However, you have made a big mistake with how the "Commons Clause" confuses Open Source under the OSD with "source available". You were not well served by those who advised you to do so.
You just can't deploy your fork (or the original code) in a private service without paying for a license for that code.
Redis Labs has the opportunity to largely erase this blunder by ditching the name "Commons Clause" and offering the same terms under honest labeling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816332
Everybody wants to have their word in how that software they didn't write should be licensed. The back and forth ends up being something akin to "It's your own fault for picking BSD; you shouldn't have picked that in the first place!... now why don't you make all the other stuff BSD too?".
Frankly, I don't see what the OSD/OSI definition of open source matters. You pick the license that suits your needs best. People ought to argue the license on its actual text and merits, not whether some other organization likes it or not, otherwise it's just argumentation by authority.
> The Commons Clause is a license condition drafted by Heather Meeker that applies a minimal-form commercial restriction on top of an existing open source license
Making it proprietary and failing the Open Source Definition.
You cannot have Commons Clause 'on top' of an existing Open Source license. This is impossible. You can only replace the existing Open Source license with Commons Clause.
The page is a bunch of (insert HN-guidelines-appropriate word for 'very incorrect information').
> This Clause is not intended to be applied against at-scale existing open source projects, but incrementally on top of commercial counterparts that need to be transitioned to source-availability to satisfy urgent business or legal requirements.
Commercial and Open Source aren't opposites - this a very basic mistake made by people who are new to OSS. There are many Open Source commercial projects (your bank runs on Red Hat Linux, which is entirely OSS, with everything but the Red Hat logos allowed to be reproduced) and many non-commercial proprietary projects. It's scary that a company called 'Fossa' whose specialty is 'Modern open source management_' is confused about this.
> The original Open Source Definition represents an immensely important set of ideals that carried many projects to success during the earlier days. However, the open source ecosystem has changed a lot over the past 10 years, and the conditions of the modern landscape has forced change for the sustainability of many projects.
The project wants to create a new OSD which isn't Open Source.
The 'drafter' of this license seems to have simply re-created Shared Source per Ballmer-era Microsoft.
> It this “Open Source”? > No, at least not by the official definition set forth by the OSD. Applying the Clause to an open source project will transition the project to “source-available”.
Here's a pull request: https://github.com/fossas/commons-clause/pull/3
That's all that needs to be said. Your page reads as though the author is hiding something or that the author is ashamed of the answer. Just come out and say it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815389
and specifically asked them who drafted the thing, among other things.
> This Clause is not intended to be applied against at-scale existing open source projects, but incrementally on top of commercial counterparts that need to be transitioned to source-availability to satisfy urgent business or legal requirements.
This isn't actually making the 'commercial vs open source' mistake, it seems to mean:
> This Clause is not intended to be applied against all open source projects, but incrementally on top of commercial software that is currently open source but needs to be transitioned away from open source to to source-availability to satisfy urgent business or legal requirements.
That's what I've put in the PR anyway.
Worse, none of the deceptiveness was necessary to implement the plan described by the Redis Labs Co-Founder above, which is completely [edit: potentially] compatible with Open Source. Antagonizing the wider Open Source community was pointless.