I know that too. It’s often not sufficient. It was a random idea to turn some ever pissy corporations to maybe contribute to a community in other ways than using them as a free lunch by playing on their fears of having their lawyers look at licenses.
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Companies like Amazon and Google are smart enough to understand the licenses and know that they don't need to contribute anything back or pay for a license though. I guess providing a license can work in some weird cases like the useless $6000 SQLite license that's available.
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Apple flat out bans GPL anything for example. They’re a big company that’d rather not bother at all. Smaller companies also frequently have the same kind of approach. I’ve worked for a few of them too.
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In the Apple case, I think it's really the other way around. In the past, they incorporated tons of GPL2 software and released some of their own. It's the GPL3 that they're allergic to, maybe due to the patent grant but it also directly forbids having an immutable root of trust.
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It's GPL3 that bans using the software as part of firmware or an OS with signature verification based on an immutable key in hardware. Apple couldn't have used it on the iPhone unless they supported users setting the key like many other devices. Patent grant may also scare them.
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If someone is using GPL3 because they believe in the ideology behind it, then I don't think they would want to sell a license for creating a locked down device. You could use GPL3 to force companies to pay for a license for this case, but it's a tiny subset of commercial use.
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One "ideological" position is "if you're doing locked down proprietary stuff you should be heavily finding the folks who are creating free alternatives to it".
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Do Amazon's web services not qualify as heavily locked down proprietary stuff? My understanding is that it's one of the major reasons for the recent push for alternatives to OSI / FSF approved licenses. Some of the projects involved were using AGPL3 and weren't happy with it.
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Redis abandoned Commons Clause for their proprietary extensions and moved to Redis Source Available license.
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I'm aware, but I didn't feel the additional move was relevant to the discussion and worth adding another tweet. I also didn't mention more examples because mentioning 2 of them gets the point across.
... MongoDB isn't using Commons Clause either. They wrote a different license based on AGPLv3 called SSPL. MongoDB is now under SSPL version 1.
Neo4j was using AGPLv3 + Commons Clause for their enterprise edition, but now they are not going to make the source available.
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Do you have an example where Commons Clause is still being used?
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