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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

So if you're a cloud provider that provides generic cloud VMs, with a button to "Install Redis onto VM", is that allowed? What if it's one of hundreds of similar buttons to install various software onto the VM?

What if there's no button, but a user can run `apt-get install redis`? Is that in violation?

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I think it's ambiguous enough that this in itself will drive people away.

That is allowed and fine. What you can't do is, if you are Amazon, release "AWS Sdejt" which is simply a managed wrapper around Redis.

Can you explain how you interpreted the license to say that's fine? Isn't the value of the service "substantially" its ability to run redis? And isn't the package manager a form of distributing redis? (Referring to the shared source modules, not the BSD licensed part)

This is the problem (at least for me) - the wording is vague and open to interpretation, which means if it ever needs to be clarified, it'll need expensive lawyers to get that done.

A reasonable man would say "Of course the value of, say, Digital Ocean's service is not "substantially its ability to run redis" - even though any linux vm customer can run their OS choice's version of 'apt-get install redis'".

But we do not live in a world were a "reasonable man's interpretation" is an acceptable risk-mitigation for a business.

I'm pretty sure there'll be other people who, like me, are considering how best to risk manage the use of redis going forward...

Luckily the core redis server is still open source. It looks like they've taken the nginx plus business model and combined it with shared source.

Why is that allowed and fine? I read this clause to explicitly prohibit that behavior.

My interpretation is you can't charge extra for clicking that button (not a lawyer)

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