7 ms·

Classical "bait-and-switch". Bait users and developers with a fully-open and freely-licensed project, wait for it to gain enough market share, then switch the l

Classical "bait-and-switch". Bait users and developers with a fully-open and freely-licensed project, wait for it to gain enough market share, then switch the license to a more restrictive one... In a few days, a clone called "Libredis" or "Freedis" will probably appear that the community and developers will move to. So yeah, it might be annnoying buit in the long term it won't matter much anymore (same as the company)

Dylan16807 3y ago
Is it really bait and switch if almost zero users are affected by the change? (except philosophically)
- RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
  It's salami bait and switch.
- repeekad 3y ago
  It’s bait and switch to community developers who contributed free labor to a for profit company for what is now either a fork or a more restrictive license
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how open source licenses work. I am completely sick of this take. It’s intellectually dishonest, or extremely ignorant.
    - repeekad 3y ago
      Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity Reading the other comments the switch does make more sense, if you want to freeload off of the work redis has done for the project then you’ll have to join whatever community remains on the forked version, and anyone who cares about this kind of stuff should probably understand what’s permissible in the previous license, which clearly includes it being switched out like this
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nicolas_t 3y ago
    What percentage of commits were made by community developers?
    - otterz 3y ago
      Why should that matter? I'm sure the percentage would be way smaller if this was the license used initially.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
      All clients will still be Open Source and a lot were initially written by the community as far as I'm aware, so they're actually still asking for free labor there.
    - rsstack 3y ago
      The company Redis only adopted the Redis project (and changed its name) a few years ago. Redis started as a community project and was run that way for almost a decade.
    - bbotond 3y ago
      About 75% afaik.
  - kjksf 3y ago
    The version they contributed to is still available under the same permissive license that was in effect when they were contributing the code. The license change only affects the code written in the future and now people can change their mind about contributing. That seems fair to me. Maybe you think that morally the license should never change but there is no clause in the license to prevent changing the license, so that would not be a reasonable expectation.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    They contributed free labour under a licence that says that anyone can do anything they want, including offering it under a different licence.
- gramakri2 3y ago
  Why do you think almost zero users are affected by this change? If a business was built on hosting redis or providing managed redis, that company is now inviable, no? note: I am not disagreeing with the license change, just asking why you think nobody is affected.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    If a company is built on hosting redis - and is now unviable, they should be pretty incentivized to fork the previous version and maintain it themselves. Isn’t that the power of open source? I doubt there were many (if any) non-AWS businesses that were affected. To earn a profit you need to continue to work, I don’t feel bad when a corporation is negatively affected after their leeching or rent seeking is disturbed. Even if it was previously acceptable behavior.
    - cebert 3y ago
      > “ I doubt there were many (if any) non-AWS businesses that were affected.” Momento is likely impacted.
    - gramakri2 3y ago
      But that is not what I am asking though. The OP is saying almost 0 users are affected and this is not true.
  - tejasbaldev 3y ago
    That's exactly the point. Companies providing managed services on top of popular opensource projects are not contributing to the respective OSS project at the scale at which they've been benefitting commercially from these projects.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Aiven is a good example - I don’t know if they contribute to Redis, but they appear to offer a managed service based upon it.
    - 3y ago
- fweimer 3y ago
  Anyone installing a distribution package will be impacted eventually. https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=redis https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=redis
ctrw 3y ago
Will no one think of Amazon's profit margins? We need new licenses that let developers get more of the pie because no one is benefiting from the GPL in the age of cloud computing. Who cares that Linux is open source when I'm locked in aws and can never leave? What does it matter to users when their data is stolen to train Ai models and they don't even know what's in it?
- rglullis 3y ago
  > We need new licenses that let developers get more of the pie because no one is benefiting from the GPL in the age of cloud computing. Try the AGPL.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    A license for the internet of the 90s, not the one we have today.
    - bberenberg 3y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? I have seen a fair amount of criticism of AGPL on here recently and am trying to understand the perspective.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      What's wrong with AGPL? Why is it not suitable for the "internet of today"?
      - throwaway48476 3y ago
        It's not viral enough. It's easy for AWS to host a version of an AGPL project and just point to the source code. Cloud hosted instances are the primary business models for a lot of projects. The solution is to add a requirement that any platform the software is hosted on also has to be open source.
        rglullis 3y ago
arthur_sav 3y ago
> community and developers will move to. I have never seen a fork last long enough.
- jaylittle 3y ago
  MariaDB called and said, "I'm still here" ;)
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    Is it really used/ popular?
    - prox 3y ago
      Yes
    - nasretdinov 3y ago
      At some point I believe Google had the largest MySQL installation in the world and they were using MariaDB.
    - georgyo 3y ago
      very yes
    - graemep 3y ago
      Yes, it replaced MySQL in Debian, and many other distros. The only shared web hosting I know about uses it on FreeBSD, etc. It seems to be more widely used then MySQL at this point.
    - jeltz 3y ago
      Yes, when most people say MySQL they actually mean MariaDB.
    - nolok 3y ago
      Unless you actively want the support contract with Oracle, there is no reason not to use MariaDB instead. Debian changed it to the default quite a while ago, and it's full support for mysql compatibility means you sometime don't even notice it (eg "mysql" is starting mariadb client).
raverbashing 3y ago
How is the Terraform fork going, by the way? (honest question)
- hacktivity 3y ago
  First stable GA release in Jan. They're talking up the pending 1.7 release... https://www.thestack.technology/opentofu-1-7-business-value/ https://www.thestack.technology/opentofu-1-7-business-value/
- cube2222 3y ago
  Hey, tech lead of OpenTofu here. It’s going excellent! I’m surprised by how well adoption is going. Just the day before yesterday we had OpenTofu Day at KubeCon, and instead of the expected ~30 people we had 150-200 attendees and a packed room! The next major release, 1.7, is coming out soon too.
Alifatisk 3y ago
I don’t think this is about bait-and-switch, I believe (like some other comments mentioned) they want a bigger part of the pie. It’s same story as what Elasticsearch went through, this an understandable move.
Aachen 3y ago
Do you really think they planned this from the start, intending to change the license as soon as enough people use it? To me, that's reading malice into a situation that could equally be explained by changing circumstances over time, which does not meet the definition of bait and switch
tejasbaldev 3y ago
Could you expand on ''bait & switch'' What exactly is the material impact on a developer with this licensing change? There is a tendency these days to sensationalise things without getting to the bottom of it or even reading the whole article. What did the OSS Redis project promise a developer that it is not going to deliver in the new licensing model?
- anymouse123456 3y ago
  For me, using OSS means that if I bump into a problem, I can fix it and use, and share the fix. Yes, I've created OSS projects and contributed to others. It also means that if the people providing the software decide to change the deal to something that is too onerous for me to accept, I have options that don't disrupt the continuity of my business. If I no longer have those rights, I'm no longer willing to rely on this software. Unfortunately, it's far from trivial to rip Redis out of a running application environment and they know that. This kind of change feels like a bait & switch to so many people, because it is a bait and switch. Now that it has been integrated, and could cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in labor to rip out, they change the deal. We've been reassured for many years that this is OSS and it will always be OSS and many people relied on that assurance to place a hard and expensive dependency on this software. That is a betrayal of trust and it's hard for me to understand how people aren't seeing it that way.
  - acdha 3y ago
    How do you think your freedom to “fix it and use, and share the fix” is changing? Unless you’re running a Redis hosting service isn’t it business as usual? I don’t love the direction that the open source world has been moving in but in terms of practical impact on my work this seems to be minimal. I think the easy money during the VC bubble lead a lot of us to get used to high-quality software not having a plausible business model and we’re going to see a lot more of this, which makes me wonder if OSI could come up with some kind of hybrid license allowing maintainers to get paid but not giving up too much freedom. Otherwise it feels like we might see a move back towards closed-source development.
weinzierl 3y ago
This is one way to see it. The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally. It is our obligation as developers to communicate to companies if we want these license changes to happen or not. If you don't like it, don't contribute and invest your time into projects that are not licensed in way that matches your needs and wants.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  > This is one way to see it. The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally. Morally I would say it depends on contributors. If there haven't been any then sure, but if I contributed a feck-load of code to some project and they slap on a commercial license, I guess I feel somewhat shafted.
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    "license, I guess I feel somewhat shafted." You shouldn't. If you contribute to a project under a permissive license that is what you sign up for. I contributed to projects under permissive licenses myself, there is nothing wrong with it. Being indignant about companies exercising the rights you explicitly granted them is unwarranted though.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      You can always fork in that case, I guess.
      - weinzierl 3y ago
        You can, and that is ok. It would not help you if you feel shafted, because then the next company comes around and takes your contributions, uses them as intended without giving back and you'd still feel the same. I think you should not feel shafted, but if you do there is a simple and obvious solution.
- lol768 3y ago
ExoticPearTree 3y ago
Actually, if i read the below correct, on the server-side side license part, they want any company to publish the source code of any Redis-as-a-Service product is being developed: If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version. Which sounds pretty good and is the complete opposite of what Mongo or Elastic are doing.
- LikelyABurner 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't like that we're at the point that we need licenses like this, but in a world where AWS has decided to "disrupt" the methods for open source monetization that the open source community has generally agreed upon as being in the spirit of open source, I don't see any other option.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    The methods in question are not the ones that the open source community has agreed upon, they are ones that the FOSS community had identified as being non-viable, with detailed reasoning, before the OSI was even founded. The fact that a handful of founders and VCs decided to ignore this established wisdom does not constitute an general agreement by the “open source community”. The consensus that simply selling FOSS software (and renting access to it is not substantially different in this regard) is not a viable method of monetizing FOSS as an independent business centered around a particular piece of FOSS because large established firms with established hardware, professional services, and other associated lines of business and the ability to integrate it with their other offerings would eat your lunch was established by, at the latest, the mid-1990s.
- 3y ago
catwell 3y ago
Talking about bait and switch for Redis makes no sense. Redis is a 15 years old project started in 2009 by Salvatore 'Antirez' Sanfilippo. He worked on his startup, then at VMWare, them at Pivotal, and only joined Redis Labs (created in 2011) in 2015. In 2018 Redis Labs changed the license of their modules and Antirez published http://antirez.com/news/120 http://antirez.com/news/120 In 2020 he quit. Anyway I agree with the conclusion: Redis will be forked, the fork will win and Redis Labs will become irrelevant.
- tudorg 3y ago
  I'm curious about something: I suppose Salvatore still owns the copyright for most of the code? The old license does include his copyright, up to 2020: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/7.2/COPYING https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/7.2/COPYING So I think this change couldn't have been done without his explicit consent? Or did he transferred his rights to RedisLabs or a foundation?
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    What your link points to is the BSD license, so yes, he owns the copyright but also gave everyone permission to use and modify the code as they see fit. There is nothing that prevents anyone to use this code in combination with proprietary code and sell the resulting project for money. If he didn't want that he would have chosen a different license.
    - tudorg 3y ago
      Ah, makes sense, thanks! And they do own the trademark, it seems.
jeffparsons 3y ago
Are you talking about the developers who willingly contributed code under the BSD licence? The same BSD licence that says that it's completely fine for the company to do this? It's such a strange pattern that plays out again and again: developers insist that a permissive license is the way to go, until somebody (or company) they don't like exercises their rights. Usually what said developers actually wanted was the GPL, because they realise in retrospect that they didn't want the company to be allowed to do this. But they didn't like it because it restricts recipients rights. So they want people to have those rights as long as they never actually exercise them? It's all very confusing. I say this having contributed to and released my own projects under both permissive and copyleft licenses — based on what I'm actually willing for people to be able to do with the code.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  To a large part it is probably simply uninformed developers choosing permissive licenses, because some of their favorite projects do so as well and that is what they know as "open source". The thought seems to be along the lines of: "I am going to make it open source! What license was that again? Ah MIT license! OK, done!" Only later, when a project has gained traction they might or might not realize that MIT license allows people to do things they would not like. But by then they need to ask all the contributors for a license change and it typically doesn't happen. Often the people also think they must not upset companies, if companies uses their software. Sometimes there is also financial motivation behind that. Big players invest into that project directly or conferences or other things, giving the people involved in the project some fame. See for example project Jupyter. One look at the $ponsors and you know why they will never change to a copyleft license. That is alright, but people should not be surprised, when the rug is pulled away under their feet and big tech creates some closed source alternative or derived work under a different license, that integrates with their other stuff and that the original authors do not see a penny of, even if millions of people use it. When I decide on software to use for myself, and I have a good choice between something copyleft and something MIT or similarly licensed, I usually go for the copyleft one, because I have no interest in the corporate involvement.
  - 3y ago
xinayder 3y ago
This is written in their blog post: > Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge. So, this is just a money grab scheme because Redis finds it an absurd that cloud providers are offering Redis hosting, in their minds Redis Company should be the only one offering Redis hosting. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe this is a shotgun shot to their foot and this will result in Redis dying or even drastically reducing its market-share.

Dylan16807 3y ago

Is it really bait and switch if almost zero users are affected by the change? (except philosophically)

RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
It's salami bait and switch.
repeekad 3y ago
It’s bait and switch to community developers who contributed free labor to a for profit company for what is now either a fork or a more restrictive license
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how open source licenses work. I am completely sick of this take. It’s intellectually dishonest, or extremely ignorant.
  - repeekad 3y ago
    Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity Reading the other comments the switch does make more sense, if you want to freeload off of the work redis has done for the project then you’ll have to join whatever community remains on the forked version, and anyone who cares about this kind of stuff should probably understand what’s permissible in the previous license, which clearly includes it being switched out like this
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nicolas_t 3y ago
  What percentage of commits were made by community developers?
  - otterz 3y ago
    Why should that matter? I'm sure the percentage would be way smaller if this was the license used initially.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
    All clients will still be Open Source and a lot were initially written by the community as far as I'm aware, so they're actually still asking for free labor there.
  - rsstack 3y ago
    The company Redis only adopted the Redis project (and changed its name) a few years ago. Redis started as a community project and was run that way for almost a decade.
  - bbotond 3y ago
    About 75% afaik.
- kjksf 3y ago
  The version they contributed to is still available under the same permissive license that was in effect when they were contributing the code. The license change only affects the code written in the future and now people can change their mind about contributing. That seems fair to me. Maybe you think that morally the license should never change but there is no clause in the license to prevent changing the license, so that would not be a reasonable expectation.
- happymellon 3y ago
  They contributed free labour under a licence that says that anyone can do anything they want, including offering it under a different licence.
gramakri2 3y ago
Why do you think almost zero users are affected by this change? If a business was built on hosting redis or providing managed redis, that company is now inviable, no? note: I am not disagreeing with the license change, just asking why you think nobody is affected.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  If a company is built on hosting redis - and is now unviable, they should be pretty incentivized to fork the previous version and maintain it themselves. Isn’t that the power of open source? I doubt there were many (if any) non-AWS businesses that were affected. To earn a profit you need to continue to work, I don’t feel bad when a corporation is negatively affected after their leeching or rent seeking is disturbed. Even if it was previously acceptable behavior.
  - cebert 3y ago
    > “ I doubt there were many (if any) non-AWS businesses that were affected.” Momento is likely impacted.
  - gramakri2 3y ago
    But that is not what I am asking though. The OP is saying almost 0 users are affected and this is not true.
- tejasbaldev 3y ago
  That's exactly the point. Companies providing managed services on top of popular opensource projects are not contributing to the respective OSS project at the scale at which they've been benefitting commercially from these projects.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Aiven is a good example - I don’t know if they contribute to Redis, but they appear to offer a managed service based upon it.
  - 3y ago
fweimer 3y ago
Anyone installing a distribution package will be impacted eventually. https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=redis https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=redis

ctrw 3y ago

Will no one think of Amazon's profit margins? We need new licenses that let developers get more of the pie because no one is benefiting from the GPL in the age of cloud computing. Who cares that Linux is open source when I'm locked in aws and can never leave? What does it matter to users when their data is stolen to train Ai models and they don't even know what's in it?

rglullis 3y ago
> We need new licenses that let developers get more of the pie because no one is benefiting from the GPL in the age of cloud computing. Try the AGPL.
- ctrw 3y ago
  A license for the internet of the 90s, not the one we have today.
  - bberenberg 3y ago
    Can you elaborate on this? I have seen a fair amount of criticism of AGPL on here recently and am trying to understand the perspective.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    What's wrong with AGPL? Why is it not suitable for the "internet of today"?
    - throwaway48476 3y ago
      It's not viral enough. It's easy for AWS to host a version of an AGPL project and just point to the source code. Cloud hosted instances are the primary business models for a lot of projects. The solution is to add a requirement that any platform the software is hosted on also has to be open source.
      - rglullis 3y ago

arthur_sav 3y ago

> community and developers will move to. I have never seen a fork last long enough.

jaylittle 3y ago
MariaDB called and said, "I'm still here" ;)
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  Is it really used/ popular?
  - prox 3y ago
    Yes
  - nasretdinov 3y ago
    At some point I believe Google had the largest MySQL installation in the world and they were using MariaDB.
  - georgyo 3y ago
    very yes
  - graemep 3y ago
    Yes, it replaced MySQL in Debian, and many other distros. The only shared web hosting I know about uses it on FreeBSD, etc. It seems to be more widely used then MySQL at this point.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    Yes, when most people say MySQL they actually mean MariaDB.
  - nolok 3y ago
    Unless you actively want the support contract with Oracle, there is no reason not to use MariaDB instead. Debian changed it to the default quite a while ago, and it's full support for mysql compatibility means you sometime don't even notice it (eg "mysql" is starting mariadb client).

raverbashing 3y ago

How is the Terraform fork going, by the way? (honest question)

hacktivity 3y ago
First stable GA release in Jan. They're talking up the pending 1.7 release... https://www.thestack.technology/opentofu-1-7-business-value/ https://www.thestack.technology/opentofu-1-7-business-value/
cube2222 3y ago
Hey, tech lead of OpenTofu here. It’s going excellent! I’m surprised by how well adoption is going. Just the day before yesterday we had OpenTofu Day at KubeCon, and instead of the expected ~30 people we had 150-200 attendees and a packed room! The next major release, 1.7, is coming out soon too.

Alifatisk 3y ago

I don’t think this is about bait-and-switch, I believe (like some other comments mentioned) they want a bigger part of the pie. It’s same story as what Elasticsearch went through, this an understandable move.

Aachen 3y ago

Do you really think they planned this from the start, intending to change the license as soon as enough people use it? To me, that's reading malice into a situation that could equally be explained by changing circumstances over time, which does not meet the definition of bait and switch

tejasbaldev 3y ago

Could you expand on ''bait & switch'' What exactly is the material impact on a developer with this licensing change? There is a tendency these days to sensationalise things without getting to the bottom of it or even reading the whole article. What did the OSS Redis project promise a developer that it is not going to deliver in the new licensing model?

anymouse123456 3y ago
For me, using OSS means that if I bump into a problem, I can fix it and use, and share the fix. Yes, I've created OSS projects and contributed to others. It also means that if the people providing the software decide to change the deal to something that is too onerous for me to accept, I have options that don't disrupt the continuity of my business. If I no longer have those rights, I'm no longer willing to rely on this software. Unfortunately, it's far from trivial to rip Redis out of a running application environment and they know that. This kind of change feels like a bait & switch to so many people, because it is a bait and switch. Now that it has been integrated, and could cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in labor to rip out, they change the deal. We've been reassured for many years that this is OSS and it will always be OSS and many people relied on that assurance to place a hard and expensive dependency on this software. That is a betrayal of trust and it's hard for me to understand how people aren't seeing it that way.
- acdha 3y ago
  How do you think your freedom to “fix it and use, and share the fix” is changing? Unless you’re running a Redis hosting service isn’t it business as usual? I don’t love the direction that the open source world has been moving in but in terms of practical impact on my work this seems to be minimal. I think the easy money during the VC bubble lead a lot of us to get used to high-quality software not having a plausible business model and we’re going to see a lot more of this, which makes me wonder if OSI could come up with some kind of hybrid license allowing maintainers to get paid but not giving up too much freedom. Otherwise it feels like we might see a move back towards closed-source development.

weinzierl 3y ago

This is one way to see it. The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally. It is our obligation as developers to communicate to companies if we want these license changes to happen or not. If you don't like it, don't contribute and invest your time into projects that are not licensed in way that matches your needs and wants.

anonzzzies 3y ago
> This is one way to see it. The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally. Morally I would say it depends on contributors. If there haven't been any then sure, but if I contributed a feck-load of code to some project and they slap on a commercial license, I guess I feel somewhat shafted.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  "license, I guess I feel somewhat shafted." You shouldn't. If you contribute to a project under a permissive license that is what you sign up for. I contributed to projects under permissive licenses myself, there is nothing wrong with it. Being indignant about companies exercising the rights you explicitly granted them is unwarranted though.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    You can always fork in that case, I guess.
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      You can, and that is ok. It would not help you if you feel shafted, because then the next company comes around and takes your contributions, uses them as intended without giving back and you'd still feel the same. I think you should not feel shafted, but if you do there is a simple and obvious solution.
lol768 3y ago

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

Actually, if i read the below correct, on the server-side side license part, they want any company to publish the source code of any Redis-as-a-Service product is being developed: If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version. Which sounds pretty good and is the complete opposite of what Mongo or Elastic are doing.

LikelyABurner 3y ago
Yeah, I don't like that we're at the point that we need licenses like this, but in a world where AWS has decided to "disrupt" the methods for open source monetization that the open source community has generally agreed upon as being in the spirit of open source, I don't see any other option.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  The methods in question are not the ones that the open source community has agreed upon, they are ones that the FOSS community had identified as being non-viable, with detailed reasoning, before the OSI was even founded. The fact that a handful of founders and VCs decided to ignore this established wisdom does not constitute an general agreement by the “open source community”. The consensus that simply selling FOSS software (and renting access to it is not substantially different in this regard) is not a viable method of monetizing FOSS as an independent business centered around a particular piece of FOSS because large established firms with established hardware, professional services, and other associated lines of business and the ability to integrate it with their other offerings would eat your lunch was established by, at the latest, the mid-1990s.
3y ago

catwell 3y ago

Talking about bait and switch for Redis makes no sense. Redis is a 15 years old project started in 2009 by Salvatore 'Antirez' Sanfilippo. He worked on his startup, then at VMWare, them at Pivotal, and only joined Redis Labs (created in 2011) in 2015. In 2018 Redis Labs changed the license of their modules and Antirez published http://antirez.com/news/120 http://antirez.com/news/120 In 2020 he quit. Anyway I agree with the conclusion: Redis will be forked, the fork will win and Redis Labs will become irrelevant.

tudorg 3y ago
I'm curious about something: I suppose Salvatore still owns the copyright for most of the code? The old license does include his copyright, up to 2020: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/7.2/COPYING https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/7.2/COPYING So I think this change couldn't have been done without his explicit consent? Or did he transferred his rights to RedisLabs or a foundation?
- weinzierl 3y ago
  What your link points to is the BSD license, so yes, he owns the copyright but also gave everyone permission to use and modify the code as they see fit. There is nothing that prevents anyone to use this code in combination with proprietary code and sell the resulting project for money. If he didn't want that he would have chosen a different license.
  - tudorg 3y ago
    Ah, makes sense, thanks! And they do own the trademark, it seems.

jeffparsons 3y ago

Are you talking about the developers who willingly contributed code under the BSD licence? The same BSD licence that says that it's completely fine for the company to do this? It's such a strange pattern that plays out again and again: developers insist that a permissive license is the way to go, until somebody (or company) they don't like exercises their rights. Usually what said developers actually wanted was the GPL, because they realise in retrospect that they didn't want the company to be allowed to do this. But they didn't like it because it restricts recipients rights. So they want people to have those rights as long as they never actually exercise them? It's all very confusing. I say this having contributed to and released my own projects under both permissive and copyleft licenses — based on what I'm actually willing for people to be able to do with the code.

zelphirkalt 3y ago
To a large part it is probably simply uninformed developers choosing permissive licenses, because some of their favorite projects do so as well and that is what they know as "open source". The thought seems to be along the lines of: "I am going to make it open source! What license was that again? Ah MIT license! OK, done!" Only later, when a project has gained traction they might or might not realize that MIT license allows people to do things they would not like. But by then they need to ask all the contributors for a license change and it typically doesn't happen. Often the people also think they must not upset companies, if companies uses their software. Sometimes there is also financial motivation behind that. Big players invest into that project directly or conferences or other things, giving the people involved in the project some fame. See for example project Jupyter. One look at the $ponsors and you know why they will never change to a copyleft license. That is alright, but people should not be surprised, when the rug is pulled away under their feet and big tech creates some closed source alternative or derived work under a different license, that integrates with their other stuff and that the original authors do not see a penny of, even if millions of people use it. When I decide on software to use for myself, and I have a good choice between something copyleft and something MIT or similarly licensed, I usually go for the copyleft one, because I have no interest in the corporate involvement.
- 3y ago

xinayder 3y ago

This is written in their blog post: > Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge. So, this is just a money grab scheme because Redis finds it an absurd that cloud providers are offering Redis hosting, in their minds Redis Company should be the only one offering Redis hosting. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe this is a shotgun shot to their foot and this will result in Redis dying or even drastically reducing its market-share.