I truly don't understand the panicked tone. There are always going to be lots of projects licensed under all the existing licenses. If you don't like the new license, don't use it. Or start your own competing project.
Greybeard says, people using $LICENSE are filthy heathens. You should use $OTHER_LICENSE instead. Film at 11.
Estoppel would probably prevent a company from revoking your license to software "because you have become a competitor."
Bryan, are you worried about the cloud providers restricting or limiting the access of competitors to computing resources? It seems like that is a much more real threat than a startup company doing something negative around a community project.
And frankly the smug tone about "open source will survive" is not warranted. Open source was the original software business model in the beginning. It didn't survive the 1980s.
If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software?
The copyright to the software resides with Confluent, because of the copyright assignment clause that all contributors must sign. This is no different than Apache projects, which also require copyright assignment. For example, if you git clone Apache Hadoop, you do not acquire the copyright to Hadoop. Does Bryan really not understand how copyright assignment works?
To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this!
Why do any of those foundations need to review the license or EULA that Confluent chooses? Confuent isn't claiming that their license is OSI compatible (in fact they explicitly state that it is not.)
If you don't like the license, don't use the software. Or use Amazon's software, which does require a EULA (see https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ ).
Greybeard says, people using $LICENSE are filthy heathens. You should use $OTHER_LICENSE instead. Film at 11.