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> And part of this is because we've somehow ended up a with a community norm that it is mildly immoral to charge money for software. I find this an interesting

> And part of this is because we've somehow ended up a with a community norm that it is mildly immoral to charge money for software. I find this an interesting development, to be honest. People were outraged over Redis going "free unless you're a business", but the people who were affected the most were the people who have profited off Redis for ages. Every time a free product goes "pay us if we make you money", people get angry, but I rarely see the upset people start a fork with the old license. I think the fact we're so used to "just" downloading dependency upon dependency plays a role. If one dependency asks five dollars per year, that's a no-brainer, but if the hundreds of dependencies that make up the modern software stack do, that becomes a problem. I wish more people would buy and sell GPL/dual licensed software. GPL for the software freedom that open source once was all about, dual licensing for the companies that don't want to give their customers the freedom that comes with the GPL. On the other hand, I also feel that switching to a profit oriented work isn't acceptable if you've accepted sizable contributions from the community. This is legally acceptable with a CLA or a license that permits most commercial use, but ethically difficult, unless you also pull every major contributor in with your licensing-for-money scheme. In the end, I feel a lot of the protests and anger about selling (partially) open software comes from a sense of entitlement. I know "fork it if you don't like it" feels like a cop-out, but with how few maintained forks I see of software that caused controversy, I feel like a lot of this sentiment is people wanting other people to maintain important parts of their software for them.

strken 3y ago
People are upset when part of the commons is lost. Open source software available under a license with few restrictions is part of the commons, and any added restriction is a loss. I think it's important to understand that Redis as a whole is more than just Redis the product. It's also the social and intellectual capital invested into using Redis from the community and includes every StackOverflow answer and anyone whose resume has Redis on it. If Redis didn't exist, teams would have chosen any of the other alternatives: Memcached for caching, Kafka for queueing, etc. Redis positioned itself as the conceptual floor tile of "free thing to use for X" and then decided to move itself somewhere else, and if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted. This can feel -- to some people, at some times -- like a cynical rug-pull. Developers get intangible but real benefits from creating well-known software, and open source software becomes well-known more easily. Changing the license once you've extracted those benefits means that the effort put into learning to use your software and into writing tutorials, Q&A answers, and conference talks was partly wasted. Attempting to capture part of the pie means reducing the size of the pie: across broader society, value is lost as the positive externalities created by your product shrink. I do think that in the specific case of the SSPL the argument is more complicated and I tend to side with Redis Labs more than it sounds like in the rest of this reply. I just disagree with the idea that there is always zero problem with relicensing something you have rights to.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  >if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted. I agree with this analysis, but I think the conclusion to draw from it is not that this is an unfair outcome for the poor person standing in that part of the floor, but rather that this is an unfortunate outcome that that person should have considered likely to happen from the outset, and prepared for. (I'm assuming here that no promises to remain FOSS forever were actually made.) Making a good thing available to people ought not to shift onus onto the good-thing provider to continue providing it forever.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  The FOSS code still exists, so there's nothing stopping you from continuing to use Redis, or more realistically, a Redis fork that will continue being maintained. The time spent on Redis is only wasted if nobody sets up a fork or if businesses move away from Redis because it costs money now. It sucks to see an open source project become proprietary through the SPSS, but if the community is as strong as all of those social and intellectual investments make it seem, there will be no problem maintaining an open fork. I imagine the independent open source contributors won't be as willing to contribute to Redis now, so there's a chance to maintain the open source version. This approach worked for MariaDB, LibreOffice, and a bunch of other projects that went through similar controversies.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I find this an interesting development, to be honest. People were outraged over Redis going "free unless you're a business", A central reason was that the SSPL (license) is not an open source license (as defined by the OSI: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd ). See https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l... for details. This means that Redis switched away from being open source.
- dartos 3y ago
  You can still fork from older commits. The state of open source is really unfair to maintainer. The more popular a project becomes, the most cost is involved in maintaining and supporting it, but all too often (like with redis, elastic search, and aseprite) there is 1 company or even just 1 person facing the brunt of the community and development burden. Building a community for your open source project is a whole job in and of itself. I love open source. I owe my career, hobby, and lifestyle to it, but the cracks are showing more and more. As a OSS community, we need to be more active in supporting the project we use for free otherwise what happened with redis is going to be the end state for many very popular OSS projects.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I meant "free" as in "beer". I am aware that SPSS isn't open source, but as usual, there's nothing stopping the last open source version from being forked and maintained. You need to go through the code and documentation and s/Redis/Libredis to avoid trademarking issues, but there's nothing stopping the industry from continuing open source development and maintenance. If the industry comes together, and Redis only sells limited copies, as I would expect from a previously free product, it will effectively look like Redis is a fork of its open source version, not the other way around. If the industry doesn't (because that would require time, money, and effort), I can't say I have much of a problem with the situation, because apparently people were using the Redis devs for free work and not much else.

strken 3y ago

People are upset when part of the commons is lost. Open source software available under a license with few restrictions is part of the commons, and any added restriction is a loss. I think it's important to understand that Redis as a whole is more than just Redis the product. It's also the social and intellectual capital invested into using Redis from the community and includes every StackOverflow answer and anyone whose resume has Redis on it. If Redis didn't exist, teams would have chosen any of the other alternatives: Memcached for caching, Kafka for queueing, etc. Redis positioned itself as the conceptual floor tile of "free thing to use for X" and then decided to move itself somewhere else, and if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted. This can feel -- to some people, at some times -- like a cynical rug-pull. Developers get intangible but real benefits from creating well-known software, and open source software becomes well-known more easily. Changing the license once you've extracted those benefits means that the effort put into learning to use your software and into writing tutorials, Q&A answers, and conference talks was partly wasted. Attempting to capture part of the pie means reducing the size of the pie: across broader society, value is lost as the positive externalities created by your product shrink. I do think that in the specific case of the SSPL the argument is more complicated and I tend to side with Redis Labs more than it sounds like in the rest of this reply. I just disagree with the idea that there is always zero problem with relicensing something you have rights to.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
>if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted. I agree with this analysis, but I think the conclusion to draw from it is not that this is an unfair outcome for the poor person standing in that part of the floor, but rather that this is an unfortunate outcome that that person should have considered likely to happen from the outset, and prepared for. (I'm assuming here that no promises to remain FOSS forever were actually made.) Making a good thing available to people ought not to shift onus onto the good-thing provider to continue providing it forever.
jeroenhd 3y ago
The FOSS code still exists, so there's nothing stopping you from continuing to use Redis, or more realistically, a Redis fork that will continue being maintained. The time spent on Redis is only wasted if nobody sets up a fork or if businesses move away from Redis because it costs money now. It sucks to see an open source project become proprietary through the SPSS, but if the community is as strong as all of those social and intellectual investments make it seem, there will be no problem maintaining an open fork. I imagine the independent open source contributors won't be as willing to contribute to Redis now, so there's a chance to maintain the open source version. This approach worked for MariaDB, LibreOffice, and a bunch of other projects that went through similar controversies.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> I find this an interesting development, to be honest. People were outraged over Redis going "free unless you're a business", A central reason was that the SSPL (license) is not an open source license (as defined by the OSI: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd ). See https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l... for details. This means that Redis switched away from being open source.

dartos 3y ago
You can still fork from older commits. The state of open source is really unfair to maintainer. The more popular a project becomes, the most cost is involved in maintaining and supporting it, but all too often (like with redis, elastic search, and aseprite) there is 1 company or even just 1 person facing the brunt of the community and development burden. Building a community for your open source project is a whole job in and of itself. I love open source. I owe my career, hobby, and lifestyle to it, but the cracks are showing more and more. As a OSS community, we need to be more active in supporting the project we use for free otherwise what happened with redis is going to be the end state for many very popular OSS projects.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I meant "free" as in "beer". I am aware that SPSS isn't open source, but as usual, there's nothing stopping the last open source version from being forked and maintained. You need to go through the code and documentation and s/Redis/Libredis to avoid trademarking issues, but there's nothing stopping the industry from continuing open source development and maintenance. If the industry comes together, and Redis only sells limited copies, as I would expect from a previously free product, it will effectively look like Redis is a fork of its open source version, not the other way around. If the industry doesn't (because that would require time, money, and effort), I can't say I have much of a problem with the situation, because apparently people were using the Redis devs for free work and not much else.