针对这周Confluent修改License的小感想

这周Confluent(Kafka背后的商业公司)的CEO Jay Kreps发了<<License Changes for Confluent Platform>>一文,主要是修改了license,以针对那些大型云平台,防止他们也构建和Confluent类似的竞品。之前MongoDB和Redis社区也相继发生了类似的事件。这些举动自然会引起一些争议,像dtrace的作者Bryan Cantrill这次立马写了一篇标题为<<Open source confronts its midlife crisis>>的长文抨击这种行为。

我个人是支持Confluent的行为的, 引用Jay在文章中的原话:

the cloud providers have significant advantages: they control the pricing of all resources a service provider will use and can tightly integrate their own services across all their offerings.

The major cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Google) all differ in how they approach open source. Some of these companies partner with the open source companies that offer hosted versions of their system as a service. Others take the open source code, bake it into the cloud offering, and put all their own investments into differentiated proprietary offerings. The point is not to moralize about this behavior, these companies are simply following their commercial interests and acting within the bounds of what the license of the software allows.

As a company, one solution we could pursue would be for us to build more proprietary software and pull back from our open source investments. But we think the right way to build fundamental infrastructure layers is with open code. As workloads move to the cloud we need a mechanism for preserving that freedom while also enabling a cycle of investment, and this is our motivation for the licensing change.

We think this is a positive change and one that can help ensure small open source communities aren’t acting as free and unsustainable R&D for tech giants that put sustaining resources only into their own differentiated proprietary offerings.

Hadoop社区所发生的事情就很好地印证了云平台的这种巨大优势,Hortonworks/Cloudera/MapR三家都对Hadoop项目作出了巨大的贡献,可都活得举步维艰,前两家上市后表现都不好,最后还不得不合并。而以Hadoop为底座的AWS EMR却是AWS的超级现金牛。

在大型云平台近乎碾压式的优势下,license是创业公司手中为数不多地可以保护自己劳动成果的武器。拿着这个武器创业公司才有更大的可能性存活下去,慢慢壮大,让参与者无论是风投还是员工获得回报,也只有这样才会继续有人支持创业公司去做类似的事情。

对大型云平台来说,这也不算是糟糕的事情,大公司毕竟有足够的资源可以投入到自研项目,近期这些license涌现的问题相信也会鼓励他们去那么做。即使最后项目失败,也无伤大雅,如果项目成功,回馈社区,那是更好的事情了。

Jay和Bryan的原文都值得一读:

我个人虽然不太认同Bryan的观点,不过第一段对于中年的描述倒很精彩。

Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown: the kids that were such a fresh adventure when they were infants and toddlers are now grappling with their own transition into adulthood — and you try to remind yourself that the kids that you have sacrificed so much for probably don’t actuallyhate your guts, regardless of that post they just liked on the ‘gram. Making things more challenging, while you are navigating the turbulence of teenagers, your own parents are likely entering life’s twilight, needing help in new ways from their adult children. By midlife, in addition to the singular joys of life, you have also likely experienced its terrible sorrows: death, heartbreak, betrayal. Taken together, the fading of youth, the growth in responsibility and the endurance of misfortune can lead to cynicism or (worse) drastic and poorly thought-out choices. Add in a little fear of mortality and some existential dread, and you have the stuff of which midlife crises are made…

Jay在上文引用的段落里也有一个无关主旨的小细节,他在提及major cloud providers时的顺序是Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and Google。

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