|
First of all the 'spirit' of the new license is "you can do anything you like with the code, except if we don't want you to". Nobody knows when or whether one of these companies will turn around and say "that's now part of our business model, you can no longer do it". Perhaps they will decide that not only can Amazon not 'resell' their product, neither can anyone host it themselves, but everyone has to subscribe to their cloud service. Secondly, although I love the Redis product for example, the company that sells it is no longer getting rewarded for their added value, as when they sold support or consultation, or as when AWS sells the fact of putting Redis on a machine and maintaining it. Instead they get paid for supplying something that no one else has, something which they have made artificially scarce. Next, Amazon et al have resources and market power enough to push their own versions of these. Who will it serve when there's Amazon Redis, RedisLabs Redis, Community Redis, Azure Redis, all with slightly different interfaces? Who do you think will win? Amazon and Microsoft have the resources to destroy small competitors in these type of battles, and the user will be even more screwed. Just because Oracle failed with Jenkins, don't assume that no big tech is savvy enough to succeed at this game. Lastly, free software wouldn't exist if everyone took your attitude. If Linus had told people that they could install his kernel for free, but that distros had to pay $2, Linux would never have been a thing. If you can't deal with sharing when someone else might end up putting in less and taking out more, you're not ready to share. |
The Redis case study is a nuanced one. The core Redis code is BSD-3 licensed, and adopted a lightweight community governance model in June of 2020 [1]. This model includes a core team of individuals, and seeks to empower individuals who demonstrate a long-term commitment to Redis as a community-driven project.
The core team is now made up of people who currently work for Redis Labs, AWS, and Alibaba [2].
From my perspective, on the core BSD-3 licensed Redis code, it is in all stakeholders interest to collaborate on the "upstream." There's one Redis, and it is the version that is produced by the Redis development community, and Redis Labs acts as the primary sponsor and steward of the project.
[1] https://redis.io/topics/governance
[2] https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/