
Akka
Scala
Cassandra
Spinnaker
and others.
Open source has
served society, and open-source business models have been successful and lucrative
Life was good.
Amazon behavior
I admire Amazon execution
In the venture business we are used to the large software incumbents (such as IBM, Oracle, HP, Compuware, CA, EMC, VMware, Citrix and
others) being primarily big sales and distribution channels, which need to acquire innovation (i.e
startups) to feed their channel
In July 2015, The Wall Street Journalquoted meas saying, &Amazon executes too well, almost like a startup
This is scary for everyone in the ecosystem.& That month, I wroteFear The Amazon Juggernauton investor site Seeking Alpha.AMZNis up 400
percent since I wrote that article
(I own AMZN indirectly.)
But to anyone other than its customers, Amazon is not a warm and fuzzy company
Numerousarticleshavedetailedits bruising and cutthroat culture
Why would its use of open source be any different
Go toAmazon Web Services(AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top
You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service
These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.
For example, Amazon takesRedis(the most loved databasein StackOverflow
developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache
Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly
been taken and offered as AWS products.
To be clear, this is not illegal.But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable
open-source communities.
Commons Clause
In early 2018, I gathered together creators, CEOs or chief counsels of two dozen at-scale
open-source companies, some of them public, to talk about what to do
In March Ispoke to GeekWireabout this effort
After a lot of constructive discussion the group decided that rather than beat around the bush with mixing and matching open-source licenses
to discourage such behavior, we should create a straightforward clause that prohibits the behavior
We engaged respected open-source lawyerHeather Meekerto draft this clause.
In August 2018 Redis Labs announced their decision to add this
one additional paragraph) known as theCommons Clauseto their liberal open-source license for certain add-on modules
Redis itself wouldremain on the permissive BSD license  —  nothing had changed with Redis itself! But the Redis Labs add-on
modules will include the Commons Clause rider, which makes the source code available, without the ability to &sell& the modules, where
&sell& includes offering them as a commercial service
The goal is to explicitly prevent the bad behavior of cloud infrastructure providers.
Anybody else, including enterprises like General
Motors or General Electric, can still do all the things they used to be able to do with the software, even with Commons Clause applied to it
They can view and modify the source code and submit pull-requests to get their modifications into the product
They can even offer the software as-a-service internally for employees
What Commons Clause prevents is the running of a commercial service with somebody else open-source software in the manner that cloud
infrastructure providers do.
This announcement has  — unsurprisingly, knowing the open-source community  — prompted spirited
responses, both favorable and critical
At the risk of oversimplifying: thoseinfavorviewthisas alogicalandpositiveevolutionin open-source licensing that allows open-source
companies to run viable businesses while investing in open-source projects.Michael DeHaan, creator ofAnsible, inWhy Open Source Needs New
Licenses, put one part particularly well:
We see people running open source &foundations& and web sites that are essentially talking heads,
spewing political arguments about the definition of &open source& as described by something called &The Open Source Initiative&, which
contains various names which have attained some level of popularity or following
They attempt to state that such a license where the source code is freely available, but use cases are limited, are ¬ open source&
Unfortunately, that ship hassailed.
Thoseneutraloragainstpoint out that the Commons Clause makes software not open source, which is
accurate, and that making parts of the code base proprietary is against the ethos of open source; and Redis Labs must be desperate and
having trouble making money.
First, do not worry about Redis Labs
The company is doing very, very well
And Redis is stronger, more loved and moreBSDthan ever before.
More importantly, we think it is time to reexamine the ethos of open source
When open source became popular, it was designed for practitioners to experiment with and build on, while contributing back to the community
No company was providing infrastructure as a service
No company was taking an open-source project, re-branding it, running it as a service, keeping the profits and giving very little back.
Our
view is that open-source software was never intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and sell
That is not the original ethos of open source.Commons Clause is reviving the original ethos of open source
Academics, hobbyists or developers wishing to use a popular open-source project to power a component of their application can still do so
But if you want to take substantially the same software that someone else has built, and offer it as a service, for your own profit, that
not in the spirit of the open-source community.
As it turns out in the case of the Commons Clause, that can make the source code not
technically open source.But that is something we must live with, to preserve the original ethos.
Apache + CommonsClause
Redis Labs released
certain add-on modules as Apache + Commons Clause
Redis Labs made amply clear that the application of Commons Clause made them not open source, and thatRedis itself remains open source and
BSD-licensed.
Some rabid open-source wonks accused Redis Labs of trying to trick the community into thinking that modules were open source,
because they used the word &Apache.& (They were reported to be foaming at the mouth while making these accusations, but in fairness it could
have been just drool.)
There no trick
The Commons Clause is a rider that is to be attached to any permissive open-source license
Because various open-source projects use various open-source licenses, when releasing software using Commons Clause, onemustspecify to which
underlying permissive open-source license one is attaching Commons Clause.
Why notAGPL
There are two key reasons to not useAGPLin this
scenario, an open-source license that says that you must release to the public any modifications you make when you run AGPL-licensed code as
a service.
First, AGPL makes it inconvenient butdoes not preventcloud infrastructure providers from engaging in the abusive behavior
It simply says that they must release any modifications they make while engaging in such behavior
Second, AGPL contains language about software patents that is unnecessary and disliked by a number of enterprises.
Many of our portfolio
companies with AGPL projects have received requests from large enterprises to move to a more permissive license, since the use of AGPL is
against their company policy.
Balance
Cloud infrastructure providers are not bad guys or acting with bad intentions
Open source has always been a balancing act
Many of us believe in our customers and peers seeing our source code, making improvements and sharing back
It always a leap of faith to distribute one work product for free and to trust that you&ll be able to put food on the table
Sometimes, with some projects, a natural balance occurs without much deliberate effort
But at other times, the natural balance does not occur: We are seeing this more and more with infrastructure open source, especially as
cloud infrastructure providers seek to differentiate by moving up the stack from commodity compute and storage to higher level
infrastructure services.
Revisions
The Commons Clause as of this writing is at version 1.0
There will be revisions and tweaks in the future to ensure that Commons Clause implements its goals
We&d love yourinput.
Differences of opinion on Commons Clause that we have seen expressed so far are essentially differences of philosophy
Much criticism has come from open-source wonks who are not in the business of making money with software
They have a different philosophy, but that is not surprising, because their job is to be political activists, not build value in
companies.
Some have misconstrued that it prevents people from offering maintenance, support or professional services
This is a misreading of the language
Some have claimed that it conflicts with AGPL
Commons Clause is intended to be used with open-source licenses that are more permissive than AGPL, so that AGPL does not have to be used!
Still, even with AGPL, few users of an author work would deem it prudent to simply disregard an author statement of intent to apply Commons
Clause.
Protecting open source
Some open-source stakeholders are confused
Whose side should they be on Commons Clause is new, and we expected debate
The people behind this initiative are committed open-source advocates, and our intent is to protect open source from an existential threat
We hope others will rally to the cause, so that open-source companies can make money, open source can be viable and open-source developers
can get paid for their contributions.
