Yep still the biggest leachers. Token hires and flowery PR campaigns doesn't entitle them to most of the profits of other vendors products or absolve them of their predatory behavior.
But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.
Redis Labs was a long time sponsor for the full-time development of Redis then later compensated the creator of Redis for their rights to Redis Technology and branding who was ended up retiring from technology to write Sci-Fi books. By contrast AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back, making them the biggest leacher and the primary motivation for the relicensing to prevent mega corps with unfettered access to their future contributions that AWS repackages to compete against them.
So whilst their previous license allowed AWS to leech off them, it's now been relicensed to prevent them from profiting off their future investments without compensating anything back.
During an all-hands around 2008 I asked AWS leadership whether AWS was going to open source their technologies the answer was we're thinking about it. 16 years later it has not happened, nor it will given the record ;(
AWS, along with Google and others have created a fork already. It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time). Denigrating their work for no reason other than to “win” an internet argument.
We’ll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also never created redis). Both contributed to its maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We’ll see which fork wins out.
> It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time).
I've called AWS's hiring of a single developer a token hire that they then go on to write flowery PR posts about to camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS vendors.
For concrete numbers they contributed 165/12111 commits for a total of a 1.36% of the commits.
Whilst that qualifies as a valuable contribution to any project, it's also dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs and doesn't absolve AWS from being a called a "leacher" by helping themselves to the majority of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back.
It’s funny that you would use commits to quantify investment from AWS, but you’d use $ to buy shares in future profits to quantify investment from redis labs. Why not use the same yardstick for both?
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Everyone who put in effort into redis did it knowing the license. There’s nothing wrong in relicensing future commits. There’s nothing wrong with forking. There’s nothing wrong in using whichever fork works better for you.
You’re insisting up and down that AWS and others were leeching because they didn’t own the copyright to redis. I’ve never heard this interpretation of OSS before, but sure maybe you’re right. But we’ll see which fork comes out on top a year from now.
Yes, they paid. And they can use the code they paid for. But it doesn't give them right to leech of any future code written by someone else IN THE FUTURE.
Calling it leech isn't right, because what makes aws any different from another user? Just because they're selling the hosting, doesnt make it any different to a regular user.
Code contributions from amazon would've been leeched by other parties using redis as well - something which amazon is accepting (and probably encouraging).
And considering Redis Inc hasn't contributed the majority of the code, they won't be able to leech off other people's code because why on earth would anyone contribute to this trainwreck!
AWS are the largest leeches of OSS, syphoning off most the profits and contribute relatively nothing back towards the OSS projects they rent seek from.
The "Free for all except mega cloud corps" license changes are to disrupt this status quo which currently sees the mega cloud corps with impenetrable moats from capturing most of the value of OSS products others spend their resources into building, AWS are then able to use their war chest profits to out resource, and out compete them, using their own code-bases against them.
It's unfortunate organizations need to resort to relicensing stop this predatory behavior, but its clear in AWSs 20+ year history they're not going to change their behavior on their own.
It is not owned by the company. You are free to create your own fork of the code with all the attendant benefits, including monetization, if applicable.
Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.
I wonder if there is a qualitative analysis of the commits. Aka, it changed a line of comment vs it introduced a new feature or refactored and increased long term viability, etc.
Some projects require signing copyright transfer before making commits (legal document claiming that you are a) copyright holder and b) you transfer those rights to them ie CLA [0]) so single entity holds whole copyrights.
They usually have a GHA that checks it when proposing PRs.
It doesn't look like redis has any of this.
So they run RedisLabs purely on trademark + admin rights on GH on redis/redis.
If that's the case then they also cannot legally change licence of code that's already there because they're not sole copyright holders of that code.
ps. as a side note that's why ie. SQLite doesn't allow external contributions at all, even though their code is Public Domain – because they can legally claim full copyright/authorship.
If you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some point. Other than that unless you are one of the contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of leeching.
How does buying a copyright to a name, literally just being able to call it "Redis" equate to purchasing the code contributions that individual contributors make? They bought the rights to the name, not the project, the project was open-source until the license change and belongs to society as a whole.
Often, as that's what rentiers are. Generally bad for society. And have captured many regulatory processes and got tons of tax breaks for producing nothing.
One of the well known flaws of capitalism, in the 'bad, but everything else is worse' sense.
Basically Redis Inc is the one making the fork, which retains the Redis name since they purchased it from antirez.