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by d-z-m
810 days ago
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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. |
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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.