"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."
They could have instead said : Confluent Community license is not a FOSS licence, but tries to provide many of the rights afforded in FOSS licenses.
That would have cleared up the status in a jiffy, and people would have made their decision to use or not use. But the intention seems to be to have their cake, and eat it too.
Yes, it's fairly "wink, wink". The GP selectively quoted a part of their FAQ answering this. Here is the full answer:
> 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.
That's the rub, it doesn't. An honest statement would be: "We give you the source code not to grant you any rights, but just so you can fix our bugs for free."
.. no? I mean, is the Microsoft Visual Studio Community license a "wink, wink" license? Or the Sun Community Source License? Or the Atlassian Community License?
FWIW, "Community" in the license name seems to indicate "not free software" and "not open source software". There's only one OSI or FSF approved license with that word in the name.
They write 'Strictly speaking it is “source-available.”' That description has its own Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software points out that it doesn't always meet "the criteria to be called open-source".
I understand that it changed. But if there is a "wink, wink", who is it supposed to be for? For those who knew it was F/OSS? If so, it's not very effective, since they know the difference, and the text is clear that about why it's not likely to be considered F/OSS by the OSF, FSF, or Debian.
Or is it a "wink, wink" to those who didn't know? In which case, don't the many other community-but-not-F/OSS licenses mean that Confluent is being consistent with what others do?
AS someone who hasn't used Confluent but knows about issues related to F/OSS licensing and the difficulties of getting sufficient funding for developing F/OSS software, the explanation was pretty much what I expected for a company switching to an open core model from one which was all open source.
So, why might it be a "wink, wink"? That's likely my stumbling block in understanding your g'parent comment.
It's a ruse. If MongoDB or CockroachDB for example want to describe their project as open source they should also act accordingly.