Redis relicensing: Why is this a problem?

https://dafoster.net/articles/2024/03/24/redis-relicensing-why-is-this-a-problem/

by davidfstr • 2 years ago

1 2 2 years ago

It's a problem because they used their open source nature to help themselves become popular, and have now switched away from it (the osi hasn't approved the sspl, don't try to tell me they're still open source).

Another project might have taken off if redis was this way from the start, it was a simple bait and switch by the redis team.

reconditerose• 2 years ago

I also disagree with that post’s assertion that Redis contributions would have been withheld if it started with a different license. I expect contributions would come from existing users of Redis who wanted new features themselves and were willing to sponsor the related effort, regardless of the license in use.

This is partially true, but is missing the fact that all of the recent major contributors were coming from other IT companies (AWS, alibaba, tencent, huawei, Google). None of them would have contributed with this license change. Most of the major features (TLS, ACLs V2, sharded pubsub, Functions, multi-slot dictionary) were all funded by companies, not individuals. It's hard for an individual to contribute complex features these days, since systems are so complex. Even those that do, it required a lot of help from folks like me or other contributors to get it merged.

Disclosure, I was the pervious maintainer of Redis and am employed by AWS.

Redis relicensing: Why is this a problem?

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