This judgement by the FSF is unsurprising, Commond Clause is like the Patriot Act, a purposeful misnomer by its authors to attempt to gain unearned goodwill & respect.
> Commond [sic] Clause is like the Patriot Act, a purposeful misnomer by its authors to attempt to gain unearned goodwill & respect.
The author (not plural) describes in depth the differences between recognized open source licenses v. the commons clause (https://commonsclause.com/) and also describes her intent behind developing the license. Specific emphasis appears to have been devoted toward distinguishing this license as being distinctly non-open in the FAQ printed on the root of the domain.
(To be clear: I have no affiliation with the author or with this license and any known implementations of it.)
The Commons Clause is added as a restriction to existing open source licensed projects, to those that aren't clued in that the Commons Clause has been applied, they can easily be misled by this poorly named restriction.
Creative Commons offers noncommercial licenses even more restrictive than Commons Clause.
I'd've picked a different name, too. But the idea that "commons" means only open source, or only free software, doesn't sit right. Compared to pulling their software back as fully closed or source-available, all-rights-reserved, a Commons Clause combo makes a lot more available.
Creative Commons specifically recommends against the use of any of their licenses for software. The CC licenses are primarily intended to be applied to artistic works, and the NC/ND variants make a lot more sense in that context.
You're right. And I'm well aware. But I don't think that changes my point on "commons". CC-BY-NC is a "commons" license for artwork, music, screenplays, scripts, poems, and novels. Why wouldn't a noncommercial software license be a "commons" license, as well?
Is the controversy here that the Commons Clause piggy backs on top of existing free software licenses and thus could mislead users to think that software using it is free software when it's in fact proprietary by their definitions?
As a part-time independent developer of software myself, I personally find the combination of a free software license + Commons Clause to be very compelling. I'm willing to grant to the user every right offered by free software licenses with the exception of rights to commercial use.
If that means my software has to be labeled as proprietary by the FSF, so be it, but at the same time I'd prefer not to mislead users into thinking my software is being offered under a vanilla free software license.
Is there a proprietary license I can release my software under, with the properties of a free software + commons clause license, that doesn't run the risk of misleading users? If not, I'll likely continue releasing my software under a free software + commons clause license, along with some kind of disclaimer above the license section in the project's readme.
> I'm willing to grant to the user every right offered by free software licenses with the exception of rights to commercial use.
From the FSF's point of view - that's fine, but it's no longer "free software". Which I agree with.
They're somewhat grumpy, I think understandably, that companies like RedisLabs and MongoDB take the name and all of the text of a free license - and then make it non-free while keeping most of the brand recognition of the free license. As you suspect, it's misleading to end users.
I think the Creative Commons people did some good work on this front, having the concept of things like "non-commercial" and "No derivatives" as explicit modifiers added to tne name/title of a license, to make it very clear up fromnt. wonder if the FSF would be happier if, for example, RedisLabs had chosen to use something like "Apache2 non commercial" instead of the less self explanatory "Apache 2.0 modified with Commons Clause" ???
I don't know there is any controversy as such. The FSF is doing its job and reminding everyone that freedom includes the freedom to make money.
If your software is licensed under something that includes the Commons Clause then it isn't free software, because users are not free to do what they want with it (being limited by the Commons Clause, funnily enough).
I'd hazard the only reason this is worth a mention is because "Commons Clause" sounds a lot like "Creative Commons" and, as the article mentions, it is a also misleading because it is attached to licenses in a way that changes them from Free Software licenses to [-O-p-e-n-S-o-u-r-c-e- +] proprietary software licenses. Someone scanning the license could think "oh, this is xyz license that is free, all is good" and not pick up on the Commons Clause. It is a bit insidious like that.
You are of course free to license your work as you whish - but might I ask why you would want to limit "commercial" use? Do you dual license your software?
Free only for "non-commercial use" is a license style that failed in the software ecosystem a long time ago. Feel free to choose that if you think it's right for you and your goals, but if you were hoping to form a successful community around your code, that's pretty unlikely.
I would say that forming a successful community around code is a slim prospect under any license. The median contributor count on an open project is one or two, depending on how you count.
BY-NC sounds philosophically like exactly what OP wants, but those licenses are not intended for software and the CC org themselves say:
"We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative."
I would have a lot more sympathy for this effort if it wasn't for the misleading marketing. So you are selling software with a free 32-day trial? Nothing wrong with that. You're also allowing non-commercial users to use and modify their software for free? That's nice, and probably even makes sense financially if your market is mostly business users anyway.
But then you just have to use a name and logo that's strongly reminiscent of the CC-Zero and brand yourselves "a new way to support open software developers". Except the "prosperity" license is not actually an open source license, and devs using it for their software are therefore not open source developers.
The PR surrounding it follows the same pattern. It very much feels as if you are trying to benefit from the positive reputation that open source has built. Yes, the information is all there if you read the license text or readme, but it still seems intentionally designed to give an incorrect first impression to people who don't look too closely. Which is probably most people.
> devs using it for their software are therefore not open source developers
Using a non-OSI license for one project doesn't make a developer not an open source developer, any more than Open Core makes companies stewarding open source projects not open source companies. Most examples of financially self-sustaining, independent open source developers I know make money on contracts for closed development. A few standouts avoid that by running their own proprietary software businesses, offering additional features on top of their open work. Prosperity helps those developers who want to make the source for their paid-only features publicly available, and to make it free to many users who could never buy.
Prosperity, the noncommercial license, is one of two public licenses published under the project. The other is a very strong copyleft, or "free for open source" license. Both are controversial. I maintain, and have maintained, that the latter conforms to OSI's Open Source Definition, and that it's net-positive for software freedom, eschewing ruinous compromises. I remain far more personally passionate about the share-alike option, but it's just not functionally sufficient to create license-based opportunity for all projects. Freestanding applications not used to build other software, in particular.
None of the branding issues here have been easy. Part of the reason I renamed the public licenses to remove all mention of License Zero itself was to decouple communication problems. Also to emphasize their independence from L0. The licenses are perfectly usable without any dual licensing, or without licensezero.com in particular.
But while I want to be sure to get my messages across clearly, I strongly reject the idea that open source, however defined---OSI has not approved CC0-1.0, for example---deserves a special branding "buffer zone", that it's on other approaches to distinguish themselves, rather than for whoever wants to define "open source" to be clear what they mean. Open source branding itself takes advantage of lots of benefits attributable to mere source availability, and to public licensing more generally. It takes advantage of momentum from developers participating in a movement, some of whom reject any license-based definition of that movement, and some of whose needs, aspirations, and history orgs like OSI no longer seem to honor.
I named License Zero as a I did to reflect its goal: zero out friction in dual licensing, even for projects built with many deps, as through npm. Due to the documentation, and the readability of the licenses themselves, I believe it's actually far easier for developers to tell what's going on with L0 and L0 licenses than for most open source terms and business approaches. But I haven't stopped publishing as much as I can to help with those approaches. For example:
In essence, a modern permissive license, plus noncommercial language similar to that in CC-BY-NC licenses, with a built-in, free, thirty-two day trial period.
They failed so badly at the PR around this change that many people overlooked that fact. They still inflicted damage on their reputation.
It's kind of like how the Internet was left with the incorrect impression that Google removed "don't be evil" from their Code of Conduct. (It's still there, now at the end instead of the beginning after a rewording. The new parent company Alphabet has a different but similar slogan; both apply to Google. This is separate question, of course, from any more concrete discussion of Google's current ethics than what their code of conduct says.)
Redis’ core is still BSD-licensee but Salvatore Sanfilippo transferred the IP rights to Redis Labs, which means there is nothing to stop Redis Labs from pulling another bait-and-switch and making Redis itself non-free.
I think all companies using Redis should make contingency plans for when that happens. I’m afraid forking Redis will likely prove necessary given Redis Labs’ record of questionable behavior.
I'm still wrapping my head around the commons clause but I think I really like it. The FSF licenses are designed to create a parallel open "copyleft" ecosystem. However, they fall short of identifying capitalism as the system that creates value in "copyright" and creates scarcity where none exists in the name of profit. The commons clause has more revolutionary content in that it prohibits participation in capitalism.
I'm trying to decide if there should be additional limitations or exemptions for institutions that build a better more democratic and humane society. For example, perhaps worker coops can use the software, but heirarchical institutions cannot. Perhaps science and medicine can use it, but stores cannot.
I recognize the point of the commons clause is a kind of rebellion within capitalism against exploitation of individuals by business. However, like the GPL, perhaps it's time to go further than copyleft and advance a real left agenda by supporting left institutions.
While I agree with you, and personally I think we're on the brink of (or perhaps we've shot right past and just haven't noticed yet) a new kind of software creation - some kind of "company-supported, source-available, relatively-free-to-use, but with restrictions on uses that compete with or financially benefit from things the company that mostly funds the software do" thing. I don't know if it'll work out long term, or if it does whether it'll be a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it's worth a shot to see what happens when you pursue those ideas, and will be watching RedisLabs and MongoDB (and others) with interest over the coming years.
There's a very left leaning socialist part of me who thinks "That's bad. Apache and MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP and many many other genuinely free software projects have worked fine for decades now, why change to less free alternatives if Stallman-style free software can and does work?", but there's also a pragmatic part of me that thinks "I wonder what new software might come into existence if companies can afford to hire teams of devs and architects (and QA people and tech writers and and and) by limiting _some_ of the freedom to allow themselves to generate revenue more easily, without limiting anything like as much freedom as, say, Microsoft or Oracle do?" Personally, I don't think I'll be contributing to any "commons clause" restricted software, but I _do_ wish the people experimenting with that new model the best of luck and have some optimism that it _might_ open up new and unexpected opportunities as it changes the landscape around how software gets written, shared, and monetised.
It's not surprising FSF sees the Commons Clause as non-F/OSS according to their definition.
The question, though, is whether OSI's taxonomy is even relevant today when there are other, more imminent concerns. Namely, if you want your software project to contribute to software and information monopolization in "the cloud" and on very few content aggregation sites such as Fb, github, and others that themselves don't reciprocally allow eg. indie search crawlers and untracked linking.
> [The fact that OSD doesn't set out complete rules for copyleft] is altogether understandable, considering the way it was written, and why. The Definition wasn’t meant to answer current questions about the limits of open source copyleft design. Those questions hadn’t even been practically posed yet. But we’re asking them now. In order to establish meaningful regulation for open source copyleft, we’ll have to look beyond the Definition. That will be far easier to do without pretending that we’re still debating the Definition.
This is a different issue, as you yourself have mentioned. And it has an easy solution: you are free to host the code yourself if you don’t like putting it on a centralized service.
That's exactly the kind of limited perspective I'm questioning. FSF bases their copyleft concept on ethical beliefs. But what are the ethics of publishing your project on github such that your user's clicks are tracked, and you can't even scrape github for building up a search index unless you're GoogleBot or Bing? What are the ethics of giving your labor to cloud providers working hard to lock users in to their ecosystem? What is ethical about OSI's no-purpose-limitation criterion such that your software can be easily weaponized in one form or another? What is ethical about promoting the idea that software developers need to give all their work away such that only very few cloud providers can benefit, to the detriment of financing further development and maintenance?
I still don't understand your point. The GPL provides none of the protections you are asking for, since I am free to post my code wherever I see fit. Are you asking for protections as to where I am legally allowed to host my code?
"So if anyone tries to convince you that Commons Clause is wrong because it doesn't meet all the requirements of the Open Source Definition, you should ask them if proprietary is better."
"Freedom for others to commercialize your software comes with starting an open source project, and while that freedom is important to uphold, growth and commercial pressures will inevitably force some projects to close."
> "you should ask them if proprietary is better [than Commons Clause]."
Neither is better, because they are the same. Commons Clause is proprietary.
If a piece of FOSS that I used became proprietary, I would fork (or use a fork) based on the last FOSS version. Just because the Commons Clause kinda looks like it's FOSS if you squint, doesn't make it any different.
Well, the FSF defines "“proprietary software” as synonymous with nonfree software."[1] But that's kind of a cop-out answer.
"Proprietary" means that the copyright holder retains certain rights, rather than granting the rights to the recipient. In the case of the Commons Clause, the rights that they retain propriety of are the rights to commercial use.
When someone releases their software under GPL, they still retain certain rights rather than granting them to the recipient - notably, the right to sell it commercially without providing the source, and without requiring the buyers to adhere to the terms of the GPL. This is clearly a valuable right, seeing how many companies have business models that are built around dual-licensing GPL'd code for commercial proprietary use.
Strictly speaking, the only license that doesn't have the copyright holder retaining any rights is the lack of one (i.e. releasing to public domain). If you're not releasing to PD, that's necessarily because you want to retain some rights. And then it's just a question of which ones. GPL has one answer, something like MIT has another, and Commons Clause has another still. I fail to see what makes some of them proprietary, while others are not.
From my perspective, if I can get the code, hack on it, and release the changed version to others who can also do all of these things in turn, that's enough to make it non-proprietary already. Proprietary is when the software is closed source outright, or the source is provided for "educational use only" (i.e. no derived works allowed), or when derived works cannot be redistributed. Licenses that allow redistribution of patches, but not original code with patches applies, would be the grey territory.
> Strictly speaking, the only license that doesn't have the copyright holder retaining any rights is the lack of one (i.e. releasing to public domain).
This is a bit nit-picking, but releasing without a license is pretty much the opposite of releasing to the public domain.
If you release without anything, the raw unmodified copyright laws apply, which are rather strict and give the recipient basically no rights - certainly no right to redistribution.
You have to make some kind of explicit statement if you want to release something into the public domain. That's why things like CC0 exist.
I'm not an expert by any means, but if the Commons Clause's FAQ is accurate, the copyright holder is only retaining a very specific right to commercial use, not all rights to commercial use:
"Commons Clause only forbids you from “selling” the Commons Clause software itself. You may develop on top of Commons Clause licensed software...and you may embed and redistribute Commons Clause software in a larger product, and you may distribute and even “sell” (which includes offering as a commercial SaaS service) your product...You just can’t sell a product that consists in substance of the Commons Clause software and does not add value."
I see how that restricts my rights as a user, but those are rights I simply don't care about. Back in the days of dialup, people were able to make a few bucks by selling Linux CDs to help other users get started. But what examples are there today of unmodified free software being sold by someone other than the primary developer, aside from various app store scams?
the difficulty is deciding what is added value. for some it may be a new interface to use the software, for others it may be a promise of support or even some kind of insurance.
with this kind of limitation in the license it is really hard to tell what the intentions of the licensors are, what they will tolerate and what they won't allow.
there is really only one position that is safe. either all commercial activity is allowed, or none of it is.
everything else is a legal minefield that is to dangerous for anyone to even touch.
Not at all. MS shared source license didn't permit the creation of derived works at all, much less redistribution of them, for any purpose (commercial or otherwise).
Proprietary software can and, in many cases, do have their source code accessible, so yes, Common Clause is as good as proprietary software, no more and no less.
