
Redis will remain BSD licensed - antirez
http://antirez.com/news/120
======
Yiftach
Hi, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure
you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. For
avoiding any doubt - commons clause (as defined in commonsclause.com) is
applied only to add-ons (modules), on top of Redis (e.g. RediSearch, Redis
Graph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, Rebloom) that were developed by Redis Labs .

We initially released these modules under AGPL license but found two major
drawbacks (a) AGPL does not prevent cloud providers (such as AWS) from
building managed services from these modules, and (b) we got requests from
developers, working at large enterprises to move from AGPL to a more
permissive license, because the use of AGPL is against their company’s policy.

In addition, a few people here (and other threads) have asked why we didn’t
create a new proprietary license, like those offered by Elastic or MaraiaDB?
Well, Commons Clause was created by a coalition of several OSS infrastructure
companies, some of which use a different OSS licenses. In order to maintain a
standard framework we decided to piggyback the restriction (on creating
managed services by cloud providers) on any existing OSS license.

~~~
rectang
Thank you for the explanation. I see no problem with this approach in
principle and wish your business the best of luck.

However, you have made a big mistake with how the "Commons Clause" confuses
Open Source under the OSD with "source available". You were not well served by
those who advised you to do so.

~~~
XiZhao
The Commons Clause clearly acknowledges this in the FAQ:

[https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/)

~~~
nailer
From that page:

> The Commons Clause is a license condition drafted by Heather Meeker that
> applies a minimal-form commercial restriction on top of an existing open
> source license

Making it proprietary and failing the Open Source Definition.

You cannot have Commons Clause 'on top' of an existing Open Source license.
This is impossible. You can only replace the existing Open Source license with
Commons Clause.

The page is a bunch of (insert HN-guidelines-appropriate word for 'very
incorrect information').

> This Clause is not intended to be applied against at-scale existing open
> source projects, but incrementally on top of commercial counterparts that
> need to be transitioned to source-availability to satisfy urgent business or
> legal requirements.

Commercial and Open Source aren't opposites - this a very basic mistake made
by people who are new to OSS. There are many Open Source commercial projects
(your bank runs on Red Hat Linux, which is entirely OSS, with everything but
the Red Hat logos allowed to be reproduced) and many non-commercial
proprietary projects. It's scary that a company called 'Fossa' whose specialty
is 'Modern open source management_' is confused about this.

> The original Open Source Definition represents an immensely important set of
> ideals that carried many projects to success during the earlier days.
> However, the open source ecosystem has changed a lot over the past 10 years,
> and the conditions of the modern landscape has forced change for the
> sustainability of many projects.

The project wants to create a new OSD which isn't Open Source.

The 'drafter' of this license seems to have simply re-created Shared Source
per Ballmer-era Microsoft.

~~~
XiZhao
Yes, and right below it acknowledges that it is not Open Source and doesn't
try to be:

> It this “Open Source”? > No, at least not by the official definition set
> forth by the OSD. Applying the Clause to an open source project will
> transition the project to “source-available”.

~~~
justinjlynn
> Is this Open Source? No. The source is available for inspection and
> restricted use but, because of these restrictions, its licence is not Open
> Source per the Open Source Definition.

That's all that needs to be said. Your page reads as though the author is
hiding something or that the author is ashamed of the answer. Just come out
and say it.

------
vmlinuz
This could have been made clear in a few simple sentences:

We have created a new software license which we are calling the 'Redis Labs
License' (RLL), by adding the Commons Clause terms as extra restrictions on
top of the Apache 2.0 License. We recognise this will no longer be a true Open
Source license, but we consider it a fair trade-off between our business needs
and our responsibility and commitment to the Redis community.

From now and in the future, work on the following Redis Labs modules will be
published under the RLL: Module A, Module B and Module C.

There will be no change to the licensing of Redis core, and we remain
committed to supporting ongoing development under the existing BSD license.

~~~
mrfredward
Redis went out of their way to obfuscate what they were doing with deceptive
license names. Now they are struggling to control the damage caused in all the
confusion. There's a lesson here...

~~~
derefr
> Redis

Redis Labs isn't Redis, any more than, say, Heroku is Ruby because Matz works
there.

------
stingraycharles
I’m happy to hear that Redis will remain BSD, but it’s a bit weird to play the
“fake news” card. Can you really blame people for interpreting this the wrong
way?

Especially when the original announcement was specifically targeting cloud
providers, who, afaik, are just running vanilla redis.

If there is anything that we can learn from this, is that a little bit of
forethought when putting these announcements out there is required, and
blaming this on the readers is not fair.

~~~
antirez
Honestly my colleagues did a poor job with such an announcement there, and I
did not get a chance to read it (which is actually a good thing, it means that
the OSS division, I'm part of, is independent and can work to the Github
repositories without caring about what the commercial side does). But it was
kinda of a manifest to announce that certain things made inside Redis Labs are
now Common Clause licensed. In doubt, why not asking? Also people that follow
me and Redis for years getting trapped into this idea is very strange, I would
never do that and without explaining, prior notice, and so forth. So yep the
Common Clause page at Redis Labs sucked but in doubt ask instead of creating
news out of no actual information.

~~~
dilap
It was clear to me from a careful reading that the page did not refer to
Redis, but it also seemed deliberately designed to suggest that it did. It
seemed pretty scummy.

And the name itself of "Commons Clause" is practically a tiny version of fake
news, since it tries to give an "open source" feeling to what is essentially a
proprietary license.

As a practical/PR matter, I think Redis Labs have likely shot themselves in
the foot. I've been in a low-key debate advocating for Redis Labs over AWS
elasticache on an upcoming project; my argument probably just got about 1000%
harder, given the anti-RL sentiment I saw on our Slack last night.

(Finally, if you'll forgive me a bit of personal advice, I think for better or
worse Redis + your personal brand + RedisLabs are now all somewhat tied
together -- I'm not sure how much sense it makes for you to just pay attention
to the OSS side of the house...)

~~~
sikhnerd
I'll pile on here as well, we were thinking about shifting from elasticache to
RL, but this has made that decision super easy.

~~~
fizzybeetle
Elasticache is a totally closed source implementation that does not contribute
back to the community. How did this situation change your decision?

~~~
dilap
what would they contribute back? elasticache is just vanilla redis. aws is
selling you compute time and ram.

~~~
scrollaway
> _elasticache is just vanilla redis_

Only at the interface level. Elasticache is a heavily forked Redis. There's a
reason it's several versions behind.

~~~
dilap
that makes sense. i guess i had just assumed it was laziness. :-)

out of curiosity, do you have any idea what their mods might be?

~~~
scrollaway
I never bothered to really look into it -- I suspect it's semi-public
information. If I had to guess, lots of internal changes to make Redis behave
better in AWS's architecture to do with containerization, EC2, S3/EBS,
maintenance automation related stuff, instrumentation, etc.

Oh actually definitely some stuff related to their redis clustering system.

~~~
buzer
They also support encryption in transit. That part was open sourced recently,
but hasn't made it into upstream yet (though it most likely will from sounds
of it).

------
keepper
What I find interesting is all of the comments saying

    
    
       "Well, I was going to use RedisLabs.. but because of this, i'll use AWS/elasticache"
    

Which is just such a weird statement. So instead of supporting the OSS
creators and main contributors, who want a way to monetize their "value add"
modules, while still giving the core software freely; you rather support a
huge corporation that gives almost zero back to OSS ( AWS has a history of
extend and embrace, make it a service/black box, with open source, that would
make Microsoft of the 90s/00s proud!)

~~~
prepend
“...gives almost zero back to OSS...” This is not true as Amazon not only
releases it’s own projects but contributes really broadly [0].

I can’t speak for others, but I understand the decision to choose ElastiCache
over CC software as I understand Amazon’s model a lot better than projects
that change their license.

So if I’m going to hinge on something non-OSS, I prefer the logical points
where a utility that sells cloud compute so doesn’t care about software than
for software companies that change their license, really substantially.

My org allows AGPL as we can easily comply. But we can’t comply with CC. This
shift is a big deal and kind of hoses me.

You mention Microsoft in the 90s. They shared source code all the time, but
you couldn’t use it and there was zero community. So if you want that, CC is
way more likely to get us there as community contributions will dry up. I’d
rather depend on companies that are explicit (ie, “this is open source, this
is not”).

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/](https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/)

~~~
derefr
> But we can’t comply with CC.

Why not? The point of the CC is literally "pay us to use it commercially." You
can't just... pay them to use it? Even when that's exactly what you'd be doing
by using an AWS service?

~~~
prepend
Part of CC is that it’s unclear how it operates with the myriad of other
project licenses we use.

But the main issue is that we contribute back to projects, even as minor
patches or fixes. Contributing source to a proprietary, commercial code base
has legal issues of nonpaid work and contribution.

And finally, “pay them to use it” is very ambiguous. How much to pay them? Is
it the same amount today as tomorrow? I pay for support for substantial
projects like RedHat, but is support included in licensing CC?

These questions are ambiguous. Perhaps in time they will get easier to answer.
But this is exactly why I would rather use AWS with its “so clear its
confusing” pricing [0] where I know exactly what I’m getting.

[0]
[https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/)

------
acjohnson55
> However in the fake news era my attempts to provide the correct information
> failed

Eww. This actually removes credibility from the announcement, given the way
the term "fake news" continues to be used to distract from objective truth.

~~~
antirez
What I mean is that even after the project leader tells you it was just some
confusion, the Github project still is marked as BSD, and nothing is written
in the original announcement clearly stating that Redis would switch license,
it is a bit strange that the information continues to spread _regardless_ of
what I continued to say.

~~~
endorphone
"Redis is an example of this paradigm. Today, most cloud providers offer Redis
as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from
software that was not developed by them. Redis’ permissive BSD open source
license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed"

Crying fake news (which has been co-opted to mean "real news that I don't like
or that you shouldn't pay attention to") completely undermined your statement.
Yes, the original announcement wasn't just unclear, it is very clearly drawing
a line that "this must be changed".

~~~
antirez
I admit that the communication was not great, but the announcement never said
Redis would switch. Maybe I'm a bit biased, because before Redis Labs doing
this license switch, we internally even _agreed_ about taking the core BSD, so
the goals of the company were always clear, regardless of the fact that this
page in the company web site was unclear. But "Redis switching license" was
factually incorrect since the start and never stated anywhere.

~~~
Murrawhip
> but the announcement never said Redis would switch

> Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but
> this must be changed

~~~
lima
[https://redislabs.com/community/commons-
clause/](https://redislabs.com/community/commons-clause/)

It sounds a bit different when not taken out of context:

> Redis is an example of this paradigm. Today, most cloud providers offer
> Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income
> from software that was not developed by them. Redis’ permissive BSD open
> source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed. Redis
> Labs is leading and financing the development of open source Redis and
> deserves to enjoy the fruits of these efforts. Consequently, we decided to
> add Commons Clause to certain components of open source Redis. Cloud
> providers will no longer be able to use these components as part of their
> Redis-as-a-Service offerings, but all other users will be unaffected by this
> change.

~~~
detaro
But Redislabs extensions were AGPL, not BSD beforehand.

~~~
dragonwriter
Yeah, there is literally no way to read that except as a statement of intent
to move BSD-licensed Redis into Common Clause, even if that wasn't the first
step taken.

While this is being portrayed as a communication error, that strains belief—it
sounds a lot more like an after-the-fact effort to deal with massive blowback
at the very clearly stated intent.

------
skissane
If you want to ship enterprise modules under a source-is-publicly-available-
but-not-open-source license, a sort of limited-commercial-use-source-
available-freeware license, I think that is definitely better in some ways
than keeping them fully closed source, so should be applauded.

But, I think this "Commons Clause" condition was a poor choice of a way of
achieving that end. Having some condition which is added to an existing open
source license, and takes away some of the rights that license grants, is
horribly confusing. If you aren't granting the full set of rights associated
with open source license X, then open source license X should not even be
mentioned.

If you had just picked some existing license which had the set of permissions
you wanted, or even created a new one, I don't think anywhere near as many
people would be complaining. "Commons Clause" is a horrible idea and should be
retired.

------
dwheeler
But it _does_ appear to be true that some Redis modules _used_ to be open
source software (OSS) and are now proprietary. As I understand it, some
modules used to be licensed under the AGPL (an OSS license) and they are now
under this new "Commons Clause" (which is a proprietary license). So while the
_core_ of Redis is OSS, if my understanding is correct, it's absolutely true
that parts of Redis have switched to being proprietary software. That's
different than organizations who license the software as "AGPL or proprietary"
or "GPL or proprietary" \- such licenses are also unambiguously OSS. Choosing
"Apache WITH proprietary-rider" is fundamentally different; Redis has every
right to do that, but it's fair to note that this isn't the same thing.

~~~
XiZhao
Also: there is no longer a source-disclosure requirement built into the
license.

------
quotemstr
I've seen saying for years and years that we're going to see a resurgence of
proprietary software. Free software was one of those ideas that spread so
successfully that people temporarily forgot that life could be otherwise,
which means they stopped caring about the idea, which in turn led to a
complacency that, at first, shifted software licensing to a BSD-style
permissive model, and now, is starting to allow 1990s cancer like this
commonscause.com license restriction to come back.

There's nothing new in the software ecosystem driving this.

Well, this commonsclause.com crap is such a move toward proprietary software.
We're here.

> The Commons Clause is a first step at starting an important discussion

~~~
scrollaway
Have you read the Commons Clause license? Do you understand it well enough to
back up those absurd claims you're making?

People see "oh it's not OSI-approved" and just de-facto assume it's the end of
the world.

Redis is an _amazing_ piece of open source, BSD software and you're taking a
huge dump on it and its author for not complying to your wishes. Friend, have
you done for open source even 1/10th of what Antirez and the Redis project
have?

Honestly, this whole thread. I remember instances of people finding out about
major figures in open source burning out, turning to drugs or even killing
themselves and being all like "oh, this was so preventable".

Prevent now. Stop behaving like this towards people.

~~~
quotemstr
Your comment is not productive. It attempts to substitute emotion, misplaced
empathy, and ultimately social shaming in place of a discussion of the
linguistic and economic issues that this Redis affair is surfacing.

Your post amounts to a ban on criticism, on made on the grounds that it might
make people feel bad. It's an attempt to end discussion, not further it. Much
like proprietary software licensing, this approach has been tried many times
before and has seen limited success.

~~~
scrollaway
Nonsense. I don't have a problem with people criticizing Commons Clause, I
have a problem with people acting like Antirez & redis labs are the worst
people on earth for choosing it, when they've in fact contributed so much to
open source.

You know what's not productive? Lacking empathy. Lacking tact. Lacking
decency. You wanna have a discussion on Commons Clause, there's a perfectly
respectable thread two posts over on Drew DeVault's blog post.

~~~
quotemstr
> I don't have a problem with people criticizing Commons Clause

Okay, but...

> You wanna have a discussion on Commons Clause, there's a perfectly
> respectable thread two posts over

... you _do_ , evidently, have a problem with discussing the Commons Cause:
you want to sequester this discussion into its own thread despite the Commons
Clause very much on-topic here. You are attempting to smear critics of Redis's
use of the Commons Clause by claiming that criticism amounts to treating CC's
proponents like "the worst people on earth". This tactic does not lead to the
kind of discussion that enlightens or convinces. It lacks tact and has no
place here.

~~~
scrollaway
My post meant to say that there's reasonable discussion out there I don't have
a problem with. Your post however, I have a problem with, as with the tone of
many people in this thread.

It's inappropriate and it is the tone I've seen of people who have driven
various open source maintainers to burnout and much worse. So yeah, I have a
fricking problem with that.

------
scj
If a project is licensed "BSD + antithetical_term" or "Apache +
antithetical_term", then the names of BSD and Apache should not be invoked.

They are free to make a RedisLab license though.

~~~
antirez
Redis core is just "BSD", nothing attached.

------
esterly
Best to check the source, license unchanged:
[https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/COPYING](https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/COPYING)

Thank you Salvatore for Redis, it has benefited so many projects.

~~~
papaf
This should be the top rated comment.

I wish people would put the pitchforks away, and acknowledge the challenges of
funding a successful Open Source project.

------
rauhl
> An example of such module is RediSearch: it was AGPL and is now going to be
> Apache + Common Clause.

Sounds to me like the right thing to do here for Free Software proponents is
to download the latest AGPL RediSearch, fork it and continue development.

~~~
codingdave
HN needs a feature to say, "Hey! We haven't talked in forever, wanna catch
up?" when we notice comments from people we worked with many years ago but
haven't talked to in forever.

------
_hyn3
Closely related: "The Commons Clause will destroy Open Source"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818407)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
As the author of that article, I want to clarify that I was aware that Redis
core was going to continue to be available as BSD and incorporated that
information into my article. antirez, if you have any comments or corrections
I'd be happy to include them in the article.

------
zimbatm
Even if Redis were to change license, the ones who would be to blame are the
big cloud providers that re-package OSS products and rent them without giving
anything back. They are milking the work out of these projects, taking only
the opportunity to make money out of it.

I remember talking to Elastic and they had a similar issue where AWS would
take their product, package it and not give anything back (money or patches).

Obviously it's permitted by the license, it doesn't mean that it's right.

~~~
prepend
Why would this tweak the developers. Isn’t this precisely what the license
they chose was made for to include and allow?

In this case Amazon functions like a hosting company. So would you be
surprised if a hardware vendor automated the install and patching of Elastic?
They’re basically just installing OSS for end users.

------
radus
I think that this clears up questions about redis itself, but doesn't address
the concern than future development will be focused on new modules rather than
the core - akin to Google Play Services vs. Android.

~~~
chii
> doesn't address the concern than future development will be focused on new
> modules rather than the core

which is a very valid thing to do, since dev costs money.

~~~
radus
I'm not arguing that, and am personally not outraged by it, but in that
context I do understand what seems to be a sense of betrayal on the part of
OSS stalwarts, even as redis remains BSD licensed.

------
leshow
IMO people in the original thread had a pretty good understanding that Redis
core was going to have the same license, and some of the modules RL developed
would be proprietary (sorry, "source-available").

I think many people are just plain unhappy with that situation, no
misunderstanding. I read comparisons drawn between android, taking more and
more out of the open source core into proprietary modules, among others.

------
allengeorge
It was pretty clear to me on reading the RedisLabs page that Redis itself
would be BSD licensed.

And, FWIW, I totally sympathize with the motivations behind their decision. I
suspect we'll see variations of this in a variety of projects (if not module
licensing, then enterprise-only features, reduced work in the open-source
version, etc.)

~~~
_hyn3
> It was pretty clear to me on reading the RedisLabs page that Redis itself
> would be BSD licensed.

The page has been updated since the original announcement.

------
relaunched
The underlying clarification makes sense, sort of. Is it correct to say that,
"These specific modules were developed solely by Redis Labs and are free of
any open source contributions."

I understand that the previously licensed versions of the modules will retain
there old license and people can choose to contribute or not, on a go forward
basis (based on the common clause). However, if FOSS contributions were made
(in mass), it still seems a little unctuous.

------
Animats
Isn't this what Google pulled with Android? First it was open source. Then
there were closed source Play Store Services. Then Google products required
the Play Store services. Then third-party Android distributions stopped
working. Now you do what Google tells you to do and pay them what they want to
be paid to use Android.

------
actuator
This still doesn't sound good. Even I don't like the fact that AWS is
extremely bad at giving back to the community but it is not like doing things
like this will make people use RedisLabs. Infact, I will be wary of using
these modules for the fear of getting locked with a vendor.

I have used both Elasticache and RedisLabs and can say both have their
advantages and annoyances. Elasticache is way easier to set up and configure.
RedisLabs puts a lot of artificial restrictions which you have to work around.
Also, their pricing model is kind of screwed up. The only major problems I
have seen with Elasticache are: Locked APIs, no way to scale instance once
created with live traffic, A-Z failover sucks and no persistence.

------
ummonk
>We at Redis Labs are sorry for the confusion generated by the Creative Common
page, and my colleagues are working to fix the page with better wording.

So I'm not the only one mixing up "Creative Commons" with "Commons Clause".

------
ChristianBundy
Small nitpick: the "most permissive license ever" is the FPL/0BSD:
[https://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0](https://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0)

------
hannob
Seems a severe case of "we tried really hard to obfuscate our words with
marketing bullshit speak and then it backfired and we got a shitstorm instead,
because noone understoond what we were really trying to say".

------
DickScarington
RedisLabs needs to clearly mark which of the following versions of these
modules are freely redistributable as part of a larger project or service.

    
    
      neural-redis BSD
      RediSearch AGPL
      rediSQL AGPL-3.0
      ReJSON AGPL
      Redis AGPL
      redis-cell MIT
      Redis-ML AGPL
      redis-timerseries AGPL
      cthulhu BSD
      rebloom AGPL
      redis-cuckoofilter MIT
      redis-roaring MIT
      redis-tdigest MIT
      Session MIT
      countminsketch AGPL
      topk AGPL
      ReDe MIT
      commentDis MIT

------
smarnach
Just as a curiosity, Redis Labs is offering a hosted Memcached service, so
they are a cloud provider profiting from open-source software they did not
significantly contribute to. Just saying. (More seriously, I think the only
mistake they made was communicating this license change badly, and with too
much whining about how unfair it is that people do what the license explicitly
allows them to do.)

~~~
antirez
It's a proxy that targets Redis actually.

------
arminiusreturns
BSD: Freedom for the developer

GPL: Freedom for the user

You've made your choice.

------
welder
This Redis-compatible alternative is also BSD licensed:

[https://github.com/ideawu/ssdb](https://github.com/ideawu/ssdb)

And it doesn't require the dataset fit in RAM.

------
js2
antirez: I understand your frustration and don’t mean to take away from the
message, but please consider removing “fake news” from the wording. It
unnecessarily politicizes the post and really leaves a bad taste.

“Fake news” is the term of art that politicians are using to criticize _true_
stories that they don’t like.

In this case, you’re trying to correct an actual falsehood. The spreading of
falsehoods and their being difficult to correct is as old as time and nothing
new to this era.

Thank you for listening, and for Redis, as always.

~~~
antirez
Thanks, I removed fake news because I've the feeling that in US it is used by
right-wing people, here in Italy it's the current government that is the
master of fake news and is used by our left-wings to criticize what they do.
In the doubt I changed the wording. I did not expect the term to be political.

~~~
protomyth
_I 've the feeling that in US it is used by right-wing people_

No, both sides love using the term about anything the other side says.

~~~
antirez
Ok, good reason to avoid this term. Indeed here it's happening as well...
instead of understanding that the point is always to verify the information
and their sources, "fake news" is becoming a quick way to dismiss what other
people are saying, without actually bringing any more source.

~~~
protomyth
Its actually getting pretty hard to write anything these days without someone
getting offended (witness the message you are replying to).

In a lot of ways, I really don't blame the current political climate, because
the US has seen way worse (read up on the US 1800 Presidential Election). I
actually blame poor applications of algorithms to what folks view. The bias
caused not only by the beliefs of the person training the box and the
professional poster's ability to learn how to manipulate the results (the next
generation of SEO) has increasingly made twitter and facebook painful to use.
Add a large bit of tribalism that is baked right into humanity and you have a
lot of fun. Further strain through the idea that a lot of companies won't even
just let the users pick accounts they always want to see regardless of the
beliefs of the provider, and you get a added bit of helpless feeling in the
populace.

Which makes writing a pain. I've seen some folks take offense at grant
applications that are basically some of the most dry reading you will find. It
once was a don't use this era's forbidden words (e.g. the word "empower" had a
very strange evolution in grants). Now its memes.

------
carapace
(What I want to know is how does that #$%^ing page hijack the font even in
Reader Mode!? WTF! I want serif body fonts goddamnit.)

~~~
mrob
The body text is contained in a <pre> tag with newlines for paragraphs instead
of the correct <p> tags. You can force Firefox to respect your font choice by
adding a font:inherit to the <pre>'s css with the developer tools. This will
break pages with correctly used <pre> tags.

~~~
carapace
Thank you! You're too kind.

------
misterbowfinger
> I think that Redis Labs Common Clause page did not provide a clear and
> complete information, but software companies often do communication errors

In their defense, many programmers can be so spiteful and cynical that
basically nothing could've been done to change this "communication error."

It's helpful that Salvatore clarified, but I suspect that there are many who
won't care or won't be convinced. The headline is all they needed to trip
their "GTFO" line.

Personally, I think the move was fine. There are much worse companies out
there.

