One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it.
https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/
Enhanced version means patched made by AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/
You're entitled to your opinion but your line of reasoning for how MemoryDB for Redis came to exist or the reasoning about why it isn't in upstream Redis is not factual. MemoryDB's architecture uses Amazon's home grown log replication services as pointed out by Werner Vogel in his blog post about MemoryDB[0]. This architecture is fundamentally incompatible with upstream Redis. The real reason why MemoryDB for Redis exists is far less juicy: MemoryDB came about by meeting customers where they were. Customer's love Redis, especially for its non-caching features, but replication is a headache with all the existing solutions today.
Also as far as I know one of the lead committers to Redis is from AWS.
0 - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/11/amazon-memorydb...
There were contributions sent upstream for Elasticsearch bugfixes and enhancements. Some of those PRs are still open, for example [1].
A sampling of additional PRs can be found in this blog post [2].
Further contributions upstream to Apache Lucene have been growing over the years. The new Approximate Nearest Neighbor support in Elasticsearch 8.0 comes from work that was sponsored by Amazon in upstream Apache Lucene [3].
[1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/64513
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr...
I’m a total AWS fanboy, but even I cringe when I read that superficial, customer-centric sound bite. You know who meets people where they are? FOSS maintainers.
“Also as far as I know one of the lead committers to Redis is from AWS”
Conveniently cryptic, what does from AWS mean? Do they still work there? Did they specialize in log replication?
Madelyn Olson, at present an AWS employee, is one of the members of the Redis core team [1]. The invitation was extended because she had "been actively involved in Redis development for several years, contributing numerous changes throughout Redis, including bug fixes and features."
For whatever reason they chose BSD. And now Amazon made some improvements and is not contributing back.
Not sure why anyone is surprised.
But yes, this is the reason I won't work for free on my own or others' BSD or MIT licensed projects.
ianal, but imo, Apache License v2, Mozilla Public License v2, and xGPLs v3 are better at protecting the rights of the consumers (including contributors).
Oracle didn't build their company in the style of AWS Redis, that cloning maneuver. Oracle's database was a pioneer. Oracle didn't get where they are by cloning open source and claiming it as their own. Despite the numerous bad things that can be said about Oracle's culture, that's not one of the key negatives about Oracle.