> They don’t claim to meet those guidelines though do they?
The problem of this whole discussion is that they try to confuse as much as they can by using terminology that surely sounds like they're doing "Open Source".
Read this:
https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat...
Yeah, they don't write "The Confluent Community License is an Open Source License", but they use the term a whole lot and they also don't clearly write the accurate thing: "We're no longer using an Open Source license."
I think this whole thing would be much less of a controversy if some companies just said clearly: "We tried the Open Source way, it didn't work for us, now we do something different." But they don't want to be that company, instead they use all kinds of confusing terminology to obscure that fact and try to be the "We no longer use open source, but we surely want you to believe that we still do"-company.
> The problem of this whole discussion is that they try to confuse as much as they can by using terminology that surely sounds like they're doing "Open Source".
"Is Confluent Community License open source? -- Strictly speaking it is “source-available.” Many people use the phrase “open source” in a loose sense to mean that you can freely download, modify, and redistribute the code, and those things are all true of the code under the Confluent Community License. However, in the strictest sense “open source” means a license approved by the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) which meets a particular set of criteria. The Confluent Community License is not approved by the OSI and likely would not be as it excludes the use case of creating a SaaS offering of the code. Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source."
I totally see how people have different opions on whether that move is good or bad for the community and/or Confluent themselves, but I don't see where they are being confusing intentionally; IMO it's the opposite, the announcement is very clear and open what it is and what it isn't. Compare that to "Commons Clause", which indeed is a super-confusing term.
"Strictly speaking" is an attempt to confuse. They could have just said "No".
Same for the whole "many people" portion, which could instead have been more honestly written as "Many people misuse the term "Open Source". We won't do that, but we really wish we could."
