Hacker News Reader

Comment by XiZhao | Hacker News Reader

The Commons Clause clearly acknowledges this in the FAQ:

The FAQ is not a sufficient corrective for all the deceptive top-level messaging around "Commons Clause". (Name, abbreviation, suggested usage all inappropriately invoking open source).

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.

From that page:

> 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.

Yes, and right below it acknowledges that it is not Open Source and doesn't try to be:

> 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”.

Yes. The page is full of tautologies. It shoudn't be.

Here's a pull request: https://github.com/fossas/commons-clause/pull/3

> Is this Open Source? No. The source is available for inspection and restricted use but, because of these restrictions, its licence is not Open Source per the Open Source Definition.

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.

There's no need to get personal about it, even when you disagree about licensing. Please don't.

The "what's the clause?" section starts with a plug for the clause's creator - even before answering the question, which seems a bit unnecessary, but I'll edit the post and remove the personal reference. Sorry Dan.

Simply naming someone is not 'a plug'. It's just naming someone.

This response, created by nailer on Hacker News, illustrates the awkwardness of mentioning the credit before the content.

It doesn't really, or if it does, it demonstrates awkwardness, not endorsement or a plug. Beside that, they they posted the faq just as DannyBee started asking them questions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815389

and specifically asked them who drafted the thing, among other things.

Then they should answer that in 'who drafted Commons Clause?' not 'What is Commons Clause?' before they've answered what Commons Clause is.

Appreciated!

Replying to myself here as I think I got this part wrong:

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.

That FAQ was quickly added after the yelling started. It's the weaseling and obfuscating that in the end look a lot worse than the perfectly sensible desire to make more money from your products. They could have achieved that without the bizarre 'piss down your back and tell you it's raining' approach.

That's irrelevant. Nobody is going to read your FAQ. You intentionally created something that tries to muddy the lines between Open Source and Non Open Source. It's dishonest, and deceitful.

You can't abuse anyone like that here regardless of how wrong they are or how you feel they are. Please keep the online shaming culture well away from HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right, and I've edited my post to reflect that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com