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Comment by vmbrasseur | Hacker News Reader

Arguably the largest users of Redis—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—are all among the many sponsors of the Open Source Initiative and each make immense contributions to free and open source software.

Redis Labs is not a sponsor (but is welcome to become one). Despite that, had they come to OSI looking for assistance with this issue we could have helped open discussions between them and their largest users. They did not ask us for help, to the best of my knowledge. Redis Labs' post does not mention what, if any, attempts they made to engage these large users and encourage more contributions before they made the decision to put this software under a proprietary license, and only implies that a lack of contributions was the motivator for the move.

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You start your career later than your siblings. You land your first real job. You scrimp and save to buy your first real set of Christmas presents. Comes the day, and everyone seems grateful. You feel established, for a moment. The others exchange presents, but oddly, not with you. In the end, your hands are empty. Everyone else is okay with this. They make out great.

Giving OSI money isn't giving Redis Labs money. I don't imagine OSI will be sending any of that money Redis Labs' way. On the other hand, OSI's activities will benefit its sponsors. One way: by constraining approved terms to licenses, like ancient permissive licenses, with poor upstart-business potential, but all the permission grants established enterprises require to mulch the remains of dead startups that result.

I'd be willing to bet Redis Labs is contemplating return to ash pretty seriously these days.

More contributions will not solve the problem. They may defer RL's trip into liquidation, but at the expense of a quicker boot out of the top spot on their own project. That, in turn, bodes ill for acquisition. Even if outsiders reduce maintenance and development cost to $0, that's savings, not earnings or recoupment.

Why should the success or failure of VC-funded startups be a concern for open source?

If Redis Labs folds, that's sad for them and I'm sure I'll end up writing some references for people.

But it's only a concern for open source if Redis stops being maintained as a result. Which I seriously doubt would happen; Salvatore built Redis before Redis Labs existed, and I'm sure would land a job at one of those "established enterprises" if they fold.

Maybe we should be more focused on how the VC-funded startup model is actually reinforcing the power of established players, instead of messing around with licenses?

For the same reason that the success or failure of other companies doing open source should be of concern. Company funding and structure get a lot of open source made. Industry involvement supercharged the open source community. But if it won't make money, industry won't do it. Industry will decide whether to do it based on past performances.

VC-funded startups produce a substantial amount of open source. If what we see at the tail end of this funding boom is a bunch of startups doing open source fail structurally, rather than merely by falling short of numbers, VCs will notice. There will be less funding for startups on any kind of open source model. And therefore less open source.

When we look at projects and define success only in terms of project continuity, and not individual outcomes, we dodge the question of why folks should get involved in the first place. Some baseline motivation will always be there from the bottom, from hobbyists, activists, and the obsessed, and the top, where enterprises use open source for cost reduction and cost sharing. Whether anyone shows up in the middle has a huge effect on what open source achieves, as a movement. And to what extent open source represents a viable opportunity to proprietary products and services.

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