Classical "bait-and-switch". Bait users and developers with a fully-open and freely-licensed project, wait for it to gain enough market share, then switch the license to a more restrictive one...
In a few days, a clone called "Libredis" or "Freedis" will probably appear that the community and developers will move to.
So yeah, it might be annnoying buit in the long term it won't matter much anymore (same as the company)
Are you talking about the developers who willingly contributed code under the BSD licence? The same BSD licence that says that it's completely fine for the company to do this?
It's such a strange pattern that plays out again and again: developers insist that a permissive license is the way to go, until somebody (or company) they don't like exercises their rights.
Usually what said developers actually wanted was the GPL, because they realise in retrospect that they didn't want the company to be allowed to do this. But they didn't like it because it restricts recipients rights. So they want people to have those rights as long as they never actually exercise them? It's all very confusing.
I say this having contributed to and released my own projects under both permissive and copyleft licenses — based on what I'm actually willing for people to be able to do with the code.
To a large part it is probably simply uninformed developers choosing permissive licenses, because some of their favorite projects do so as well and that is what they know as "open source". The thought seems to be along the lines of:
"I am going to make it open source! What license was that again? Ah MIT license! OK, done!"
Only later, when a project has gained traction they might or might not realize that MIT license allows people to do things they would not like. But by then they need to ask all the contributors for a license change and it typically doesn't happen.
Often the people also think they must not upset companies, if companies uses their software. Sometimes there is also financial motivation behind that. Big players invest into that project directly or conferences or other things, giving the people involved in the project some fame. See for example project Jupyter. One look at the $ponsors and you know why they will never change to a copyleft license.
That is alright, but people should not be surprised, when the rug is pulled away under their feet and big tech creates some closed source alternative or derived work under a different license, that integrates with their other stuff and that the original authors do not see a penny of, even if millions of people use it.
When I decide on software to use for myself, and I have a good choice between something copyleft and something MIT or similarly licensed, I usually go for the copyleft one, because I have no interest in the corporate involvement.
I think for most devs, software licenses are not a core competency. Most devs interact with licensing only occasionally, if that, and they may not have a good grasp of the licenses they work under (or if they do, they may forget parts of their understanding later).
Talking about bait and switch for Redis makes no sense.
Redis is a 15 years old project started in 2009 by Salvatore 'Antirez' Sanfilippo. He worked on his startup, then at VMWare, them at Pivotal, and only joined Redis Labs (created in 2011) in 2015.
In 2018 Redis Labs changed the license of their modules and Antirez published http://antirez.com/news/120 In 2020 he quit.
Anyway I agree with the conclusion: Redis will be forked, the fork will win and Redis Labs will become irrelevant.
I'm curious about something: I suppose Salvatore still owns the copyright for most of the code? The old license does include his copyright, up to 2020: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/7.2/COPYING So I think this change couldn't have been done without his explicit consent? Or did he transferred his rights to RedisLabs or a foundation?
What your link points to is the BSD license, so yes, he owns the copyright but also gave everyone permission to use and modify the code as they see fit.
There is nothing that prevents anyone to use this code in combination with proprietary code and sell the resulting project for money. If he didn't want that he would have chosen a different license.
Actually, if i read the below correct, on the server-side side license part, they want any company to publish the source code of any Redis-as-a-Service product is being developed:
If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version
available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source
Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the
terms of this License. Making the functionality of the Program or
modified version available to third parties as a service includes,
without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the
functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a
computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or
primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or
offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the
Program or modified version.
Which sounds pretty good and is the complete opposite of what Mongo or Elastic are doing.
Yeah, I don't like that we're at the point that we need licenses like this, but in a world where AWS has decided to "disrupt" the methods for open source monetization that the open source community has generally agreed upon as being in the spirit of open source, I don't see any other option.
The methods in question are not the ones that the open source community has agreed upon, they are ones that the FOSS community had identified as being non-viable, with detailed reasoning, before the OSI was even founded. The fact that a handful of founders and VCs decided to ignore this established wisdom does not constitute an general agreement by the “open source community”.
The consensus that simply selling FOSS software (and renting access to it is not substantially different in this regard) is not a viable method of monetizing FOSS as an independent business centered around a particular piece of FOSS because large established firms with established hardware, professional services, and other associated lines of business and the ability to integrate it with their other offerings would eat your lunch was established by, at the latest, the mid-1990s.
> Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.
So, this is just a money grab scheme because Redis finds it an absurd that cloud providers are offering Redis hosting, in their minds Redis Company should be the only one offering Redis hosting.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe this is a shotgun shot to their foot and this will result in Redis dying or even drastically reducing its market-share.
I don’t think this is about bait-and-switch, I believe (like some other comments mentioned) they want a bigger part of the pie. It’s same story as what Elasticsearch went through, this an understandable move.
It’s bait and switch to community developers who contributed free labor to a for profit company for what is now either a fork or a more restrictive license
The version they contributed to is still available under the same permissive license that was in effect when they were contributing the code.
The license change only affects the code written in the future and now people can change their mind about contributing.
That seems fair to me.
Maybe you think that morally the license should never change but there is no clause in the license to prevent changing the license, so that would not be a reasonable expectation.
The company Redis only adopted the Redis project (and changed its name) a few years ago. Redis started as a community project and was run that way for almost a decade.
All clients will still be Open Source and a lot were initially written by the community as far as I'm aware, so they're actually still asking for free labor there.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how open source licenses work. I am completely sick of this take. It’s intellectually dishonest, or extremely ignorant.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity
Reading the other comments the switch does make more sense, if you want to freeload off of the work redis has done for the project then you’ll have to join whatever community remains on the forked version, and anyone who cares about this kind of stuff should probably understand what’s permissible in the previous license, which clearly includes it being switched out like this
Why do you think almost zero users are affected by this change? If a business was built on hosting redis or providing managed redis, that company is now inviable, no?
note: I am not disagreeing with the license change, just asking why you think nobody is affected.
If a company is built on hosting redis - and is now unviable, they should be pretty incentivized to fork the previous version and maintain it themselves. Isn’t that the power of open source?
I doubt there were many (if any) non-AWS businesses that were affected. To earn a profit you need to continue to work, I don’t feel bad when a corporation is negatively affected after their leeching or rent seeking is disturbed. Even if it was previously acceptable behavior.
That's exactly the point. Companies providing managed services on top of popular opensource projects are not contributing to the respective OSS project at the scale at which they've been benefitting commercially from these projects.
Not sure what exactly the point is. The OP is saying almost 0 users are affected and this is not true. I was only saying that the license change affects quite some people. Whether rightly or wrongly is not mine to debate (I have nothing to do with redis!).
Do you really think they planned this from the start, intending to change the license as soon as enough people use it? To me, that's reading malice into a situation that could equally be explained by changing circumstances over time, which does not meet the definition of bait and switch
We need new licenses that let developers get more of the pie because no one is benefiting from the GPL in the age of cloud computing. Who cares that Linux is open source when I'm locked in aws and can never leave? What does it matter to users when their data is stolen to train Ai models and they don't even know what's in it?
Redis picked SSPL instead and cited those reasons for why
"It is based on the AGPL, with a modified Section 13 that requires that those making SSPL-licensed software available to third-parties (modified or not) as part of a “service” must release the source code for the entirety of the service, including without limitation all “management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available”, under the SSPL. MongoDB is the publisher of this license. They have a FAQ about the license https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-l..."
Can't developers sue this company for false advertising ?
This started off as one thing and ended up being something else. They probably at any point did not hint about changing license in the future, just guessing.
For any open projects , couldn't dev. request for keeping the license as is or Free(or whatever relevant) before letting their code merged.
This may sound illogical to someone who is a domain expert, but this is just a dumb question from someone who has almost 0 clue on this topic.
Sue is probably not the better description of the thoughts I had. Let's say, can't the developers do anything in an act of retaliation? Given that so much work came from the community.
> ... advertised
Yeah. Wrong choice of word. Using one kind of license to get the attention of public is in spirit akin to advertising(that was the line of thought I had). I am not doubling down on stupified things I said, I am tryina explain what I thought.
So... if I can re-ask the question , I take my dumb-comment yesterday back and ask it like this :
can't the community do in act of retaliation against these acts ?
can't we mandate community approval for license updates when the community is also participating in contribution and popularizing its usage
I do not have anything against Redis. What is going to happen to the future of FOSS and software in general , if once open(open source and Libre) projects end up walled or proprietary etc.
It's not viral enough. It's easy for AWS to host a version of an AGPL project and just point to the source code. Cloud hosted instances are the primary business models for a lot of projects. The solution is to add a requirement that any platform the software is hosted on also has to be open source.
What's your outcome? Are you actually asking for a "No AWS" license?
AGPL is fine - it ensures that open source projects remain open source. If a vendor hosts an AGPL project as is (unlikely imho) and is able to point to the existing repo for source, then that's great. If they make changes to the code, they must also make that source available through a compatible license.
> The solution is to add a requirement that any platform the software is hosted on also has to be open source.
Even that is a somewhat temporary hack. The SSPL spreads to:
> "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available"
and sure, AWS and Azure definitely don't want to open source all of that stuff now, or for the next decade or two.
But that's not their competitive advantage; that's their datacentres and their sheer gigantic size and deep pockets, making them a "safer" partner for enterprises. National governments won't run a critical service on Redis Cloud when Azure Redis is available, even if the software stacks were 100% identical.
It's quite possible to imagine a cloud provider in 2040 that does run a fully OSS stack and is able to sell SSPL software on a massive scale without paying a cent to the original developers. Doesn't even have to be a new actor, Amazon could spin-off a separate experimental organization for that purpose.
If that were to happen, could another license solve the problem?
> Cloud hosted instances are the primary business models for a lot of projects.
No one is entitled to their business models, no matter how noble their goals.
It's quite simple: if you believe in the ethos of Free Software, you need to be prepared to the possibility of other people taking your work, doing modifications and even profiting from it. That is the whole point.
If you don't want "evil corporations" from taking your code, then keep it closed and say it so. But don't be dishonest with others when you say that you "support open source" while not ready to walk the walk.
People are struggling with what I think of as the pyrrhic victory of open source software. Vast swathes of computing is done with OSS, yet there is very little software freedom for actual people, because it’s all running in megacorps data centres with all the data locked away.
Essentially, the intention of copyleft to increase software freedom, which is the overall mission, has foundered. It is didn’t work and need revising.
Smaller companies are an ally of convenience here.
No, the problem is that people conflating "free as in speech" with "free as in beer". Data is locked in megacorps because people are giving away their freedoms in exchange of convenience.
> the overall mission, has foundered.
Absolutely not. I've never had so much freedom on how to do computing.
I don't think the intention of OSS was to make computing more free for a tiny elite who are will to live with quite a lot of inconvenience. Maybe I'm wrong. I certainly don't think the average computer user is more free in their software use than they were, say, 10 years ago. Or 20.
1) The average user has a lot more choices of free systems to use. That they still prefer to lock themselves to a closed platform is not a failure of FOSS.
2) in the worst case analysis, FOSS trickle downs to people. Eg: WhatsApp could only have started if we had FOSS. It may have been colored by Facebook, but at the end of the day it was thanks to it that the "non-elite" managed to disrupt the telcos and offer messaging for free.
It absolutely is a failure of FOSS. It was supposed to be viral, leading to greater software freedom for all. The strategy has been countered and subverted by running FOSS on servers people don’t control.
Half the world’s communication being under the control of one company with a dictator is hardly a success.
Are we arguing over "freedom from" and "freedom to"?
I don't like that so many people preferred to go for a closed solution and I certainly don't like virtual monopolies, but people are there out of their own volition.
30 years ago, there was no real alternative for Windows on the desktop. All productivity tools were closed. Today, people buy iPhones and sign up to Instagram/TikTok because they want to.
What would you propose, to have Stallman pointing a gun to everyone who didn't attend a install fest?
> What would you propose, to have Stallman pointing a gun to everyone who didn't attend a install fest?
If I can propose wild things, then I'll propose that something forces big hosting companies to share their code.
And data freedom is an important issue that has a huge overlap with software freedom. I like the EU's movement toward forcing export and interoperability for big entities.
The more things you list that are before the year(s) they used as reference points, the more you support their argument that software freedom peaked a while ago and has been going downhill in major ways in more recent years.
My point is that I can continue with the timeline, and it will trend towards more freedom, not less:
- Google's original Android was more open than any of the alternatives. And even if Google went on the direction of closing Android and putting functionality around its Play Services, there are a good number of alternatives that build on Android and make it completely free. The number of devices that can run LineageOS/Murena/Linux is going up, not down.
- All social media was closed, and now we are seeing an explosion of open source projects. The number of people using it is going up, not down.
- Self-hosting software is easier than ever.
I fail to see any time interval where the availability of free software has been reduced. All it takes is a motivated individual.
Basically everyone who complains about proprietary/closed software and platforms and claims to "support" FOSS but never put their money where their mouths are.
Every company that pays through the nose for their cloud hosting, but does not allocate anything in their budget to support the downstream projects.
Every owner of a pricey Apple device who claims "they need something that just works" but never spared a few dollars per month to contribute to the development of free alternatives.
If a fraction of these people realized that quality free software takes money to be developed, and were willing to invest in it, the FOSS funding issue would be solved. The problem is, people are not willing to pay for R&D, they just want to pay for the finished product.
Unless you actively want the support contract with Oracle, there is no reason not to use MariaDB instead.
Debian changed it to the default quite a while ago, and it's full support for mysql compatibility means you sometime don't even notice it (eg "mysql" is starting mariadb client).
Yes, it replaced MySQL in Debian, and many other distros. The only shared web hosting I know about uses it on FreeBSD, etc. It seems to be more widely used then MySQL at this point.
What exactly is the material impact on a developer with this licensing change? There is a tendency these days to sensationalise things without getting to the bottom of it or even reading the whole article.
What did the OSS Redis project promise a developer that it is not going to deliver in the new licensing model?
For me, using OSS means that if I bump into a problem, I can fix it and use, and share the fix. Yes, I've created OSS projects and contributed to others.
It also means that if the people providing the software decide to change the deal to something that is too onerous for me to accept, I have options that don't disrupt the continuity of my business.
If I no longer have those rights, I'm no longer willing to rely on this software.
Unfortunately, it's far from trivial to rip Redis out of a running application environment and they know that.
This kind of change feels like a bait & switch to so many people, because it is a bait and switch.
Now that it has been integrated, and could cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in labor to rip out, they change the deal.
We've been reassured for many years that this is OSS and it will always be OSS and many people relied on that assurance to place a hard and expensive dependency on this software.
That is a betrayal of trust and it's hard for me to understand how people aren't seeing it that way.
How do you think your freedom to “fix it and use, and share the fix” is changing? Unless you’re running a Redis hosting service isn’t it business as usual?
I don’t love the direction that the open source world has been moving in but in terms of practical impact on my work this seems to be minimal. I think the easy money during the VC bubble lead a lot of us to get used to high-quality software not having a plausible business model and we’re going to see a lot more of this, which makes me wonder if OSI could come up with some kind of hybrid license allowing maintainers to get paid but not giving up too much freedom. Otherwise it feels like we might see a move back towards closed-source development.
This is one way to see it. The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally.
It is our obligation as developers to communicate to companies if we want these license changes to happen or not. If you don't like it, don't contribute and invest your time into projects that are not licensed in way that matches your needs and wants.
> The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally.
Legally, sure. That's pretty binary.
But if you claim they have the moral right to do so you need to elaborate on that. Since they had a "social contract" with the community (people who submitted PR's, advocated for Redis, etc.) which a single side has now altered. I don't see how one can do that an claim to be in their moral rights to do so.
We've altered the deal, pray we don't alter it any further...
They haven't taken anything away from the community though. You can still fork it and maintain it going forward. It's the same as if the entire redis team died in a bus crash.
What they did do is decide that in the future, their work won't be as easily taken advantage of.
If you think that your "social contract" has been violated that that is because you are mistaken about the contract you entered into.
This would only be immoral if you were misled or forced, and I'd argue that neither is the case here.
All the contributors gave their explicit permission to use their contribution in the way Redis does.
All contributors had plenty of freedom to spend their energy in projects under a license that specifically prevents what happened with Redis. It is not that they wouldn't have other options.
No they haven't. "The community" submitted under a BSD licence, they literally gave anyone permission to take their code and relicence it under an alternative.
It's not like the BSD version of their code has disappeared. You can still use older versions of Redis that have their changes under BSD.
It sounds like submitters should have gone with GPL or AGPL if they wanted it to remain open source, available with the original licence for commercial use, etc.
> This is one way to see it. The other side of the coin is that this move is totally in their rights, morally and legally.
Morally I would say it depends on contributors. If there haven't been any then sure, but if I contributed a feck-load of code to some project and they slap on a commercial license, I guess I feel somewhat shafted.
You shouldn't. If you contribute to a project under a permissive license that is what you sign up for.
I contributed to projects under permissive licenses myself, there is nothing wrong with it. Being indignant about companies exercising the rights you explicitly granted them is unwarranted though.
You can, and that is ok. It would not help you if you feel shafted, because then the next company comes around and takes your contributions, uses them as intended without giving back and you'd still feel the same.
I think you should not feel
shafted, but if you do there is a simple and obvious solution.
> It is our obligation as developers to communicate to companies if we want these license changes to happen or not. If you don't like it, don't contribute and invest your time into projects that are licensed in way that matches your needs and wants.
The best thing you can do is to fork the project at the commit prior to the license change, and maintain it from that point onwards (and/or contribute to other forks with the same goal).
In a few days, a clone called "Libredis" or "Freedis" will probably appear that the community and developers will move to.
So yeah, it might be annnoying buit in the long term it won't matter much anymore (same as the company)