LinuxQuestions.org - Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

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Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

Very interesting article:

"Amazon’s behavior toward open source combined with lack of leadership from industry associations such as the Open Source Initiative (OSI) will stifle open-source innovation and make commercial open source less viable.

The result will be more software becoming proprietary and closed-source to protect itself against AWS, widespread license proliferation (a dozen companies changed their licenses in 2018) and open-source licenses giving way to a new category of licenses, called source-available licenses..."
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/30/la...able-licenses/

A must-read article for those interested in the future of open-source.

I agree with ChuangTzu.

This is an excellent article on how amazon (and other entities), are using open source for their own commercial interests to the detriment of other entities.

Also, as usual, most of the problems arise from leadership.

Quote:

To that end, a group of open-source lawyers led by Heather Meeker, a respected and undisputed leader on technology and open-source law who worked on both Commons Clause and SSPL, will soon open a suite of “source-available” licenses for community comment.

The suite of source-available licenses is expected to provide authors of open-source software with a number of methods to address the growing threat from cloud infrastructure providers. The suite will provide short plain-language source-available licenses; standardize patterns in recently adopted source-available licenses; and allow users and companies to mix and match limitations you want to impose (e.g. non-commercial use only, or value add only, or no SaaS use, or whatever else). I believe these frameworks will be a smart alternative to open source, as the OSI refuses to provide leadership in solving the Amazon problem.

On the surface, it appears that Attorney Heather Meeker is a leader that is more useful to the cause of a viable open source "source-available licenses" than the current leadership at OSI.