Open Source Inside Baseball (with Stephen O'Grady)

Oxide and Friends · 25 Oct 2022 · 1h 11m · Episode 31

What this episode covers

Stephen O'Grady, author of The Dead End and Software Paradox, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the trend of open source companies relicensing their software to proprietary models. O'Grady argues that venture capital investors are actively pushing this 'rug pull' strategy to create lock-in and protect valuations, citing examples like MongoDB, Confluent, and CockroachDB. The conversation highlights how this behavior erodes trust in the open source community and creates legal ambiguity through poorly defined licenses like the Commons Clause and BSL.

Mentioned

Companies
MongoDB, Confluent, CockroachDB, Red Hat, Amazon, Google, Meta, Oxide Computer Company
Products
Akka, Kafka, Linux
Also
Commons Clause, BSL, AGPL, MPL 2

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