Especially when the original announcement was specifically targeting cloud providers, who, afaik, are just running vanilla redis.
If there is anything that we can learn from this, is that a little bit of forethought when putting these announcements out there is required, and blaming this on the readers is not fair.
And the name itself of "Commons Clause" is practically a tiny version of fake news, since it tries to give an "open source" feeling to what is essentially a proprietary license.
As a practical/PR matter, I think Redis Labs have likely shot themselves in the foot. I've been in a low-key debate advocating for Redis Labs over AWS elasticache on an upcoming project; my argument probably just got about 1000% harder, given the anti-RL sentiment I saw on our Slack last night.
(Finally, if you'll forgive me a bit of personal advice, I think for better or worse Redis + your personal brand + RedisLabs are now all somewhat tied together -- I'm not sure how much sense it makes for you to just pay attention to the OSS side of the house...)
Only at the interface level. Elasticache is a heavily forked Redis. There's a reason it's several versions behind.
out of curiosity, do you have any idea what their mods might be?
Oh actually definitely some stuff related to their redis clustering system.
I totally get why, as long as I can compile the addons and run on a server myself I'll be pretty happy.
The thing that's going on here isn't that the page wants you to believe that the thing that changed license is Redis; the page (and Redis Labs' site in general) wants you to believe that they own Redis in some sense.
Redis Labs is essentially doing the same type of thing for Redis that e.g. RedHat or IBM does for OpenStack. They take this FOSS project, add their own secret sauce to it, brand the combined thing as "[our company] [FOSS project name]", and then try as hard as possible to conflate the "[our company] [FOSS project name]" distribution with the FOSS project itself. Because they want you to associate the brand-cachet of the FOSS project with their distribution.
That backfired in this specific instance, because people misinterpreted what Redis Labs was saying regarding "Redis Labs Redis" as applying to "Redis." But it's their whole business strategy, so they can't exactly stop.
The license is very vague. According to this
> a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.
What if I have big online shop with huge catalog and my software value "derives from the functionality of RedisSearch"? Do my only option not to host it at Redis Labs?
Your software might just literally be 99% RedisSearch, but you're not making money from your software (e.g. by selling it); you're making money from operating your software, combined with content (e.g. by using it to facilitate e-commerce transactions.)
You'd be in trouble if you wanted to white-label "your technology" and sell it as a platform for other people to run their own online shops on, because it's not really "your technology" to sell.
But if your play isn't specifically that, then you're fine.
Also,
> Do my only option not to host it at Redis Labs?
this wouldn't be an option. The whole point of this license is that the software "RedisSearch" is owned by Redis Labs. Hosting it with Redis Labs themselves, or not, is irrelevant. You have to license the software (if you're deploying it yourself)—or rely on your DBaaS provider to license it for you (if they're deploying it.)
Basically exactly like a software patent, come to think of it.
But yes, while hoards of people behave in a bit of a crazy manner, it is a known thing, and if you're responsible for public communication, you should understand those quirks and their predictable consequences. And you should realize that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure by just making everything as clear as possible from the beginning.