Confluent joins Redis and MongoDB in restricting its open source licensing for competitors

'A positive change that can help ensure small open source communities aren't acting as free and unsustainable R&D for tech giants' says CEO Jay Kreps

Confluent, the company behind the enterprise distribution of streaming platform Apache Kafka of the same name, has joined Redis Labs and MongoDB in changing the licensing terms on some of its software to prevent it being monetised by competitors.

Under the new Confluent Community Licence, users can continue to modify and distribute Confluent's code, but they cannot create a competing product with it, including "making available any software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar online service that competes with Confluent products or services that provide the software."

This means that cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft will not be able to host Confluent KSQL, Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent Connectors or Confluent REST Proxy - now licensed under the Confluent Community Licence - and sell them as competing services.

Apache Kafka is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is not affected. Confluent Clients, Serializers and Community Connectors also remain under Apache 2.0, and the licensing of products covered by the Confluent Enterprise Licence is unchanged.

The new Confluent Community License is not officially open source as it has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Instead it is described as ‘source available'.

Confluent CEO Jay Kreps explained the changes in the company's blog.

"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."

Kreps continued: "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.

He added: "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."

The move follows similar moves by open source database distributors Redis Labs and MongoDB earlier this year. Speaking to Computing recently, Redis Labs' chief marketing officer Manish Gupta singled out AWS for criticism.

"What the cloud vendors, particularly AWS, have done is take open source projects and contribute almost nothing, but they have monetised the projects to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars," Gupta said. During the interview Gupta said he hoped more open source projects would follow suit in preventing the cloud giants from monetising open source software without giving back.