Why Redis Labs made a huge mistake when it changed its open source licensing strategy

guest · Aug 23, 2018

Why Redis Labs made a huge mistake when it changed its open source licensing strategy
Redis Labs just put itself through the wringer with a new licensing strategy. It needn't have bothered.
August 22, 2018
https://www.techrepublic.com/articl...t-changed-its-open-source-licensing-strategy/

No, Redis is not proprietary after Redis Labs introduced a tweak to its licensing strategy. Yes, some modules from Redis Labs will now be under a weird new license hack that says, in essence, "Clouds, you're not allowed to make money from this code unless you pay us money." And yes, this hack was completely unnecessary in terms of open source evolution.

[...] the company has slapped a "Commons Clause" onto otherwise open source software to make it...not open source. The rationale? Stop free riding, at least in part, as mentioned in the company's explanation: [...]

Why bother with the licensing gymnastics? [...] it won't work. It's very rare for developers to contribute to proprietary projects. It happens, but it's the exception, not the rule.

[...] the real question is whether the company will benefit from the weird approach. In my experience, the answer is "no," but maybe they'll break new ground.
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guest · Sep 8, 2018

Commons Clause stops open-source abuse
September 07, 2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/commons-clause-stops-open-source-abuse/

Open source has served society, and open-source business models have been successful and lucrative. Life was good.
Amazon’s behavior
Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.

For example, Amazon takes Redis (the most loved database in StackOverflow’s developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. [...] and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products.
To be clear, this is not illegal. But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities.
Commons Clause
Those neutral or against point out that the Commons Clause makes software not open source, which is accurate, and that making parts of the code base proprietary is against the ethos of open source; and Redis Labs must be desperate and having trouble making money. [...] More importantly, we think it is time to reexamine the ethos of open source in today’s environment. [...]
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guest · Oct 8, 2018

Redis Labs and Common Clause attacked where it hurts: With open-source code
October 8, 2018
https://www.zdnet.com/article/redis...ttacked-where-it-hurts-with-open-source-code/

Now, instead of just ranting about it, some have counterattacked by starting a project, GoodFORM, to fork the code in question.

The two developers behind this, Chris Lamb, the Debian Linux project leader, and Nathan Scott, a Fedora developer, explained:

[...] GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora are no longer able to ship Redis Labs' versions of the affected modules to their users.
As a result, we have begun working together to create a set of module repositories forked from prior to the license change. [...]
Lamb added in an e-mail that Redis Labs' use of the Common Clause made it impossible to use their programs. Thus, their forked replacements under the old license. "We are committed to making these available under an open-source license permanently, and welcome community involvement."

Victor Ruiz, a developer who'd worked on Redis, tweeted, "After using open source contributions to make the projects good enough, now they want to cash out. Let's keep free and open Redis modules."
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guest · Feb 21, 2019

Redis Labs changes its open-source license — again
February 21, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/redis-labs-changes-its-open-source-license-again/

Redis Labs, fresh off its latest funding round, today announced a change to how it licenses its Redis Modules. This may not sound like a big deal, but in the world of open-source projects, licensing is currently a big issue.

“Some cloud providers have repeatedly taken advantage of successful opensource projects, without significant contributions to their communities,” the Redis Labs team writes today. “They repackage software that was not developed by them into competitive, proprietary service offerings and use their business leverage to reap substantial revenues from these open source projects.”
The point of these new licenses it to put a stop to this.

So today, Redis Labs is introducing the Redis Source Available License. This license, too, only applies to certain Redis Modules created by Redis Labs.
[...] In practice, the company argues, it’s quite similar to other permissive open-source licenses, [...]
This is surely not the last we’ve heard of this. Sooner or later, more projects will follow the same path. By then, we’ll likely see more standard licenses that address this issue so other companies won’t have to change multiple times.
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