@georg.greve What do you think about Dgraph writing their own clause to exclude certain applications?
It does not seem that Dgraph is actually behind this move. Also, this is a near impossibly slippery slope to manage. Everyone contributing to, or building on top of Dgraph would effectively put their own future and livelihood into the hands of Bain Capital Ventures.
Keep in mind the CLA gives them the power to change the license out from under you at any time if they decide your business has now become a problem for them. The true goal of Bain Capital Ventures appears to be to get people to generally accept “it is okay to put just a little restriction”. Then they can keep pushing the boundary on what is “just a little” - effectively applying a “salami tactics” with your business as their salami.
Only a real, officially approved Open Source license provides the community and businesses with sufficient legal security for building things on top of Dgraph. Which is what Dgraph should apply, and legally guarantee to its contributors as part of the CLA - similar to what the “Fiduciary License Agreement” of FSFE has been doing for a long time now.
Which is why I was asking @mrjn to switch back to an actual liberal license that is approved by FSF & OSI and simultaneously offered my input and help in the conversation about business models. Because I know how hard that can be and what pressure this can put on management. I am in fact very sympathetic to their cause and the problem they are trying to solve.
Unfortunately, the “Commons Close” is the the opposite of a solution.
And could Dgraph be forked now even under Common Clause to escape it?
The last Open Source Version of Dgraph was 1.0.4: dgraph/LICENSE.md at v1.0.4 · dgraph-io/dgraph · GitHub - so the anyone could fork from that and build up an Open Source community around that.
For Vereign, we have been working on a Proof of Concept including Dgraph. So for now we have put a hard freeze on the version we use to be 1.0.4 and pulled a copy of the repository, just in case. We’ll finish our PoC to see where we land, and then we will revisit the decision for Dgraph.
My hope is still that Dgraph will reconsider and switch back to an Open Source license.
If they don’t, our choices will be:
- Migrate to another Open Source graph based database
- Fork Dgraph at version 1.0.4 and build up our own team to keep developing and maintaining it
And if someone / the community were to fork before us we’d likely join that fork instead and contribute resources to it. If we are doing the fork, we’d invite anyone interested to join us in developing that further.
But again - I truly hope it won’t come down to that.