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by jjice 822 days ago
Can't believe I missed this Redis change. I know that one path for open source is to build a company around it, but it seems that so many of the big players that have done that do it for the early clout and move to a closed license later on.

After doing some quick reading on the SSPL, I actually don't hate it though. It seems to be completely open for those who use it themselves, but prevents the cloud providers from capitalizing on hosting your software as a product. Not truly open, but I think this is probably an okay middle ground if you want open source software from a business that's developing and selling products around that software.

2 comments

The consequence is that the cloud providers just implement the Redis protocol on top of a more conveniently-licensed backend.

This turns out to not be that difficult. Postgres can be a great KVS.

And they all have existing KV storage, so they don't even have to use Postgres.

OpenRedis anyone?

> I don't hate it

But what's the point?

It's not open source, so why bother?

Whether you agree with BSD or GPL, OpenSource means you aren't locked to a vendor. The SSPL means that essentially for Redis, you are

The point is to deliver value to Redis' investors by taking advantage of customers' sclerotic executives and managers whose lack of code-level knowledge of their products means these people will pay a license fee instead of letting the engineers replace it with a FOSS alternative.
I wasn't asking why Redis would be okay with this, because that's obvious, I was asking why the gpp was happy with this.