[mpyne]

> They had no choice but to change the licenses.

Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no?

Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.

[htx80nerd]

Companies are making a trillion dollars on Open Source free code then maybe donate 50k to that project. People are spending huge amounts of time , stress, their lives, to help these projects. Companies have proved themselves to be very self centered. CEOs getting 2x yatchs and 5x houses while Open Source guys are trying to figure out which grocery store has the cheapest food items.

[mpyne]

Companies should contribute as they can, if only for self-centered business reasons relating to keeping the upstream viable. But there are obligations to the users of software as well, it's not AWS's fault if making their user's lives easier make it harder for companies try to sell hosting of open-source servers.

I didn't see the PHP or SquirrelMail contributors having a conniption when Dreamhost started offering free webmail with their hosting offering.

[streetfighter64]

I've got a field of strawberries, and I put up a sign, "free to pick by yourself, or pay 10$ for a pre-picked basket". Then Amazon comes in, starts sending their workers to pick my strawberries, and sell them for 5$ a basket. Was I then lying when I advertised the strawberries as free in my original sign, if I now want to change it to stop them from doing that?

[mpyne]

I'm sorry, but "or pay $10 for a pre-picked basket" is not an open source product, because "free to pick" was the other option for an open source product.

"free to pick by yourself" is the equivalent a proprietary freeware product, not an open-source product, because it excludes the idea of others picking strawberries. If that's your thing then by all means license it as such. But call it proprietary rather than open source.

Some companies make a living off a model of "free to pick as needed for as long as you agree to help tend the future strawberries held in common, even if your competitors pick strawberries. Or you can pay $10 for your own exclusive plot of land and no requirement to let others past your fence".

But that's not the model Redis was trying to use.

[streetfighter64]

You're really torturing the analogy in a way that isn't comprehensible at all.

But if your point is that "open source" is a bad license that most people who use it come to regret later, then yes, I agree, and they probably shouldn't have advertised as open source from the beginning.