They don't get to choose. They don't own the copyright on Redis, Salvatore does. He is their employee now but if they try to pull something like this I suspect he won't be for long.
Based on this interview from 2016 Salvatore
agrees with the issues of BSD and cloud vendors so he may be a lot more amenable to a license change than you suspect: https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/19/redis-creator/
>But now, for the first time, GPL could be interesting again because of the cloud vendors. Because with BSD, cloud vendors are able to extract a lot of value from an open-source project, to the point of making it very hard for the project’s initial creators to make a business out of it. Let’s call it the “AWS problem.” The AWS problem, technically, could be enough in some way to create problems for the whole open-source ecosystem. Now people know that if they start an open-source project and put a lot of effort into it, they could be marginalized by AWS. That could mean that GPL would return again as the primary license for open-source software in the future.
You are right that they are making something new available, but they are not open sourcing it according to the commonly accepted meaning of the term -- and the original article actually says "... any software under this new license is non-open source by definition".
Now you might think that commercial use is a small semantic detail. But it is one that the open source / free software community has always insisted on, up to and including left-loonies like Stallman.
Of course none of this means that it is wrong or unfair of RedisLabs to do this. It merely means that what they are doing is not open sourcing anything.
On one hand I admire RedisLabs for acknowledging what all major cloud vendors are doing... embracing and extending open source packages but not giving back enhancements.
On the other hand, the terms of "commons" are not in the spirit of the license and software they've built their business upon.
If in the end Salvatore Sanfilippo were getting funded by the licensing of commons modules, I'd be less concerned.
Pragmatically, this is still open source software, because the software source is freely available.
It might not be Open Source Software now, perhaps according to some zealots like RMS et al.
> According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the software, whether commercial or non-commercial, or (famously) good or evil. Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition. However, in practice, Commons Clause only adds a limitation concerning fair use, and we believe that both licensing approaches share the same core value of making software available for use by anyone.
> Pragmatically, this is still open source software,
No, it's free of charge shared-source software. The OSI and FSF open source and free software definitions are virtually identical despite their very different philosophy because any less freedom than they call for quickly collapses the benefits of the arrangement.
I'd say GP is correct, but only insofar as that Redis Labs hasn't changed it yet:
> Today, most cloud providers offer Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from software that was not developed by them. Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed.