The person who needs a Redis replacement but isn't interested in selling something that isn't core to their business and wants some assistance in the development from other people who are like minded.

They may or may not be a fool but their are more returns than just licensing fees for such a project prestige and it's effect on hiring for a company. Developer happiness. Other similar intangibles.

Here’s two I found with a simple search of github.

https://github.com/yinqiwen/ardb https://github.com/yongman/tidis

No idea if they’re any good. Ardb looks interesting.

It's an in-memory key-value store. Its primary function is to let transient processes not have to hit the disk to update state. Go ahead and write one this weekend, in that shiny new language that you're interested in, and then finish it up by adjusting the redis bindings of a popular CMS to work with your daemon as well.

You don't have to write a replacement, just fork Redis and continue from there.

A collaboration between the very cloud providers this seems to be a rant against?

BSD is more liberal in what it allows other developers to do. GPL is more liberal in what it guarantees the end users of the software, which is the point of the GPL. Either is more liberal than purpose-limiting licenses.