Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

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Happy to talk more about the benefits of Polyform and why we chose that. If you've seen what's happening with open source and AWS you'll understand that this is one of the few ways to protect against cannibalisation of our ecosystem and ability to build a real business. AWS gives nothing back to the creators, and we believe cloud will have its music industry moment. Polyform is a fairly liberal and standardised set of licenses co-drafted by Heather Meeker is well known for her work on open source and enterprise licensing. We believe licensing evolution is required beyond Apache 2.0 and MIT in this new world of cloud and AWS. By choosing licensing standards over custom drafting we think it will make it simpler for companies to adopt and get approval of those in larger orgs. Again happy to speak more on the topic.

I like the idea conceptually behind the license, but without an explicit definition of what competition is, it feels tough to use.

For instance, Micro provides a persistent form of key-value storage. If my product focuses on a very specific audience (say medicine), but also exposes a way for doctors to store arbitrary key-value pairs, could that be argued in court to be competition?

The definition of competition in the Polyform Shield license is never explicitly stated, and in fact, it specifically calls out that "Applications can compete with services".

Whereas the MIT and Apache license are pretty explicitly clear in what the terms of use are, Polyform seems to be fairly vague there, which is potentially something you wouldn't want for a legal license.

These all sound like good motivations to me. But it seems for an organization to use this software, you need to convince yourselves that you understand who the licensor is and what their business is, and that your business doesn't compete as defined in the Compete section. This is a significant task if you just want to respect the request of the authors, and is bigger if you want to make sure you don't end up in court.

I understand where you're coming from, but the license itself is terribly general and broad:

> Any purpose is a permitted purpose, except for providing any product that competes with the software or any product the licensor or any of its affiliates provides using the software.

You're not just unable to compete with Polyform, you're unable to compete with Polyform's affiliates.

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