 We'll talk about open source and that may confuse you because this is the Free Software Foundation Europe assembly, which is about free software, but it doesn't matter so much because, okay, let's go back to what these terms mean. Free software is usually defined by the four freedoms, and just from the Free Software Foundation Europe webpage, the freedom to use, study, share and improve the software, which is what we're used to, like for example with a Linux kernel, everyone can download it and use it, we can get the source code and analyze it and we can share it with others and we can change the source code. For open source, there's a 10-point definition I've not put on all the points because that would be a too long slide, but if you actually look at them, it says more or less the same, and I like to phrase it as free software and open source are basically the same thing, they're just different ways of looking at the same thing. And usually the idea here is that the term free software is used by people who want to emphasize user freedom, while open source is more from people who may focus on what kind of businesses you can build around it and kind of the technological aspects, but it's really we're talking about the same thing here. And everything that every license that qualifies as a free software license also qualifies as an open source license at 10-points first. And sometimes people use the terms for us like for free open source software or free Libre open source software, now we have a microphone here. Yeah, so I often like to use those because it's kind of inclusive you're saying like it's this one big thing, we're using different terms but it doesn't really matter. There are also like different kinds of free open source software, some licenses have this idea of copy left which says yeah you can change this but if you change it and then give it to someone else, they have the same freedoms so you also have to give them the code and there are other licenses that don't require this so you can take this code and then make a proprietary product out of it where you don't have to give away the code. And there are also licenses that don't require you to do anything, not even mentioning where you got it from, like for example the CC0. And of course there are things there, not open source or free software. For example if you provide code but you're not allowed to change the code that's neither free software nor open source, that's just maybe it's from open code but it's not what we're talking about here. And also software that is not allowed to be used for certain things for example you say you don't like someone and this person is not allowed to use it or you say it's not allowed to use it to do certain things. And this is also kind of obvious but these days free and open software is extremely successful and when I made this slide I kind of realized how big of an impact this is and also in how many different areas it is successful like if you look at these logos I mean you probably don't recognize all of them but we have things like operating systems, we have messengers, video players, programming languages, basic libraries, browsers, web servers. All kinds of things where free and open source software is extremely successful. And of course free and open source software has advantages for the user like no one can tell you what you're allowed to do with this software. If you have the technological background to be able to do it you are allowed to change it and adapt it to your needs and if you're not then you may be able to pay someone else to adapt it for you. And it's also I think that's a very important aspect it's more resilient to change so if you have a company developing software and then the company no longer exists or they are no longer interested in the product then it usually just goes away, right? But if it's a free software then other people can pick it up and continue development. And also there I'm getting closer to the issue I mostly want to talk about today if you use a service that's based on a free software or you buy support from someone and you may have the opportunity to go to someone else you're not restricted to the company who made the software but other people can offer the same service or similar service based on that. Free and open source software can also have advantages for the people who develop it and one of them and I think this is extremely important it has a good reputation saying something is open source that just sounds good I also like that you may have contributions from the community which can be new features but also sometimes just bug reports that help you to find bugs in your software and also some people will just avoid using your software if it's not free for example I try to use as much free software as I can and in many cases if I have a choice between a free product and a non-free product even if it doesn't cost money but if it's I don't have access to the code I would choose to free. And also some distribution channels for software don't accept software that is not free so software for example Debian Dinox they're saying in their distribution all the packages are under the Debian free software guidelines so if you have something that is not under a free license then you cannot do that with the main gig industry. But from a developer perspective there are some things you cannot do so you cannot control what people do with your software and you cannot control who uses your software and you can sell a software but once you sold it you cannot usually not stop people from getting it for free because the person you sold it to can copy to others and put it on the internet that explicitly allows it to take part of the idea. You can sell support for your software but you cannot stop stopping others from also selling support for your software and they may even sell better support for your software and you can sell services based on your software but you cannot stop others from doing the same. And sometimes there are people who want to have a good reputation of free software or open source but they don't want to accept these things that they cannot do with it and what shall they do? They can lie, they can say it's open source although it's not or they can cause confusion and that's where I'm getting to the topic of today we have to talk about this cloud so I think yes everyone knows that cloud computing is big these days companies like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud they are very successful, very big, a lot of people use their services and obviously these cloud providers also provide services based on free and open source software so you have screenshots and you can see not everything here is open source software but on the left you can see AWS you can install a WordPress image or TV on it and all these cloud providers provide many services that are based on open source software and now you can say that's kind of normal and kind of expected because yeah your software is free everyone can use it so AWS of course they can use it and they can offer you to use it on their service why not? but some people seem to think otherwise here's an article on TechCrunch which has the title The Crusade against open source reviews and this guy thinks that this is abuse when a cloud provider uses every software and lately we had some instances where companies were changing their licenses to protect them from this abuse from cloud providers the first thing that came up was the so-called comments clause which is an extension to other licenses so you have the license I don't know Apache 2 wasn't typically assembled and then you add this additional clause and this is relatively short without limiting other conditions in the license the grant of rights under the license will not include it the license does not grant you the right to sell the software so you're restricted in what you can do with this and they expand a bit on it and basically what they're trying to say is AWS and Google and all these cloud providers should not sell services without software and this kind of became big when Redis announced that they would adopt this comments clause their first announcement was a bit unclear so people thought Redis would use that new license condition which was not the case but I was not so sorry for them because it was kind of their own fault that their communication was very confusing Redis itself at least they say will stay under BSB license but they're using some modules they re-licensed under this new license then there was this new license called server-side public list the question was Redis is a no-sql database so it's I don't know, I don't use these things I heard this is like when you want to use a database but you don't want to learn as well but a lot of people use it the next example was a MongoDB they used something called the server-side public license and this was a bit more interesting they came with this open-source license and they asked the open-source initiative to adopt it because like the open-source initiative people wrote this open-source definition and they kind of have a list of licenses they say they approve that this is an open-source license this is a bit longer so the important thing here is that the idea they have here is that if you offer a service with that software then everything you use also has to be under this license including they're pretty explicit about this user interfaces, application program interfaces automation software, monitoring software, backup software storage software and hosting software all such a user can run an instance of the service using this open-source code you make available so this kind of sounds a bit like a strong version of Copilot because we know that if you change Linux then your trainers also have to be under GPL but it goes much further basically there's no way to fulfill that license and the only idea is to make it completely impactful and if you really accept it they've written it in a way that it should not apply to normal users but it should apply to these cloud providers who are offering services based on normal users so it basically has the same intention like this comments clause before they don't want AWS to sell MongoDB services at least not without having some kind of extra agreement with them so they introduced this kind of super copy left that is practically completely impractical for example this says you cannot run a service on Linux because Linux is released under the GPL so you cannot re-license Linux under this service like public license so essentially this is an attempt to kind of hack the open-source definition because what they want is inherently not compatible with the idea of open-source but they are trying to find a way around it and there was a third thing which was the control and community license which was relatively similar to the first example so they basically said you cannot sell a service based on this so ultimately I think what all these companies want is AWS, Google, Microsoft, Stacia are not allowed to complete the task with our services because they also for MongoDB if you look on the other page you can get a hosted MongoDB from them and they want you to buy it from them and not from AWS that's what this is meant to be I think this alone wouldn't be something I would be very worried about because ultimately they could just say yeah put that in the license and then it's no longer open-source and okay, I mean I want to have more free-end open-source software but I can't let the few projects that are no longer compatible come in but what these companies want is they kind of still want the positive image of open-source and that is fundamentally incompatible they want the good things but they don't want to have the things that come with it and what I think they're doing is that they're trying to cause as much confusion as they can so it kind of sounds like they're sold they're not always lying so for this kind of course there's a web page and there's an FAQ and it's pretty explicit there's a question is this open-source and it expands a bit on that but that's here this is one of the Redis modules under this common-source course it says Redis Search is an open-source project and whatever it is that's a lie why is it a lie? open-source because it's not open-source, the license under the shape of it so are you open-source? no, I mean it's this license where they say the FAQ is this open-source, no wait wait this is the last one they don't use the common-source no, they use the common-source then this is from the blog post where they introduced this initiated by a condition of infrastructure companies to protect their rights common-source class is a condition added to existing open-source software to create a new and combined software assets now this is what I would call Confluenton because they say okay, it's added to an existing open-source license so it kind of sounds like yeah, we have an open-source and then we add something to it that kind of sounds like an open-source it's not explicitly wrong but I would say this is confusing and then they say the combined license maintains all conditions of the underlying open-source license but limits commercial sale of the software this doesn't make any sense I'm predicting in this so there's an organization called FOSTA which is kind of there behind all this so they were kind of collaborating with these companies to do these license changes they are more to this modern open-source management and you probably wouldn't think that modern open-source management is a way of saying we help open-source software to be no longer open-source this from Confluenton they basically say this is irrelevant for you for those who aren't commercial sale providers 99.99% of the users of these projects this adds no meaningful restriction of what they can do with this software what they are trying to say is yeah, I mean if you're AWS then you're affected by this but you're not I mean nobody here in the room is probably the CEO of AWS so it doesn't really affect you but I mean this is yeah that they're trying to tell you this is I mean maybe it's not technical open-source but it's not really relevant for you but I think this is bogus because you may not be AWS but you may want to use them right you may be a customer of them and I mean I don't know who here in the room is using AWS or Azure or Google Cloud audience but still and even if you run the software yourself right now you still may want to say okay but I want to keep my options open like I don't know maybe I run it now on my own server but maybe next year I want to go to some provider that offers this so I think this is relevant if you use that software not just the CEO of AWS so yeah so this isn't a kind of minor issue I think this really goes to the core of what free and open-source software is supposed to be but then you have this I mean we're really trying to gain some we're saying yeah this is really but we need to find development and I think that it's definitely a legitimate issue and we have a lot of problems that these products are underfunded that you certainly find out oh there's this super important library everyone's using it and it's programmed by one guy who never saw a dollar for it that's not mad but I really think this is I'm not sure if this is what we're talking about here this is the stock from normal so they went to the stock market I found it because I wrote an article about this license change from MongoDB and I wanted to look what other media was writing about it so Google used the type in MongoDB and I was surprised that a lot of financial market web pages showed up what an interesting stock option MongoDB is so their stock kind of doubled within a year and Redis Labs they are not on the stock market but they got like $44 million from both of them and so I'm wondering is this about developer funding or is this about investor expectations so I'm not sure we're like having the right to pay for it and then I found this which I found very confusing MongoDB management said customers were interested in due to the features across all of the large multiple cloud providers that was what they were trying to prevent in addition to preventing customer management they explained that many customers wanted to take advantage of the different unique features each large cloud company provides in retrospect MongoDB is cloud neutral positioning continues to be an advantage even as it competes with the very same cloud companies that have their own database offerings so I don't know where they're just saying that the advantage of their databases what they're just trying to prevent with their license change I don't know is there a threat to open source because this tech crunch article at the beginning we had this line cloud infrastructure threatened the viability of open source I think open source is doing really fine I don't think there's a threat maybe there's a threat to those companies business models they have this thing with evil big cloud because I mean one thing they're also trying to do a lot they're trying to gain sympathy by saying this is the big Amazon Google the big bad but I really think this is praying that doesn't really get to the issue and that shouldn't really matter because whether you like Google or whether you like Amazon is completely irrelevant if we're discussing what open source is so yeah a few conclusions I think we should demand clarity and reflect computing about the terms free software in open source something either is open source or it's not and there's no in-between and you can be part of that community and you can leave that community but yeah, you cannot have it of this we should talk about better funding for free open source software but I don't think not publishing free open source software is a way of publishing open source software and in general I think free and open source software is doing fine questions or comment on watch thanks for the talk what I always wonder is why and how are those companies even allowed to change their license legally they have software at any moment so there's two ways like one is it may be software they just develop on their own without any external contributions or often they have contribution agreements where you basically say if you send a patch then you have to sign something that you allow that to get them all right that is relatively common which also sometimes makes sense because sometimes you have a license and then it has some stupid incompatibility so they want to change it so there can be good reasons for that but you can only do that if you have the full rights to the software so if you are or it depends some licenses allow you to change it with the prior term if you have ESD code you can make better but if you have a GPL project with many contribution agreements so what do you think about EGPL it wasn't like this at all probably not but there's like a problem with like a GPL license software but both providers modify it and don't have distributed changes and EGPL prevents that but EGPL is not really well enforceable for them so we chose this graph I mean they're so okay the general idea of EGPL is that if you offer a web service or some network service then the same things apply like if you sell EGPL software because very often the software you're using is not running on the screen so EGPL tries to tackle that I think it's largely that debate because I mean I think MongoDB was EGPL and I mean Amazon is not violating their license I mean Amazon is just offering MongoDB completely land with the EGPL yeah yeah could you go back to the slide before the conclusion like what conclusion one slide before that yes so exactly like I absolutely agree with this but earlier when you were talking about the SSPL you mentioned that the class mentioned they are impractical isn't as irrelevant whether it's impractical or not for the license to be open source I mean I guess this is a tricky issue because we had I think we haven't had this before kind of trying to hack the definition but I think open source is not kind of technicality but it means something for user freedom and if you say you're a user you are allowed to offer a service with this but in practice you can't because it's not possible that's kind of so I feel this is kind of tricky I would imagine like just imagine like it is actually impossible like imagine like actually Amazon would now open source all the management software it would be absolutely amazing if you could use the same API in the same infrastructure they have put in heavenly on top of the linux term for example huge patch set on the linux term that they are not releasing and all the software that they have built around that and the whole company exists only because of that but I mean it's not saying that you have to release it but if they say you have to release it under their license it means for example for the linux term you cannot do that oh yeah that's not actually a bad question so that's written license I haven't read that yet they say that you have to release it under their license okay just a small question to clarify on the course of the comments course so really it restricts really the cloud business but it still would still allow products to be sold unless like they are slowly build to the expected state because the suit that they could actually just pay some money yeah if they get an agreement with the actual but that's kind of not what I'm interested in because like my perspective is the freedom of the community if Google and MongoDB get to some agreement my point is I don't want MongoDB to confuse the public yeah I'm not sure who was first but when the license is changed do the old provisions keep the old license? yeah yeah sure if something is released under a license then this gives you the right to release it so you can always talk the old versions and continue and I guess that will happen for some people yeah the AGPL was released in 2007 I think like I said before the MongoDB used to be a license on this and they changed the SSPL do you think one of the problems and the GPL through is even earlier than this I think one of the issues to maybe that hasn't been it doesn't look like it's much innovation in terms of like a GPL for the success of the AGPL I don't know it's not the concerns you made about the SSPL there wasn't any community drafting but this license do you think there's any scope for some other like an AGPL plus or something I mean the question would be what that would be because I think fundamentally if your license is a free license then I believe AWS can sell services based on it I don't think within the idea of free and open source software you can have a license that gives these companies what they want yeah you gave your assessment somehow like you think that open source software is going fine at the same time like presenting some cases in which the AGPL was not going fine I mean they have funding now but like so I guess so what is your proposal for like funding now I guess maybe that would be special yeah I mean I thought that would quickly get out of hand and get its own talk I mean what I think the most promising things are I mean many of these things just come out of companies that use some project and then just release it the other thing is I think there is a certain willingness in these large companies to fund for if they depend upon we should try to push that further I mean the idea that if you're a large IT company that profits from open source all the time and in many different places and it's often not a lot of money we're talking about right I mean funding on person is irrelevant to you so so my hope there would be that we can get more to the situation where not just software companies but all companies we have this idea that yeah they they pay something back voluntarily and ultimately won't stop them from that some won't do it but that is kind of a yeah and the root of the problem was the introduction of common clothes that was the first example yeah that's where I got lost so which one of the four freedom the common clothes breaks it must break one yeah I guess you cannot use it how you like it what do you mean how you like it yeah I mean it's four points and one I just but if you read the whole text that you can use it for any post that you want including commercial including selling including selling so that's one use case to offer a hosted model I wonder is this a case of false advertising because if I say my software is free and but in fact it's not and I'm a company and I say that this sounds like false advertising to me so these companies may be suitable for saying their software is free and absurd but in fact it's not it's a lie I'll have to so maybe we can get these companies by legal but I mean probably if you sue them for this they'll probably just change it I'm not sure that uses that much so but this for those companies claim their software but it's not this I fully agree this is a big problem so this has to stop but it's also I mean I took this as an extreme example but very often it's that they're using very confusing language that's my trial to see where it gets but I mean maybe you can I won't do it but maybe their organizations are interested in that yeah so these two new licenses became needed because suddenly the cloud providers made money by providing hosting my question is in what way does being a cloud differ from just selling hosting I guess it is just larger but you can try with your license you can sell hosting unless you have a name because hosting always was fine and that's a common thing to do with free software so I don't understand why suddenly it's even just because it starts with a C yeah so open source is a trademark term owned by the OSI and it's not written like that which I still think is a trademark violation the open source initiative could change that any day and it would be still the open source with big O and big S whereas free software is slightly different in its licenses that they approve of but it's also a shitty term for example it doesn't necessitate copyright which is an interesting addition to it but what I want to ask is do we need a term for software that you need to run on open source hardware without any known respects because that would be a requirement but I wouldn't have to do any other reading it's just like that it's not a lot of term yeah I don't think there's much to question I assume that you use copulate software over free software where did that come from I personally don't expect I guess we're getting into other discussions maybe we can have a later um yeah thanks you said like we need some kind of definition and it's the no no we have a definition we need to be clear about that definition yeah maybe some kind of simple with a AC light test or some kind of licenses so you can just like no no no we all have we have kept that all like that's definition and like this is a checklist we have all that I think you're being confusing when you're talking about free software capital S and you're saying it has these four readings and you're saying that in my team there's free software which is not on the lowest level why is it not because it doesn't require that you maintain those three readings yeah but that's not part of the definition I mean we're giving you the technicalities here but I mean even the free software foundation has always accepted that these permissible licenses are all part of the free software that's kind of different flavors of the free software the OSI and PSF also have lists of licenses that they accepted so and you can be pretty sure a license that is approved by the OSI and PSF is definitely a false license so you can look at that online can we do it in more I would just raise it as a company struggle between the company that is open source and the government happens to produce open source products because it seems to me that it's an industry that is coming off page and the management is coming off page and uses all the same tactics that any emerging industry uses here you try to grow and then you kick out your professors so the terms open source are just playgrounds for those management people and the thing is not to get confused on internal struggles at this point and just try to state the line as a company and not as a movement I guess there was no question about it and I don't want to have this forever if someone who hasn't said anything yet didn't have otherwise I'd close it that's okay maybe some uncommon opinion and maybe I'm also playing partly devil's advocate but in the time of software service you might think the idea to have something that is totally not open source software but has a different name which is everybody could contribute and everybody is open source running under their own terms but as soon as you run into Merkle use it you would have to negotiate a different license with the owner of the software and I think that might be a good idea it has been tried before it was never very successful but I mean if most of the benefits of the software are still there I actually don't think that you get most of the benefits I think this is a very crucial difference like if you start going down that route and I also I'm pretty convinced that for example the Linux counter would have never been relevant if it had a license like that it would have been better if it was the real one more importantly and that never was that I actually argued that software like Linux kernel and software service as you see now is the age and I totally agree with the software like Linux kernel and a lot of fundamental software that everybody needs to use but I mean the you would be that would you really like to distribute to software that is sold to other companies because it's all about community building I mean to have reliable open source software you need a reliable community and so you really need people who are inspired and want to work with one of us things and I would never distribute to the software and I know this is free for private people but it is selling from this company because I see there's no next group coming so here we go