Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

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>At it's core, this is fundamentally about property rights. The owners of the Redis copyright are well within their right to license their property in any way they see fit.

They absolutely are. And I'm free to say that their license is ridiculous and do my best to warn others about the potential pitfalls of their license.

>You could go build your own infrastructure software, of course, that is a valid path forward. But will it be of the same quality at the same (or similar) cost?

Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't matter. If Redis continues down this path, then enough developers are going to stop using Redis that any free alternative, even though it might start off weaker, will quickly become the superior option. Look at MySQL vs. MariaDB. Or OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. In both cases, Oracle (no coincidence that it's Oracle in both cases) took over a very popular, well established open source project and engaged in license shenanigans. In both cases, the community rebelled, forked the project, and the fork quickly superseded its parent.

>Will someone provide an alternative to Redis out of disdain for this? Probably. But it will take years, if not longer, to reach feature, stability, and therefore market parity.

Not true. You have to remember that the new license only applies to Redis going forward. I'm free to take my copy of the old Redis codebase, fork it into something, say, NuCache, and hack on that to try to keep up with and surpass Redis. That's exactly what happened with the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork. That's exactly what happened with MySQL/MariaDB fork. And if redis continues with its ill-advised policy, that's what will happen here.

> Not true. You have to remember that the new license only applies to Redis going forward.

At the risk of repeating myself all over this thread, I feel the need to emphasize that the new license does _not_ apply to Redis proper, which, in the words of the post, "is, and always will remain, an open source BSD license."

Full disclosure: Am a Redis Labs employee, although not here in any official capacity.

Sure. The same argument applies to the "enterprise modules", which until today everybody assumed would always remain under an open source BSD license.

Your boss has bait-and-switched once now. That's enough for everybody who cares to start risk managing future similar behaviour.

I'm very curious to see if this stands in court, since "consulting" can be considered similar to repairing and there are laws in many countries that restrict a manufacturer's right to limit repairs and who performs them.

> Not true. You have to remember that the new license only applies to Redis going forward. I'm free to take my copy of the old Redis codebase, fork it into something, say, NuCache, and hack on that to try to keep up with and surpass Redis.

True! But that means today's Redis is in maintenance mode, with all new commercially-relevant features covered under the new license.

True, but that assumes that Redis is the only one capable of coming up with commercially relevant features. If the community fork of Redis gets commercially relevant features, then Redis will have to do work to re-implement them.

Moreover, that assumes that said commercially relevant features are compelling enough for people to upgrade from the unencumbered version of redis that they have to the encumbered version.

This seems like a superior alternative than allowing cloud providers the ability to generate revenue with your product that you receive no portion of. If you're already substantially "losing", there is no harm in doubling down. RedisLabs has nothing to lose by doing this other than people moving to another solution that someone else will need to expend resources and time to develop.

Monetization shouldn't be a four letter word. People need to pay their rent and eat.

I've made some contributions to Django over the years. Some code, a decent amount of documentation, and I like to think I've been useful in bureaucratic roles (I was the release manager for a while, I sit on the security team and technical board, I serve on the board of its sponsoring nonprofit, etc.). Along the way, I've picked up pretty extensive knowledge of Django, inside and out. And I've certainly made money as a result of that!

But I can't imagine sitting down one day thinking "you know, nobody else should be allowed to do what I did". It's a big world with a lot of potential clients and employers out there. There's room for anyone who wants to get good with Django to put that knowledge to use to make a living, and I don't see any justification for trying to stop them.

If this were the standard sort of "we trademarked the name, and you can't use it as the name of your product" that a lot of larger open-source projects do (including Django, FWIW), I'd be more sympathetic. But trying to forbid people offering consulting or hosted "I set it it up for you" type services? That's a massive grab of other people's knowledge and labor, and I can't support it even a little tiny bit.

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