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/

I get that people get upset that their software of choice license is changed at the philosophical level. But I don’t get it at the economical level. When a project changes the license for a future version, the older versions are still available in the older open license right? So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”? License changes, people don’t like the new license, they don’t contribute anymore (let’s keep the forks aside for a second), all new change are now by the employees of the company, they own the rights to that like every other product company. What am I missing here? Why do people get upset about the economics of effort and benefit?

I have always been to afraid to ask this ask this question for fear of appearing stupid. But gotta live and learn. So here goes nothing.

Have you actually taken the time to understand the RSAL and SSPL?

> If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period

There is essentially only one restriction (the other is about formal notices) imposed by the RSAL, and it forbids to "Commercialize the software or provide it to others as a managed service".

> IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here

This is an uninformed opinion. Nothing changes for small companies and developers. Actually, nothing changes even for larger companies, unless they are cloud providers.

Large companies can actually provide Redis as service for internal use ("as a service internally or to subsidiary companies"). Companies are even free to sell support for Redis.

Re "But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value."

You shouldn't have to do anything: I don't get it I think you're making a choice because you have a preference for non-copyleft licenses in software you use? That's your choice

Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness?

As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not.

The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or whatever) to trusted institutions like Apache or the FSF or Linux Foundation.

It seems too easy for big "open" endeavours to change their mind after they've built trust and a userbase. It would be great if there was a way to guarantee that that won't happen.

How old is Redis again? It seems like a pretty big stretch to accuse them of having just been baiting people into depending on it this entire time.

>> IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here. ES and Mongo still use and rely on AWS for their managed offerings. OpenSearch (mainly pushed by AWS) is vibrant and very alive. Redis will be ditched by distros and die a slow death, and (probably) Valkey will be in the next distro major versions. But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value.

While I agree with you on not changing licenses mid-way, what is a small software company supposed to do? What is the Day Zero playbook that balances the desire for growth, creating customer value, and co-existing with the big cloud companies? I'm disappointed about the outcomes for companies like Redis/Elastic who obviously did create much value.

>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.

You don't know what restrictive means.

According to LWN [0], Redis was already maintained by big corporations/cloud providers:

  Tencent - 24.8%
  Redis Labs - 19.5%
  Alibaba- 6.7%
  Huawei - 5.2%
  Amazon.com - 5.2%
  Bytedance - 2.0%
  NetEase - 1.3%

[0] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/

They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly.

Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years.

You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen.

I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition.

As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it.

If I use Redis software on AWS, am I getting the most value, or does AWS? Exactly by offering ready to go implementations of known open source projects, are they increasing or decreasing my AWS lock in? Does it even matter? If they didn't offer these, which are saving me effort (thus money) today, wouldn't I just be running these myself on an EC2 or ECS setup?

Wouldn't that apply to all cloud providers, not just AWS? All of them are heavily based on open source software, from Linux, KVM/Xen, and K8s to MySQL/Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra, etc.?

That wouldn't ever make sense though. They're the licensor. You don't ever need a license in order to use intellectual property that you own. By definition the license is what allows third parties to use or redistribute copyrighted software.

They're total hypocrites! For instance Graylog switched to OpenSearch to reap the benefits, but themselves push the awful SSPL on their users.

I have no respect for these organizations. Provide real open source software or start up closed from the get-go, don't build on community contributions for a while and then switch to closed while marketing as being open!

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.

The only misleading framing here is your comment, and redis claiming anything about their license is good for users.

No, which is why I think there has been less support for the (previous) OSS company than some other projects.

Redis labs effectively became the defacto owner of the project later down the line when Antirez joined them. They inherited the project then tried to capture all of the value.

This isn’t a case of the original maintainers trying to sustain the project. It’s a hostile takeover that’s backfiring significantly. They brought Microsoft onboard as a partner hoping that would get them through the mess. Turns out that wasn’t enough.

https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1335 It’s currently working, but a commitment to ensure it stays that way is marked as pending decision.

And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter.

Based on the open source license redis had before, what did aws do wrong? They didn't even have to contribute back, yet they did.

Investors of redis based their SaaS offering on open source and community work. Now that they achieved critical mass they want to reneg on the license.

> It doesn’t want to pay license fees.

When a business is strong-armed to pay for something, doesn't it make sense to spend the money on an alternative that is cheaper, more reliable, trustable, and preserves its control?

Yes, of course. That is a major reason why people use open source. And since AWS was a contributor to Redis, why it would be absurd for them to pay license fees on a project they helped build and maintain.

AWS was also a major Redis contributor, so asking them for more money to keep using a product they helped build and maintain was nothing but greed from Redis Inc. Valkey seems to be much more in line with Redis, and it will probably replace it as the THE in-memory cache solution.

That's the anti-capitalist narrative where AWS is the root cause for a small heroic company called Redis to defend themselves against the evil capitalist thieves.

In reality, the vast majority of commits on Redis in recent history weren't coming from Redis the company (a VC funded entity looking to do an IPO) at all but from the collective users of Redis. Which include such small companies as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. many of whom have a long history of having offered Redis as part of their cloud platforms. Redis was benefiting enormously from these contributions. The notion that VCs somehow own this codebase and are the victim of other public companies abusing their intellectual property is nonsensical.

They unilaterally created a fork of the up until then open source code base that all these companies have been contributing to. This is completely legal under the BSD license and they are well within their rights to do so. Just like every other user of Redis. Including the before mentioned large software companies. But unlike Redis, they continue to contribute to the open source code base and share the code. It's Redis that has turned all greedy and capitalist here, not AWS. Redis never paid AWS for their contributions. Or Google. Or Microsoft. That's how open source works.

This developer community is of course continuing to work on the various forks that they already had (for the purpose of developing and contributing back changes) and will continue to share code with each other. Why would they stop doing that? Nominally, Valkey, which has been created under the Linux Foundation seems to be emerging as the dominant shared fork used for that. AWS is merely announcing that they indeed plan to rally behind that one.

It's logical, sensible, and completely consistent with what they have been doing for many years, which is to offer a Redis/Valkey based service to their users and collaborate with other users and companies on the open source code base. I expect more announcements from the vast majority of companies using redis in the next weeks. The only thing that changed is that Redis the company cut themselves loose from that ecosystem. Most of the code and business was never theirs. They owned neither the copyright nor the moral rights to any of that.

Ultimately it seems that everyone loses - the Redis project slowly fades, nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more, and AWS continues on unaffected by the change.

The only brainwashing is by companies who built their customer base and reputation on open source convincing anyone that changing the rules is a fair thing to do to the community that made them successful. The idea that changing the Redis license will keep people from moving to AWS’s hosted version is sadly delusional. But bailing on open source entirely does ensure that many folks will no longer give Redis a second glance.

What happened here is not that AWS and Valkey forked Redis. Rather, Redis forked itself into a closed system and Valkey et al are picking up the torch of the open source project.

> […] rather than collaborate with the creators.

How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL? Also, who do you believe the creators of Redis are?