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

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.Don’t get me wrong — there will still be open source, lots and lots of it. MongoDB SSPL, Confluent Community License (CCL), Timescale License (TSL), Redis Source Available License (RSAL), Neo4J Commons Clause, Cockroach Community License (CCL), Dgraph (now using Cockroach Community License), Elastic License, Sourcegraph Fair SourceLicense, MariaDB Business Source License (BSL)… and many more.The trend is toward “source-available” licensing rather than “open-source” licensing because source-available licenses, uncontaminated by the myopia of open source industry associations, do not require that Amazon have the “freedom” to take your code, run it as a commercial service and give nothing back to you.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.