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by nindalf 813 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

Have any major software company ever created a successful software from the ground up ? No, they all base their work on some language ! They are predatory !

Wait, does any language team ever created a successful implementation from the ground up ? No, they all base their work on some hardware people ! They are predatory !

Wait, does any hardware manufacturers ever created a successful product from the ground up ? No, they all base their work of some software ! They are predatory !

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

Yes, but there’s another explanation. Repeating the same mistake countless times and expecting a different outcome is naivety.