6 ms·

If you read the article, it implies that people like Heroku and others offering hosted Redis is EXACTLY the kind of thing they are trying to prevent with this c

If you read the article, it implies that people like Heroku and others offering hosted Redis is EXACTLY the kind of thing they are trying to prevent with this clause. To quote: "today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions dollars in revenues from them. Already, this behavior has damaged open source communities and put some of the companies that support them out of business."

mindcrime 8y ago
If you read the article, it implies that people like Heroku and others offering hosted Redis is EXACTLY the kind of thing they are trying to prevent with this clause. The thing is, the AGPL already existed for dealing with the whole "cloud vendors turning things effectively proprietary" issue.
- detaro 8y ago
  But the issue doesn't seem to be "cloud vendors turn things effectively proprietary", but rather "cloud vendors offer the same services we want to offer, so we don't get the income that's paying for our development work". A cloud vendor can just run AGPL software and offer it as a service if they share their modifications (if any). They can't do this with software under this new license.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    True, but in practice, may companies seem reluctant to offer commercial services with AGPL software. And at least with the AGPL, they are required to give back their changes, which helps the project. Granted, not all firms will be making changes, but still, I think the AGPL is better than this "Common Clause" thing, which is basically pretending to be something its not.
cookiecaper 8y ago
Well, to be fair, it's not that they're trying to prevent it per se. It's just that they want a cut.
- sonarlunar 8y ago
  If Heroku, AWS, Google, IBM, whoever make money piggybacking Salvatore's work, shouldn't Salvatore actually ALSO make money from his work? If not, what's the reason for him to continue? Elasticsearch faced the same problem, Redis too. It's unfair to the developers if cloud providers make money and not contribute or give back a portion to the OSS developers. Myself, I would never be so liberal like Salvatore had I been in his shoes. I would feel cheated if AWS was making millions, not from EC2 usage but from AWS charging for Redis and I would get nothing. All my suppressed anti-capitalistic ideas would popup in an instant and I would go left all the way. I have no idea what's the relationship between Salvatore and Redis Labs but, as a hard core Redis user of +8 years, I want Salvatore to be rewarded for his work based on the Redis market value and revenue - wherever it is generated (Redis Labs, AWS, GCP, IBM, Heroku etc). Same for all other Redis contributors. Back in the day I asked Pieter Noordhuis if he's interested in paid consulting work, knowing Salvatore has publicly stated he is not interested or has time. Back in 2012 that was the contribution I could do to support Redis (Pieter declined as he was working for VMWare). It's not some anonymous geek building Redis. They are people who have families, obligations, problems, responsibilities. They create open source code and have every guy and his brother blame them for their open source software bug or feature missing, flame them and get aggressive in many non productive ways for what they developed and offer for free. "F that" - read it tons of time in twitter from open source developers. Sorry, I want my money to go into Salvatore's pocket, not Bezos's.
  - catwell 8y ago
    Salvatore is an employee of Redis Labs since 2015. AFAIK he still owns Redis itself personally, which is a very good thing. That doesn't mean Redis Labs is the only Redis provider you should consider though. For instance, OpenRedis has been founded before Redis Labs (early 2011) by people who have been very involved with the community (contributed the Ruby and Lua clients, the original website...). They are a much smaller company than Redis Labs (bootstrapped, when Redis Labs raised over $50M...) so it wouldn't make financial sense for them to have Salvatore on their payroll. EDIT: Salvatore himself is addressing this on Twitter right now. https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032192722755571714 https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032192722755571714

mindcrime 8y ago

If you read the article, it implies that people like Heroku and others offering hosted Redis is EXACTLY the kind of thing they are trying to prevent with this clause. The thing is, the AGPL already existed for dealing with the whole "cloud vendors turning things effectively proprietary" issue.

detaro 8y ago
But the issue doesn't seem to be "cloud vendors turn things effectively proprietary", but rather "cloud vendors offer the same services we want to offer, so we don't get the income that's paying for our development work". A cloud vendor can just run AGPL software and offer it as a service if they share their modifications (if any). They can't do this with software under this new license.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  True, but in practice, may companies seem reluctant to offer commercial services with AGPL software. And at least with the AGPL, they are required to give back their changes, which helps the project. Granted, not all firms will be making changes, but still, I think the AGPL is better than this "Common Clause" thing, which is basically pretending to be something its not.

cookiecaper 8y ago

Well, to be fair, it's not that they're trying to prevent it per se. It's just that they want a cut.

sonarlunar 8y ago
If Heroku, AWS, Google, IBM, whoever make money piggybacking Salvatore's work, shouldn't Salvatore actually ALSO make money from his work? If not, what's the reason for him to continue? Elasticsearch faced the same problem, Redis too. It's unfair to the developers if cloud providers make money and not contribute or give back a portion to the OSS developers. Myself, I would never be so liberal like Salvatore had I been in his shoes. I would feel cheated if AWS was making millions, not from EC2 usage but from AWS charging for Redis and I would get nothing. All my suppressed anti-capitalistic ideas would popup in an instant and I would go left all the way. I have no idea what's the relationship between Salvatore and Redis Labs but, as a hard core Redis user of +8 years, I want Salvatore to be rewarded for his work based on the Redis market value and revenue - wherever it is generated (Redis Labs, AWS, GCP, IBM, Heroku etc). Same for all other Redis contributors. Back in the day I asked Pieter Noordhuis if he's interested in paid consulting work, knowing Salvatore has publicly stated he is not interested or has time. Back in 2012 that was the contribution I could do to support Redis (Pieter declined as he was working for VMWare). It's not some anonymous geek building Redis. They are people who have families, obligations, problems, responsibilities. They create open source code and have every guy and his brother blame them for their open source software bug or feature missing, flame them and get aggressive in many non productive ways for what they developed and offer for free. "F that" - read it tons of time in twitter from open source developers. Sorry, I want my money to go into Salvatore's pocket, not Bezos's.
- catwell 8y ago
  Salvatore is an employee of Redis Labs since 2015. AFAIK he still owns Redis itself personally, which is a very good thing. That doesn't mean Redis Labs is the only Redis provider you should consider though. For instance, OpenRedis has been founded before Redis Labs (early 2011) by people who have been very involved with the community (contributed the Ruby and Lua clients, the original website...). They are a much smaller company than Redis Labs (bootstrapped, when Redis Labs raised over $50M...) so it wouldn't make financial sense for them to have Salvatore on their payroll. EDIT: Salvatore himself is addressing this on Twitter right now. https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032192722755571714 https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032192722755571714