[juliansimioni]

I think it's fair to say that people are acknowledging the problem: it's possible for a large company to use the rights offered to them by an open source license to create products that effectively end the financial viability of smaller companies that lead core development of the project.

There's definitely not yet agreement on the solution, and Redis Labs alone is not going to solve it.

Roughly I think different people believe several things such as:

1.) The purity of open source (no restrictions on use) trump the needs of a company that does core development to profit, and so nothing should change.

2.) Its ok for companies doing core OSS development to "build a moat" that protects their revenue stream, but it shouldn't be done at the license level. Instead companies should look somewhere else like their expertise/reputation, building products on top of their open source code, etc

3.) Adjusting licenses is a reasonable way to allow interesting code to be available for use by anyone (under a not-quite pure open source license), and we are figuring out the best way to do that

[jhall1468]

> I think it's fair to say that people are acknowledging the problem: it's possible for a large company to use the rights offered to them by an open source license to create products that effectively end the financial viability of smaller companies that lead core development of the project.

That's been true since the MIT and Apache license came into existence.

Your third item just reeks of justification. "not-quite pure open source license" is nonsense. This is not an open source license, at its core. The goal here is to prevent use.

So I don't think the third is a valid option when we're discussing "fixing" open source. It's a valid option for protecting a companies revenue stream, but in doing so that company is no longer an "open source company" by definition.

[CharlesW]

I appreciate you taking the time to explain, Julian.