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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money.

Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?

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Because then AWS would fork from a version of redis with a more permissive license and only support a subset of functionality moving forward.

They could, but would they? That would mean their offering is less competitive vs anyone providing fully featured Redis.

Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their fork, than to pay royalties forever.

That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has no importance?

Sure they would. AWS's Elasticsearch offering has fewer features than Elastic's offering but is still competitive due to its integration into AWS's other service offerings. The same is true for AWS's Redis offering.

Yes.

They did it with ElasticSearch

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elastic...

And Java

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-corretto-no-c...

And something similar with Mongo DB.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-documentdb-with-...

MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community

Just use AGPL and suddenly the big boys won’t touch you!

They can negotiate a special license just for them.

Dual licenses kind of defeat the one of the purposes of open source which is getting outside developers to contribute to your product. Why should I as an outside developer submit pull requests and be required to assign copyright to you so you can make money selling a proprietary license?

Because everyone using the OSS license still benefits from your contribution? Why contribute to any of these projects now if Amazon is just going to integrate it into AWS for their own profit anyway?

Frankly, open source is more of a distribution model than a way to solicit free work from outside developers. As a developer paid to work on a popular open-source product with paying customers, most of the outside PRs I see are small tweaks that address very specific use cases, not major new functionality. Those are certainly welcome, but those kinds of contributions are not going to make or sustain the product.

AGPL is what they used before. It does nothing vs. Amazon because they don't care if they have to share changes - they can host it anyway

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