 So welcome to the next talk. Please silence all your phones, all your devices, laptops, so we can all enjoy the talk. The next talk will be by Frank Karliczek, the founder of NextCloud, about why the GPL is great for business. Thanks a lot. It's really awesome to be here. It's a bit scary in this huge room here to give my talk. But I'm also very happy that so many people are interested in the topic. So first of disclaimer, this is not about NextCloud. I mean, this is at the low end of the first slide, but this is not NextCloud talk. So if you want to learn about NextCloud, sorry, that's the wrong talk. I'm going to talk about licenses and business models and what it means for free software. So my name is Frank Karliczek. I was involved in free software for a long time, over 20 years. All kinds of projects, KDE, for example, where I was involved for a long time, found something called Open Desktop org network. Some of you might still remember it. Something called the user data manifesto. It's about basic rights regarding user data. Also, founded at NextCloud, a successor. Work with the W3C, do all kinds of other projects with the Openform Europe, and also nowadays, helping the United Nations to come up with their open source strategy. So as I said before, I'm going to talk about more theoretical concepts, not really NextCloud, free software, and open source licenses as an introduction. I know a lot of talks about licenses, especially here at FosterM, but I think it's important for what I'm going to say later to set the stage here a bit. By the way, I'm going to say free software and open source as synonyms here, so don't kill me. I am aware that there are tiny, tiny differences. I'm not covering that, so for me, for this talk, they are the same. Then I'm going to talk about open source business models. And then, of course, the main topic, why I think GPL is great for businesses. As you know, there's a bit of a controversy at the moment. Some companies, some former open source companies, change their license to proprietary licenses, to safe open source and safe free software. And my talk here is actually tries to make the point why I disagree with that, and I think it's a mistake to abandon free software. So in the early 80s, this guy, I'm sure you all know him, Richard Stallman, came up with something that's called the Four Freedoms. So the Four Freedoms tried, from a philosophical, ideological perspective, tried to define fundamental rights that people have regarding software. So the first freedom is to run a software, a program, software as you wish for any purpose. So there should be no restriction in running the software. It's not like you can't run it for this purpose or something like that. If you have a software, you can run it as you want. Then you also, the second freedom is the right to study the program, how it works, to look into the source code, to see how it works, to learn from it, and of course, and also to change it. The third freedom is the freedom to redistribute copies of the software to your neighbors. As you can see, this is the 80s. I mean, distributing software to your neighbors. I think nowadays we do this through the internet, but okay, you can see the point. The fourth freedom is to redistribute the copies of your modified version. So if you improve it, if you change it, you also have the freedom to redistribute it, the changed version. So also, source code is a precondition for that. So these were the four freedoms that came out of a more philosophical, ideological perspective. Freedoms that everybody should have regarding software. Then in the eight of the end of the 90s, of course, the Open Source Initiative came along and they created the Open Source Definition, which some different rules, but I would say they're in spirit the same. Of course, they're written a little bit different, but in spirit it's basically the same idea. That you have the right to freely redistribute software, that you always have the source code available, that you can do derived works, that it respects the integrity of the original source code from the author. It doesn't discriminate against persons or groups. So it doesn't say, well, everybody can use the software, except this group of people. It doesn't, it's not allowed. And also, this doesn't discriminate against field of endeavor. It doesn't say, well, everybody can use it, but not for this purpose. Everybody should be able to use it. The license should distribute it. It shouldn't be specific to a specific product or not restricted, restricting other software. Can't say, yeah, we were allowed to use my software, but if you use my software, then you're not allowed to use this other software, something like that. And it must be technology neutral. So these are basically similar ideas from a philosophical perspective, rights that people should have. Of course, then the question is, how do you bring this to life? How do you enforce that? How do you actually live that? And for that it's important to understand like the concept of distribution. Because the idea is that someone creates something and then has the ownership of that. There's a concept that exists in basically every country. A person writes a software or takes a photo or writes a text or something, and then the person owns it. And then if the person gives it to someone else, it gives this software to someone else to get it with a license. It means, hey, this is what I did. You can have it. But these are the conditions that I'm telling you this is how you can use it. And for these licenses, there are actually different types. So usually a good way is to describe this with this spectrum here. Where you have public domain on the left-hand side and total trade secret on the right-hand side. So the left-hand side that goes through that, the left-hand side that is public domain. The idea is that if I write software, I give up control, I give up ownership completely. I give it to the public. It's now owned by the public domain. That's common in academia. It was very popular in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But it's a concept that's actually very difficult in some countries, specifically in Germany. It's not even possible to give up ownership over your software. So that's more like something that's not really practical. But the next one are the permissive licenses. This is something where you still keep ownership of the software that you write. These are basically the BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses. But you give it to other people with the license, something like do whatever you want with it, but don't sue me. That's basically a summary. So you can hear the software, do whatever you want. Technically, I'm still the owner, but everybody can do whatever they want. Just don't sue me. Again, very common in academia. In the 70s and the 80s, and this is a very common license types. Then in the middle, we have something that's called a copy left licenses. It means if you make a derived work of this and distribute it to others, then you have to provide the source code under the same license. So that's typical, the GPL and HGPL-style licenses. Again, 80s and 90s. And that's something that was invented by the Free Software Foundation. Again, Richard Storman. That's something that's in the middle. And then, of course, the next point are the proprietary licenses, which they're of course different. They're really different conditions in there, but usually there's something like you can use it if you pay me. That's usually what's in the licenses. Of course, you don't have any rights to modify it or to study or redistribute or whatever. So this is the license model of Microsoft Oracle, Google, Apple, and so on. And of course, trade secrets, then the next is the last extreme, which is like, well, I have something, but no one can see it or know it. That's completely restricted. Okay, so these are the different license types that tried to enforce those four freedoms and these ideas that were postulated by Richard Storman and the OSI. Okay, and that's great. And these are basically the fundamentals of our community here, I think. And that's great for us. But of course, there's also a question, can we do something that does not only work for us, but really is changing the world? It's really moving these ideas forward. And while there's in the 90s, this guy, Linus Torvalds, writer, Linux Colonel, and he basically had this quote, what's the goal of everything? World domination. And this is a bit of a joke. I mean, he really meant it as a joke in the 90s. And he actually said in an interview that he stops using it because nowadays, it's sort of real, but at a time, at a time it was meant as a joke. But I want to say with this slide is actually, it's nice that we have these ideas, these free software principles, but we want to move this forward. We want to bring it to the rest of the world because we think it provides freedom. But of course, if you really want to have a free software and open source revolution, then the question is, how do we get paid writing free software? Because I mean, there's a lot of, it's a huge volunteer community here, but the question is also, I mean, is there a way to really work full time on free software and open source? And then a bit of a personal story, as I said earlier, I was involved in KDE for a long time. KDE is of course, as you know, it's one of the biggest open source communities. It's completely community driven. There's no company behind it. Everything is volunteer driven free software. But there's an idea I discovered over the, problem I discovered over the years, which is that a lot of people dropped out of the community because they've usually joined the community when they're students and they have time. And then later when they're done with the studies, they start a full time job. And then they need a real job. And a real job often means writing proprietary software. So there's a lot of rotating team members. And that was always the idea, hey, is there a way to pay people to write free software? Because I think this is a, this is a, yeah, we need to solve that to really conquer the world and reach the world domination, basically. Okay, but that's a bit of a problem. So how can we get paid for doing free software? Because in economics, you usually have this idea that someone gives you money and they get something back in exchange. But what do people get back in exchange if the licenses that everybody can distribute it to everybody, including the software, basically for free? So what is the, how does this business model here looks like? So what do people get? Why should they pay for something? And this leads me to my second chapter to talk about open source business models. Open source business models, that's like a hot topic forever. Actually, I had a relatively easy job because I could upload a Wikipedia page. So there's a Wikipedia page listed all possible open source business models. And it's actually funny, you should look it up. I've also listed most of them here in the talk. It's actually funny to go through the list because lots of them are, well, yeah, sort of open source business models, but also a bit stupid. But yeah, let's go through them. At the end, I will cover the few that are actually relevant in our world. But let's first, some more theoretical ones. First is like selling branded merchandising. So it's basically the idea that you have a company with lots and lots of developers and you're writing this great piece of software and then you go to events like FOSSTEM and then you sell like t-shirts and mouse pads and coffee cups and this pace for all the developers. Yeah, that's a nice idea. I'm not really sure this really works. I don't know a single example where selling merchandising really pays for writing free software, maybe a little bit, but not really. The second open source business model that exists is selling software as a service. So this is for software that's hosted on server infrastructure. And the idea is that you have a company, an organization which employs the developers and they write the software and then give it away under a free license. But you can also go to this company and say, hey, I want to have a hosted version of that. It's a little bit like WordPress.com. We have a company who is providing the software under a free license, but you can also go to the company and get a hosted version of WordPress. And this is how they pay for everything. So that exists, but it's not so easy and it's also getting harder and harder nowadays with cloud computing. Well, we'll talk about this later a bit. The next one, that's a bit like unclear, I think. It reads partnership with funding organizations. So the idea is that you have a free software company or organization which somehow joins like the Red Cross or Amnesty International or something like that and gets like funding through these channels because there's a better, bigger cause for everybody somehow. I actually don't know a lot of examples for open source development which is funded through something like that. But theoretically, I guess it exists. The next possible open source business model would be selling certificates and trademark use. As you know, selling the software license doesn't make sense but there could be other things that could be sold. For example, if the community who is, I don't know, developing Perl could sell certified Perl developer certificates or something like that. Or they can like, if you do, if you're the Apache web server project then you can sell like maybe the Apache logo that people can put on your website. This website is powered by Apache and they could sell it. Again, I'm not really sure if this is really successful and this is really good enough to really pay lots of developers. Next one are voluntary donations. So it just asks the users for donations. So that's something that exists. I know that the KDE community and the GNOME community, nowadays they really have working fundraising. They ask their communities for donations. And they actually nowadays collect quite some donations. That's nice. But to be honest, I mean with these donations that you can actually like pay a few people. But if you look at the overall community, the community who is writing GNOME, like for example, they're like hundreds of people and like 99% of them are still volunteers and unpaid. So that's at the moment I think no way to pay this whole community with donations. The next option are bounty driven developments or crowd sourcing. So the idea here is that someone is using a software like KDE or GNOME or NextCloud and you really like it but you're really missing one important button somewhere. And then you say, well, I'm happy to pay 10 euros for this button. And then someone else comes along, yeah, I'm like this button too, you pay $20 and you have like already $30. And at some point you have so many dollars that someone actually implements this button. That's something that exists. I mean we at NextCloud, for example, also have a bounty program and it works a little bit. But of course it's far away from like funding everything. It's just too far away. And of course there's also the problem that people in this scenario only pay for features but no one really pays for maintenance or refactoring or packaging or something like that. The next model that's possible is advertising. So you could say, well, we are doing this great software here and we just include advertising banners in our software and people look at the banners and this is how we make our money. Yeah, I am sure this would not be very popular, especially in this community here, especially because if it's free software, someone can remove the advertising and just rebuild it and redistribute it without advertising in five minutes. So this is not very successful but I actually think there is one, there's one very successful open source software which is actually paid like that. And this is Firefox. Firefox, as you know, from Mozilla has a huge team behind it who is actually writing the software. There are no direct advertising banners in Firefox but Firefox is using Google as default search engine, basically advertising Google services and Google is paying them for that. So it's a way, in a way it's actually free software paid by advertising and from Google in this scenario. The next theoretical scenario is delayed open source. So this means that you have a software and you're paying customers get the latest version but your free software community only gets like the version from before. That's an interesting way to make money with free software. I think there is something called ghost script, post script interpreter from, I don't know from the 90s which did something like that. I'm not sure if they still do it but this is theoretically possible but it's definitely also not a model that's successful or working. Then there's something called open source at end of life. That's a weird one. The idea is that you actually have proper Terry software and you make your customers pay for it but you have to promise well if the product is discontinued or if the company goes away well then release it as open source. That's of course not really an open source business model or open source free software community at all but it's in the list. And now I'm getting to the models that are a little bit more successful and realistic. The first one is selling professional services or consulting. So this is actually which exists. The idea is that you have a small organization, small company and they're developing some software for something, they're a bug tracker or forum software or something like that and it's free software. Everybody can use it. And then customers or companies go to them and say yeah this is great but I want to have a feature or I want to have one specific bug fixed or can I get a workshop or training or something and can I pay you for that and this is what they do. They're basically consulting companies, professional services companies who also basically have an open source product that I don't really make money with but I use the open source software to stimulate their consulting business basically. So this is something that exists but I have the last point here. It does not scale because at the end of the day no one really pays you to write your software to maintain it, to refactor it, to have innovation there. You're really paid for these other services. So this is something, I don't think there's an open source company which has this kind of business model which is bigger than 50 people or something because at the end you're just a consulting company. You're not really doing, you're not really, you don't really have a free software business model. Then the next one is of course open core, optional proprietary extensions. So the idea is that you have a product that is free software, open source, but it has limited functionality. And then there is another version of this software, usually called something like Enterprise Edition which is then the real version. This has all the functionalities but this is not free software. This is something you just have to buy. You have a license, you have a license fee. It's just normal proprietary software business and the community version is just like a teaser. It's just like a marketing tool to make people hook, to make them people try it. And then if they really like it, then the thing, oh, this is nice, but now I want to use it in production and then realize that a lot of stuff is missing and then by the Enterprise Edition and then it's basically normal proprietary software business. Nothing to do with open source anymore. I'm not a big fan because this is not really, this is basically using free software as a marketing tool. That's all. The next possible business model is dual licensing. This is something where software is available under different licenses. Usually you have something like GPL or HGPL which forces your free software community users to give back changes they make on the software. This is like the nature as I explained earlier. The GPL enforces that everything you change also has to be released under the same license again. And then sometimes there are companies who say, well, I don't really want to open source my changes. And then the company can say no problem, just buy this other license from us. Then you get it under our special license where you don't have to open source it. So it's basically a paid way to work around the GPL. This is used by some companies, by the acute company for example and some others. It requires complete ownership. So the company who does it needs to have complete ownership of the code. And if you have a community who contributes, they all need to sign a contributor license agreement to give the full rights on the software to the company. That's of course a restriction and because of that it's also controversial. Now I'm coming to the last Open Source Free Software business model and it's actually the most successful one. So this is selling support subscriptions. And that's a business model that's used by Red Hat, by Susie, by Next Cloud, by many others. So the benefit here is that this is scalable because you don't really sell ours or engineers. You sell something more like an insurance. It's like, hey, you use this software in a production way. And if something goes wrong, I need someone to talk to, someone who helps me, who provides me with a security fix or whatever, something like that. If you look at the links distributions, you can say, well, I use maybe CentOS and that's fine. But then yeah, maybe if I'm a bank and really depend on the software that's really working, I want to make sure that I can talk to someone if something goes wrong. Then maybe I get a Red Hat subscription and then I basically have the same software, right? Well, and CentOS are more or less the same. But I have the support, I have the guarantee that someone maintains my software. And this is what's sold here. And this doesn't require code ownership, right? Red Hat doesn't own the whole Linux stack. Susie doesn't own it on Next Cloud. Also, we also don't own all the code of all the apps, nothing, and that's not really needed. To give you a little bit of an example, I have two slides here with the Next Cloud subscription benefits. This is just an example here. This is what our customers are paying for. And it's more or less the same for Red Hat and Susie and all these other companies. You basically have a job insurance for the SysAdmin. If you're an adventurous SysAdmin, you just download the zip file and you use it. But if you really want to make sure that someone helps me if something goes wrong, this is a subscription benefit to help you and you get all kinds of things. You have access to the engineers. Maybe you have a service-level agreement where someone helps you 24-7. Maybe you have long-term support. This is also something we do where if you really don't want to update your server, you can really buy like 10 years support for 10-year-old software. The similar that Susie and Red Hat have done the same. Maybe we help you with migration, something like that, influence on the roadmap, stability, access to some special documentation. Maybe you have certificates that are GDPR or HIPAA compliant, something like that. So all kinds of benefits you get additionally to the software if you run it in a mission-critical way. So this is the best working open-source business model at the moment. So from all the business models out there, if you go through the big open-source free software companies, then this business model is the one that works best. And, well, the best example is, of course, Red Hat. This is like the stock price. Red Hat, I mean, nowadays owned by IBM, of course, but last year had 13,000 employees, 3.4 billion revenue with this subscription business, and IBM paid like $34 billion for IBM. So clearly this business model with selling support subscription is actually working. So I would say this is the best model. Unfortunately, there's a new enemy in town, and that's the cloud. So the cloud means that less and less companies actually have their own infrastructure. Less and less companies have their own MySQL server in their basement. They just buy it as a service from the big cloud companies. So they buy, like, some storage service or some database service or whatever from the big cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But if you really buy MySQL as a service from Amazon, then you don't really need a support subscription from MySQL anymore. Because you just get it as a service from Amazon. They do everything you need. You don't need any help with upgrading. There are no security patches. There are no workshops or scalability issues. They take care of everything. It's just a service. And also, Amazon and Google and Microsoft themselves, they have enough engineers that they can do this without having a support subscription with the software vendor. So Amazon doesn't pay MySQL or someone else to actually support the software because they can just do it themselves. And that's a real threat. That's a threat that actually goes against the business model of the most successful open source companies out there. Because this model with support subscription is really no longer needed if you move everything to the cloud. And this is one of the reasons why we see these trends where software companies like Redis, for example, they introduced the common clause, which means, yeah, you can have the software, do whatever you want, but it forbids to sell the software or for hosting or consulting without a commercial license. Okay? That's obviously a restriction of the service which obviously goes against the four freedoms. And like Simon Phipps at the time, the president of the OSI correctly said on Twitter, Redis just went proprietary. Okay? So this is obviously a change. There's interesting marketing going on. People say, well, we are saving open source here or something. Well, not really. This is basically you make your software proprietary because, as you can see with the restrictions, you're trying to protect yourself against the Amazons and the Googles and the Microsoft Clouds out there. MongoDB is the same. They introduced a service-side public license who also says anyone who wants to offer it as a service needs a commercial license or open that complete infrastructure, including billing beckons and everything, which is usually not very practical. So again, this goes directly against the big cloud companies. And again, that's obviously a proprietary license. That's no longer free software. CockroachDB is the same. They introduced a business source license. Again, no commercial services are allowed without a commercial license from them. Okay? Again, same idea, proprietary. Okay? And as I said, there's interesting marketing going on to explain this and to justify this. For example, there's an interesting article on TechCrunch from 2018. The headline is, Common Clause, Dobbs Open Source Abuse. That's interesting, I think. It basically claims that open source is abused somehow, and it means that the common clause somehow helps with that. That's, of course, complete bullshit. So this is basically saving open source by killing it. It's like, yeah, we're saving open source by making everything not open source anymore. But that's what's going on at the moment, and it's an interesting marketing challenge to twisting words around. So I personally think these license changes are not needed, and they're also harmful. And I think, and this leads me to the main part of my talk, because I think that the GPL is actually great for business, and there's no need to make stuff proprietary, because the free software and open source community actually works great. There's lots and lots of examples for that. So I now want to go through some reasons why I think that the GPL is actually great for business. The first point is, I think it creates the best communities, the best contributor and user communities, because the GPL enforces that all contributors are equal. It means that no one is really special. If you look at the examples that I mentioned earlier with Red Hat or even Next Cloud, like the company like Red Hat or Next Cloud, they have the same rights with the code than any other contributor to. So everybody can contribute to the code base and gets the same rights back. No one is special. The company, if there's a company behind the project, it's not special in any way, it's in the same playing field, which is great to build a community. I personally wouldn't contribute to something that's owned by another company which will give them some special rights somehow. I don't know, if you're in the same playing field, then it's fine, but I don't know why I should, like, enable someone else to make a great business and I don't get the same rights back. So that's great for building communities at GPL. Second reason is with GPL software, forks are always possible, which means no one is really special. Like if Red Hat, for example, is doing a bad job with their Linux distribution, someone can just take it and fork it and make it better. Or if we as the Next Cloud company, if we are doing a bad job with developing our software, anyone can just take it, fork it and make it better. And this forces everybody to create the best results and I think it's a great benefit of the GPL. Next reason is the GPL enables the global upstream and downstream network. That's only possible that we collaborate with other projects and we exchange codes and ideas in all directions. Everything that makes us so successful, standing on the shoulders of giants. And it's only possible because we all use the same fair, equal license like the GPL licenses. It makes sure that there are no code islands. Next reason is from a company's perspective, I think it's really relatively easy to find the best developers because I think the best developers like to work with free software with open source. So from my perspective, finding a good developer, when I say hey, you can contribute to this, your job is to contribute to this free software project, that's way more attractive than you have to write this proprietary banking application or whatever. So actually GPL is good to attract great developers from a company perspective. Next point is everybody wants to build an ecosystem nowadays. If you build a software, if you build a phone or a car or a coffee machine or whatever, everybody wants to build an ecosystem of extensions, of plugins, of connectors and everything else. And again, the GPL is great to enforce that everybody is equal and this enables people to write connectors and apps because no one has a special prioritized position somehow. The next point is that I think that GPL enforces good community governance. There are some projects like the Kubernetes community or the OpenStack community who they have more like MIT, BSD, Apache-style licenses and they really need a lot of governance and like steering committees and foundations to make sure that everybody contributes upstream that no one really takes the stuff and makes it proper, it runs away so they need a lot of governance around it to make the community work. And I think if you base your software in GPL then lots of those stuff is directly built into the license and you don't have to care about it anymore. If you look at the Linux kernel, for example, the Linux kernel doesn't have any steering committees or any weird forks by anyone. The GPL enforces that everybody is the same playing field and everybody contributes upstream and you work together in a nice way. The next point is GPL makes sure that there is no vendor login. Again, if you look at Red Hat again or Sousa or NexCloud, you can use the software that's great and if you want to have a support subscription to help you run it in an enterprise environment to make it really scalable and support and everything you can do it and if you no longer need this or if you think the service is bad you can cancel the support contract and keep on using the software. There's no real vendor login, right? There's nothing, yeah, I have to pay every month otherwise my company falls apart. It doesn't exist. GPL software and again, this is fair relations between customers and suppliers. It makes happy customers which I think makes a good business at the end and it's just fair for everybody. There's also no need for a company to really own the code. I mean, there are some examples where you need to own the code. For example, if you're venture capital invested company and you want to do the big IPO or something and it's always great to show analysts, yeah, I know all this intellectual property is owned by me and this makes us so valuable but for real subscription, support subscription-based business model we don't really need to own the code at all. The value is in the people. The value is in the people who are doing great work and great services and there's all this idea that we need to own the software and license the software. I think this is quite outdated. And again, if you look at Red Hat, who are, I think, very nice strategy with CentOS where they basically leave the software away, the complete REL software away under the CentOS label for free to everybody, that's quite interesting. It might be a surprise to a lot of business people why do you allow everybody to use your software without paying. But I think this is a great strategy because everybody's using CentOS now and then it's a de facto standard and then later you buy a REL subscription if you need a support. So that's a great strategy again. Again, completely based on GPL software. Customers can freely distribute their software and do whatever they want with it. So they like it, of course. If the software is successful in one department, they give it to another department or deploy more users, they can do what they want and they like it again. Of course, customer companies are forced to use a software that changes the contribution flow in and out of the companies, which again is a good thing because it makes everybody contribute from the changes from everyone to make the better software. Another point is I think that copy left license are clear and well understood and tested. So that's a good thing because if you have a weird license by someone, no one really knows what it means, but the GPL is actually a license that is understood and it's quite clear what it is. Copy left software can never die or disappear. If the maintainer goes away, if the company goes away, the software is still here and someone else can pick it up and just keep on going. They have the same rights than before and it's an insurance basically. Software licenses like GPL v3 even has patent protection. That's again something that you don't have in a lot of other licenses, which is actually very important nowadays. Okay, so I now gave you lots and lots of examples of why I think the GPL is great. I want to give you three more real life examples and then come to the conclusion here. So as you might know, I did before Next Cloud this other project called OwnCloud, where we experimented actually with some of those business models which nowadays consider not very good and it might be helpful to show you some real life problems here. For example, at our own cloud times, we required a contributor license agreement from all contributors and need them to sign a contract because we needed this to do licensing in an open core, as I described earlier. Of course, this led to the situation that the contributors were not really happy. Why should I sign the ownership of my code to this company? I'm no lawyer. I don't want to read this contract and this led to contributors' unhappiness and leaving the project. That's a real life example of something not working. Of course, also the employees at the time, they were thinking that while I'm working for an open source company, right, but why I suddenly have to do this proper Terry extensions now that are not really an open source of free software because the company decides well, we need to do this to earn money. That's, again, not very nice for the employees. And also for the customers. Lots of the customers we had at the time they thought they were buying open source software and they were really surprised when later they realized, yeah, we buy this enterprise edition, but that's actually not open source and it has a full vendor login and we are really disappointed when they saw that they're just buying normal proprietary software and there's nothing to lose open source. Okay, so I gave you all those examples why I think that the GPL is actually great for business and why I think that there is no need to come up with these weird new proprietary licenses and we can actually do everything with GPL and it's actually great for business. Okay, of course then the question is, okay, Frank is telling me that this is, the GPL is great. So why are actually all these MongoDBs and this Redis and all these others, why do they actually change their license? So why is that? And again, earlier I showed you this article on TechCrunch, Common Clause of Open Source Appeals, right? I already told you that I think that's bullshit. I think an explanation for this whole move, actually you can get it if you scroll a little bit down here and if you scroll a little bit down then you realize that this article is actually written by a Venture Capitalist who said during 13 years I invested in a lot of open source companies, like here's a list of there's like Redis, there's like Cassandra or Spring and some others and this is where they're invested in all these companies and they say there's a dark cloud on the horizon, the behavior of cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon threatens the viability of open source. So I think open source is not threatened at all. I think open source is just fine. I think maybe this business model of this investor is threatened, okay? So maybe this is the problem here and open source and free software is just fine. So the summary is I think many software like Next Cloud wouldn't exist without open source and free software. This whole community is based on these licenses and I think we're doing just fine and I really think that we should not give up our four freedoms for the value of, for some fast money to make some Venture Capitalists happy. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the interesting talk. Are there any questions? Hello, thank you for your talk. It was great. I remember also your talk from last year. I also like that very, very much. I love Next Cloud. Quick question. I really took a focus on what you said about MySQL and Amazon AWS providing it as a service, right? And having also Aurora and other stuff. My question to you is that you currently run a business so you provide Next Cloud the way that you provided here. What if, and probably in the future I hope that it will be better for you in terms of finances, that it will be more profitable. What happens when AWS sees your profits, right? And how much money open source companies make and decides, okay, I'm gonna go aggressive here and I'm going to take over your market share. And because these companies are huge, are making billions, they can actually do that. They can take, they can bleed a bit. They can bleed a bit and take over your market share. What is the defense strategy to have viable open source companies like yours in this situation? That's an excellent question. That's really to the core of the issue here. It's true that if Next Cloud becomes more popular we might show up on the radar of these big cloud companies and that just decide, well, maybe we offer some Next Cloud service and then basically no one would buy our support subscription anymore. That's true, that's a danger. There are some things we could do, for example with trademark. We could actually then somehow take away from Amazon the right to call it Next Cloud. That's something we can try. Then they would rename it to Amazon SuperCloud or whatever. Then they can still do it. They can still take our software and provide this service. That's true, but I don't know. I mean, what would be the alternative? If everything would be proprietary, then we wouldn't be in this position in the first place. It's true that, and that's also part of free software, that you give up control partly about the software. People will use it and not pay us and everything, and that's fine. I'm actually fine with only whatever. 1% of the company is actually paying us and the rest just not paying us. You can call this an abuse or something, but I think it's actually totally fine. I don't have a better answer for that. I don't have the big stick that says, yeah, if the Amazon do this, then we hit them. No, I don't have that. We decided to give the software away under free license, so yes, they can abuse the software in a way, they can fork it with 10 times more developers, like take over the software, that's true, but I think that's just part of the game. Yeah, common clause solves this problem by makes it proprietary, which is bad, as I just described. Okay, we will go to the next question, maybe. I want to come to a similar point. You explained the advantages of the GPL and the problems in the cloud, but the copy left does not apply in the cloud, so why do not say HGPL is best? You have to not make a difference between the use of GPL and HGPL. Yeah, so in my talk, I should have said that. When I said GPL, I also mean HGPL. I mean this type of licenses. It's true that HGPL, by the way, next cloud service that is HGPL license for exactly that reason, the HGPL is better for service side software, I think. Yeah, I'm not sure I understood the full question because the fundamental issue is still the same, even with the HGPL. Hi, I have a question that might be very specific. I work in Germany, and I'm aware that the clause that says that you can't publish a software, somebody can use it, but don't sue me is not really true. Like if you are liable for what can happen if somebody uses a software, something goes wrong. And that is one of the reasons why companies can also be a little bit careful, not only regarding license, because the GPL is not very popular in enterprises, but also fostering community contributions because they don't want to be liable for somebody else's mistake. So that has to be taken care of very carefully, and I just wanted to know if you have ever seen this issue or had some solution to have contributions and still not get sued. So that's a big question. I'm not sure I can answer everything. And also, the fundamental question about liability, I'm not a lawyer, so please talk to other people. I'm sure they've left Karen uprightly here, either for these questions or someone who is a lawyer in Germany, if you're based in Germany, I don't know. I can't answer this part. But I want to say is that the GPL, I don't agree that the GPL is not very popular in companies anymore. I saw this trend like 20 years ago, maybe still 10 years ago, but nowadays I really rarely have the issue that GPL or HGPL software is no longer accepted. You can always ask, like, hey, do you have a Linux server somewhere? It's GPL. Does it eat your kids? No, it's fine. Do you have an Android phone? Yeah, it's GPL. Does it kill your company? No, it's fine. So I mean, the fact that people are so afraid of the GPL, I don't see this anymore, to be honest. I would like to ask you, I don't understand really why licenses, like the common clothes of the MongoDB license, are you don't have the freedom to use it as you want? I really couldn't understand, I'm sorry. Okay, so if you're a normal person and you don't have a company, you can still take software that is licensed with the common clothes and have all of the freedoms to use it and to change it. And those freedoms are removed only when you are making money out of it. So why is it completely proprietary? I would say it's proprietary only if you are a company, but if you're a normal person, it's not proprietary. I think what I showed earlier in my talk, the four freedoms and the open source definition, I think this is the foundation, although this is basically the definition of what's proprietary or not. And all these server-side public licenses and common clothes and business source license, they violate these freedoms. And this makes it proprietary. I mean, I think that there's some interesting marketing going on and it's also sort of halfway successful in our community because these licenses, they target Amazon and Google and Microsoft and no one likes them anyways. But I mean, we have to be really precise. They are proprietary and they have usage restrictions that are clearly set in the four freedoms and in the open source definition there should be no usage restriction. So it's quite clear. Okay, we will come to the last question now. Thank you. As someone who left their job really to work on open source, I think for me having that freedom is very important, but similarly I also continue to make an income. One of the questions that came up for me was, do you have a different strategy or do you think there should be different strategies when you're targeting non-technical or technical end users? Can you repeat again? I'm sorry, that is a huge amount of echo here. Oh, sorry. So the summary, do you think that non-technical commercial users require different business models? I'm not sure I understand. I don't know why technical or non-technical person should make a difference with the business model. I mean, usually in a company the software is like bought by the IT department and then by the procurement department and then some compliance department checks the licenses and then it's bought or not bought for the end user who is technical or not. I'm not really sure it should make a difference, but maybe I'm missing the point, sorry. Okay, now thanks for your talk again and thanks for all the questions.