And this illustrates why the Commons Clause naming and usage guidelines are so problematic.

That's guaranteed to result in a Cease and Desist. Concatenating those words makes it look like an endorsement.

That is exactly why it should be renamed. It seems to be designed to be confusing. No one will care as much, if they just made it clear that they are transitioning parts of it to a commercial license that is not confusingly named. They are trying to make it sound like Apache is endorsing this license.

It is not "mixed OSS/commercial", because it is not OSS.

Using the text of the Apache License 2.0 as a point of departure is fine. But please make it clear what you are doing.

The problem here is that the end result is not the Apache 2.0 license anymore. It’s something else. Using the Apache name in this context raises some serious eyebrows.

By all means keep the common core concept for Redis but I urge you to get as far away from this toxic “Common Clause” pseudo-license as possible.

That would be actively misleading - "This software is licensed under a mixed OSS/commercial license" implies the traditional dual-licenced model where you offer both an open source licence (e.g. GPL) and a commercial licence. Those who want an open source licence can choose that one, and those who want some extra options can choose the commercial licence. That's not the case here, there's no choice to get an OSS licence.

The difference between this and the restrictions in other OSS licences is that the "common clause" restricts core freedoms - if you attach it to something, that something ceases to be an open source licence, this clause transforms into a commercial licence that prohibits free use of the software. There's nothing mixed about it, it's a "not-OSS" licence.

I will remove "proprietary" from my post. The gist of my objection is not the content of the license, but the implied endorsement of the Apache Software Foundation.

I think that Common Clause is proprietary while AGPL is open source. This should not be a matter of opinion. AGPL asks you to redistribute the work back, however if you complain with the share back clauses, you can do whatever you want with the code. This is not the case of Common Clause. However if we don't focus too much on the Open Source license yes/no, we can see how there is a spectrum of licenses... and Common Clause allows many freedoms to actual users compared to other non-OSS licenses, and in certain respects even VS AGPL.

Any license that includes the ""Commons Clause"" is by definition proprietary, it precludes incorporating the code into anything commercial and even prohibiting anyone from providing paid support for it (which seems even more extreme).

It's a set of anti-commercial license terms and is definitely proprietary by Free Software and Open Source definitions.