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An EULA in FOSS clothing?

posted by martyb on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the click-to-agree-information-wants-to-be-free dept.

canopic jug writes:

Software developer Bryan Cantrill has a second, more detailed, blog post on EULA plus Copyright frankenlicenses. The combination of the two appears to bring in a lot of baggage from both proprietary licensing and EULAs while being dressed up as FOSS. He writes a blog post in response to a longer discussion on HN and blog post from the CEO of Confluent. He discusses the situation, raises quite a few questions (three are quoted below), and concludes with an assessment on the seriousness of the problem and a call to action.

This prompts the following questions, which I also asked Jay via Twitter:

1. If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software?

2. Do you consider the Confluent Community License to be a contract?

3. Do you consider the Confluent Community License to be a EULA?

[...] To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! I don’t think I’m being too alarmist when I say that this is potentially a dangerous new precedent being set; it would be very helpful to have your lawyers offer their perspectives on this, even if they disagree with one another. We seem to be in some terrible new era of frankenlicenses, where the worst of proprietary licenses are bolted on to the goodwill created by open source licenses; we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!

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  • (Score: 2) by rigrig on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:54PM (2 children)

    by rigrig (5129) <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:54PM (#785919) Homepage

    I can't really see why the term FOSS is being mentioned at all in conjunction with the Confluent Community License

    Because it used to be licensed as Apache 2.0, but then Confluent decided to alter the deal [confluent.io], while pretending they didn't.

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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:19PM (1 child)

    by arslan (3462) on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:19PM (#786056)

    Personally I don't see a big deal about it - in spirit they seem to just don't want folks to take their software and operate as a public commercial SaaS to compete with them; which would be quite ironic if you are in their shoes.

    Of course IANAL so there's probably technical (legally) concerns in the way they've implemented said license, set precedents, yada yada yada...

    • (Score: 2) by rigrig on Monday January 14 2019, @01:20AM

      by rigrig (5129) <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Monday January 14 2019, @01:20AM (#786179) Homepage

      Making their software non-free is not the big deal, lots of companies make proprietary software.

      The big deal is that they took away freedom 0 "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose", and still pretend it is free software.

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      No one remembers the singer.