So if I develop a niche feature relevant to a handful of people and contribute it upstream, I'm entitled to a free perpetual license to future software updates,

So if I develop a niche feature relevant to a handful of people and contribute it upstream, I'm entitled to a free perpetual license to future software updates, even though a select few core developers, who are by and large paid Red Hat employees, do all of the work? I'm sorry, but Amazon didn't do much for Redis. I'd argue that they did the exact opposite: Indirectly defund the people who did all of the work to make Redis happen. Given the forced opportunity to fund the core developers, they noped out real quick to gain more control over costs and the software project itself. I hope that Red Hat learned their lesson and use strong copyleft licenses in the future to avoid this toxic situation.