[mythz]

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.

[happymellon]

Err, after this license change Redis Inc will be the biggest leechers considering they didn't contribute the majority of the code.

> Yep still the biggest leachers

Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever they want. That's not leeching.

[mythz]

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.

[jakupovic]

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 ;(

[JackSlateur]

Do you have some data to back this ?

  AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back

It appears that AWS and friends are not "leeching" at all, according to the LWN article.

[deanCommie]

> By contrast AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back

You do understand that AWS profits not off redis but by offering redis as a managed hosting provider.

Microsoft and Google do to, it's just that they're not as popular as AWS.

They're not re-skinning or re-selling Redis, they're selling a separate product - the managed operations for operating and scaling Redis.

You may not appreciate this (most on HN never do - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) But the value is evident to thousands of customers.

[objektif]

How does one buy rights to an open source technology?

[tracker1]

You buy the trademark/name from the original author. I'm the case of GPL or other assigned work licenses, you sell the baseline copyright and they can change it.

[nindalf]

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.

[mythz]

> 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.

[nindalf]

> dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs

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.

[rad_gruchalski]

> camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS vendors

If you don't want others to monetize your work, don't license it under a license permitting them exactly that.

[mythz]

hence the relicensing

[rad_gruchalski]

It’s hard to argue that a use permitted by the original license is „predatory”.

[evanelias]

That's fair in isolation, but one can justifiably argue that a repeated pattern of behavior is clearly predatory.

Specifically: have the major cloud providers ever created a successful FOSS database, cache, or fulltext search index project from the ground up? By this I mean, a FOSS project with its own protocol, own community from scratch, not a fork or a re-implementation or based on another FOSS project, nor a late-stage company acquisition.

I'm struggling to think of even a single example. Even for broader infrastructure (not just db/cache/search), there's few examples, only Kubernetes comes to mind rapidly.

If the cloud providers are widely practicing "FOSS for thee but not for me" with respect to creation of new infrastructure projects, that's predatory and unsustainable.