I also find it interesting that the BSD license enables this 3rd party company to fork Redis and build closed source commercial software on top of it. One of the trade offs to consider when licensing a project.
As user of commercial software I am fine with it, not so sure if FOSS advocates at large will be so happy when only non-copyleft licenses survive and we are back in the shareware/pd libraries days.
Why do we assume closed-source software vendors contribute nothing back?
Speaking as an employee at a company that produces a closed-source software product that uses open-source libraries, I've contributed plenty back to various libraries, including publishing some of my own.
Libraries with permissive licenses get more users, and more users mean more opportunities for receiving contributions. Something like GPLv2 is really only truly effective at soliciting contributions that it wouldn't have received otherwise if there's no viable alternative.
Or to give another example, Rust is dual-licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 and MIT. This permissive license made it really easy for lots of people (including myself) to contribute to it. If it were released instead using the GPL, it would likely be a shadow of the language it is today, if even still alive at all.
when you're contributing to GPL software, you don't need your employer's permission for it to be upstreamed. If they release the code, and don't violate the GPL, then there's nothing the employer can do to stop it from going upstream.
Yes, you do; if you are contributing to it, you need to have exactly that permission. If you are working on a derivative, you need that permission before you can contribute it to anyone else, including upstream.
> If they release the code
Plenty of people work on internal code for their employers, so this is not a given.
Yes you do. Except the permission in this case is "permission to use the library" in the first place, which is a much higher bar than permission to upstream changes to a permissively-licensed library because using a GPL library has much farther-reaching implications than merely contributing changes back.
Like companies staying away from Linux or GCC? It's debatable if these projects would have been as successful using MIT/BSD.
Companies having problems with GPL is a problem of companies and not a problem of the license. If the library you want is GPL, then why blame the project and not your company's legal department?
Thanks!