Technology

Unity Technologies, the highly valued startup behind one of the most popular game development tools, lost its CFO Mike Foley last week, Business Insider (paywalled) reported.

A company spokesperson confirmed the CFOdeparture, saying it was a &friendly and mutual decision between both parties,& while also noting that the company was searching for a replacement and had some candidates and hoped to announce more details soon.

In a statement, Foley told TechCrunch, &I look forward to seeing Unitycontinued success under its strong leadership team.&

Unity has raised north of $600 million at a valuation over $3 billion, CEO John Riccitiello confirmed to us earlier this week. In an interview at our Disrupt SF 2018 conference, Riccitiello told TechCrunch that the companygame engine platform now powers about half of all new games.

In April, Riccitiello told the publication Cheddar that the company was on the &general path& toward an IPO. &We&re not putting out dates but I do believe the company is strong enough financially to go public now.&

The company is not the only third-party game engine tool available for developers, but Unity has become a favorite for indie developers due in large part to the breadth of integrations for various game platforms and the ease of deploying to them. The game engine company was started 14 years ago scraped from the remains of a failed video game title, but has begun to grow rapidly in the past couple years particularly due to investor bullishness around AR/VR and the potential for a real-time rendering engine to shape everything from manufacturing design to autonomous systems training.

Update: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Foley left his position in June, rather than last week.

Apple Music is rolling out a new playlist series that will feature the Top 100 songs on Apple Music globally and for those countries where Apple Music is available. Because they&re playlists, users will be able to add these top charts for their country or the Top 100Global songs to their library so they can stream them any time, or listen offline.

The feature was first reported by Rolling Stone, which was given a preview of the changes by Apple.

At launch, there are 116 charts launching in total, including the Top 100 Global and one for each Apple Music market. Many countries will have access to all of these new Top 100 playlist charts, but availability will vary, we understand.

Whatalso interesting about the top chart playlists is that they&ll be updated daily at 12:00 AM PT based on Apple Music streams, which keeps them fresh.

Rolling Stonereport indicates the release of these charts is due to growing importance of streaming numbers. Artists and their managers as well as labels and scouts tend to reference top streaming charts in the hunt for new talent, it says. And the industry has adapted, too, by more heavily weighting paid streaming over free.

On that front, Apple Musicdominance in North America means its numbers, in particular, are important to track.

Apple Music, now with 50 million paid subscribers worldwide, is currently ahead of Spotify in the North American market, according to comments made by CEO Tim Cook on the latest earnings call.

&We took the leadership position in North America during the quarter and we have the leadership position in Japan, and in some of the markets that we&ve been in for a long period of time,& he said in July.

Spotify is still ahead on the worldwide stage, with 83 million paid users.

However, itworth also pointing out that these new top charts aren&t just launching as a static section of the Apple Music app & they&re dynamic playlists.

That is, Applenew Top Charts playlists will not be replacing the existing Top 200 Songs chart, available today.

Playlists are an important battleground between the major streaming services, with Spotify focusing heavily on personalization with playlists like its flagship Discover Weekly, plus Release Radar,Daily Mixes (and a newer variation, Your Daily Car Mix), Your Summer Rewind, and Time Capsule.

Apple Music, meanwhile, offers users a Favorites playlist, along with a New Music Mix, Chill Mix, and is rolling out a Friends Mix in iOS 12.

The feature is available today on Apple Music. You can check out these playlists as an example:

• Top 100 Global
• Top 100 USA
• Top 100 UK
• Top 100 Canada
• Top 100 Russia
• Top 100 Germany
• Top 100 Australia
• Top 100 France
• Top 100 Mexico
• Top 100 China

Therea dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source.

During 13 years as a venture investor, I have invested in the companies behind many open-source projects:

• Spring
• Mule
• RubyRails
• Groovy
• Grails
• Maven
• Gradle
• Redis
• SysDig
• Hazelcast
• Akka
• Scala
• Cassandra
• Spinnaker
• and others.

Open source has served society, and open-source business models have been successful and lucrative. Life was good.

Amazonbehavior

I admire Amazonexecution. In the venture business we are used to the large software incumbents (such as IBM, Oracle, HP, Compuware, CA, EMC, VMware, Citrix and others) being primarily big sales and distribution channels, which need to acquire innovation (i.e. startups) to feed their channel. Not Amazon. In July 2015, The Wall Street Journalquoted meas saying, &Amazon executes too well, almost like a startup. This is scary for everyone in the ecosystem.& That month, I wroteFear The Amazon Juggernauton investor site Seeking Alpha.AMZNis up 400 percent since I wrote that article. (I own AMZN indirectly.)

But to anyone other than its customers, Amazon is not a warm and fuzzy company. Numerousarticleshavedetailedits bruising and cutthroat culture. Why would its use of open source be any different

Go toAmazon Web Services(AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.

For example, Amazon takesRedis(the most loved databasein StackOverflowdeveloper survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products.

To be clear, this is not illegal.But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities.

Commons Clause

In early 2018, I gathered together creators, CEOs or chief counsels of two dozen at-scale open-source companies, some of them public, to talk about what to do. In March Ispoke to GeekWireabout this effort. After a lot of constructive discussion the group decided that rather than beat around the bush with mixing and matching open-source licenses to discourage such behavior, we should create a straightforward clause that prohibits the behavior. We engaged respected open-source lawyerHeather Meekerto draft this clause.

In August 2018 Redis Labs announced their decision to add this rider (i.e. one additional paragraph) known as theCommons Clauseto their liberal open-source license for certain add-on modules. Redis itself wouldremain on the permissive BSD license  —  nothing had changed with Redis itself! But the Redis Labs add-on modules will include the Commons Clause rider, which makes the source code available, without the ability to &sell& the modules, where &sell& includes offering them as a commercial service. The goal is to explicitly prevent the bad behavior of cloud infrastructure providers.

Anybody else, including enterprises like General Motors or General Electric, can still do all the things they used to be able to do with the software, even with Commons Clause applied to it. They can view and modify the source code and submit pull-requests to get their modifications into the product. They can even offer the software as-a-service internally for employees. What Commons Clause prevents is the running of a commercial service with somebody elseopen-source software in the manner that cloud infrastructure providers do.

This announcement has  — unsurprisingly, knowing the open-source community  — prompted spirited responses, both favorable and critical. At the risk of oversimplifying: thoseinfavorviewthisas alogicalandpositiveevolutionin open-source licensing that allows open-source companies to run viable businesses while investing in open-source projects.Michael DeHaan, creator ofAnsible, inWhy Open Source Needs New Licenses, put one part particularly well:

We see people running open source &foundations& and web sites that are essentially talking heads, spewing political arguments about the definition of &open source& as described by something called &The Open Source Initiative&, which contains various names which have attained some level of popularity or following. They attempt to state that such a license where the source code is freely available, but use cases are limited, are ¬ open source&. Unfortunately, that ship hassailed.

Thoseneutraloragainstpoint out that the Commons Clause makes software not open source, which is accurate, and that making parts of the code base proprietary is against the ethos of open source; and Redis Labs must be desperate and having trouble making money.

First, do not worry about Redis Labs. The company is doing very, very well. And Redis is stronger, more loved and moreBSDthan ever before.

More importantly, we think it is time to reexamine the ethos of open source in todayenvironment. When open source became popular, it was designed for practitioners to experiment with and build on, while contributing back to the community. No company was providing infrastructure as a service. No company was taking an open-source project, re-branding it, running it as a service, keeping the profits and giving very little back.

Our view is that open-source software was never intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and sell. That is not the original ethos of open source.Commons Clause is reviving the original ethos of open source. Academics, hobbyists or developers wishing to use a popular open-source project to power a component of their application can still do so. But if you want to take substantially the same software that someone else has built, and offer it as a service, for your own profit, thatnot in the spirit of the open-source community.

As it turns out in the case of the Commons Clause, that can make the source code not technically open source.But that is something we must live with, to preserve the original ethos.

Apache + CommonsClause

Redis Labs released certain add-on modules as Apache + Commons Clause. Redis Labs made amply clear that the application of Commons Clause made them not open source, and thatRedis itself remains open source and BSD-licensed.

Some rabid open-source wonks accused Redis Labs of trying to trick the community into thinking that modules were open source, because they used the word &Apache.& (They were reported to be foaming at the mouth while making these accusations, but in fairness it could have been just drool.)

Thereno trick. The Commons Clause is a rider that is to be attached to any permissive open-source license. Because various open-source projects use various open-source licenses, when releasing software using Commons Clause, onemustspecify to which underlying permissive open-source license one is attaching Commons Clause.

Why notAGPL

There are two key reasons to not useAGPLin this scenario, an open-source license that says that you must release to the public any modifications you make when you run AGPL-licensed code as a service.

First, AGPL makes it inconvenient butdoes not preventcloud infrastructure providers from engaging in the abusive behavior described above. It simply says that they must release any modifications they make while engaging in such behavior. Second, AGPL contains language about software patents that is unnecessary and disliked by a number of enterprises.

Many of our portfolio companies with AGPL projects have received requests from large enterprises to move to a more permissive license, since the use of AGPL is against their companypolicy.

Balance

Cloud infrastructure providers are not bad guys or acting with bad intentions. Open source has always been a balancing act. Many of us believe in our customers and peers seeing our source code, making improvements and sharing back. Italways a leap of faith to distribute onework product for free and to trust that you&ll be able to put food on the table. Sometimes, with some projects, a natural balance occurs without much deliberate effort. But at other times, the natural balance does not occur: We are seeing this more and more with infrastructure open source, especially as cloud infrastructure providers seek to differentiate by moving up the stack from commodity compute and storage to higher level infrastructure services.

Revisions

The Commons Clause as of this writing is at version 1.0. There will be revisions and tweaks in the future to ensure that Commons Clause implements its goals. We&d love yourinput.

Differences of opinion on Commons Clause that we have seen expressed so far are essentially differences of philosophy. Much criticism has come from open-source wonks who are not in the business of making money with software. They have a different philosophy, but that is not surprising, because their job is to be political activists, not build value in companies.

Some have misconstrued that it prevents people from offering maintenance, support or professional services. This is a misreading of the language. Some have claimed that it conflicts with AGPL. Commons Clause is intended to be used with open-source licenses that are more permissive than AGPL, so that AGPL does not have to be used! Still, even with AGPL, few users of an authorwork would deem it prudent to simply disregard an authorstatement of intent to apply Commons Clause.

Protecting open source

Some open-source stakeholders are confused. Whose side should they be on Commons Clause is new, and we expected debate. The people behind this initiative are committed open-source advocates, and our intent is to protect open source from an existential threat. We hope others will rally to the cause, so that open-source companies can make money, open source can be viable and open-source developers can get paid for their contributions.