[skybrian]

I largely agree, except what the “bait” is.

Here’s where antirez said he chose BSD because he wanted to allow forks that change the license. [1]

Under BSD, forks that change the license and forks that don’t change the license are both okay, full stop. When antirez chose a BSD license, thinking he might do a proprietary fork later, it wasn’t “bait,” it’s how it works.

But when Redis, the company, said that Redis “has always been and will continue to be BSD licensed” [2], this was an implicit promise about what license the company would use for their own future improvements to Redis. In that sense, what they said is misleading, and maybe that’s bait.

So giving things away for free isn’t wrong, and making a proprietary fork isn’t wrong. It’s promising that you won’t do it and then doing it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39863371 [2] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/