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by Dalewyn 810 days ago
>It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized.

We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.
2 comments
jasode 810 days ago
>I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money,

Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money.

Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license.

That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license.

Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right.

The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community:

- start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change

vs

- start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL

[1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392

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raverbashing 810 days ago
> start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL

Well, the competition landscape was a lot different 15 yrs ago.

In the same way, GPL went from version 2 to 3, in response to the landscape

I think it's unwise to not respond to environment changes.

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BSDobelix 810 days ago
>I think it's unwise to not respond to environment changes.

True, but killing your company and make your code proprietary is most likely the wrong response.

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dontupvoteme 810 days ago
so trillion dollar public companies get to use all their legal rights (and lobby governments to extend them), but the little guy can get fucked if he does?
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BSDobelix 810 days ago
It's not "asking for money", it's shutting down a usage of the code, and that's completely against the spirit of "free software", and even against the broader meaning of opensource[1].

However, I think everyone understands that it's a problem to make a living from small but important part of an bigger infrastructure, but this is the wrong way.

The Linux Foundation will throw money at Valkey, Amazon will still sell the service and Redi's will lose (because it's just one company and not opensource).

[1] https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...

And I'm not even talking about external contributors whose work is re-licensed under a proprietary license.

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justincormack 810 days ago
The Linux Foundation won't "throw money" at it, it will probably provide some legal support if needed, but project work is largely funded by the membership fees for the subfoundations, and at this project membership level thats not much unless eg AWS etc are contributing it.
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BSDobelix 810 days ago
>but project work is largely funded by the membership fees for the subfoundations

That's something completely different you are right ;)

>>Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Valkey Community

>>Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...

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