[Spivak]

What other framing is there? There was an OSS project called Redis that existed before Redis Inc., who gave their software to the OSS community in the hope it that would be useful to others. Millions of people including AWS started using it under the pretense that it was and would continue to be OSS. Redis Inc. saw $$ after Redis Enterprise and their hosted offering were luke warm successes at best and took all the code, even the parts that were contributed by other members of the OSS community, and made it proprietary.

Even if you're not affected by this license change because you aren't hosting Redis there is no reason to believe that you won't be on the chopping block for the next license change when Redis Inc.'s numbers must go up. The trust has been completely broken. You would be crazy to base your business on Redis now.

AWS and the Linux Foundation are the ones keeping the original Redis, the community project that existed before the business, alive for the benefit of everyone.

[d-z-m]

I see it as an incentive problem. How are the maintainers of these projects to receive the support they need? Companies like AWS are incentivized to take all they can take and contribute nothing in return, "it's FOSS, baby".

Redis Inc. is incentivized to continue the development and improvement of Redis, because the success of Redis is directly proportional to the success of their business. Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat.

[Spivak]

> Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat.

Why do you say that? AWS is going to be providing Valkey as a service to millions of paying customers via their ElasticCache offering. Every cloud provider will be doing something similar. It's the same story with OpenSearch, it's now deeply integrated into AWS and used not just directly by their customers but by other AWS services. That's honestly the best model for OSS, many financially interested parties who want the software to exist to support their business, but the software itself isn't their business.

And now there's not a conflict of interest for the project to hold back features because they want to save them for the enterprise tier. The software getting better for everyone directly benefits their hosted offering.

I think there's a strong case that given a time machine Redis should have never been OSS so they could sell software licenses. But at the same time Redis wouldn't have become a household name for developers and have the huge ecosystem of tooling surrounding it were it not for the fact that it's OSS.