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Redis was open before the trademark was acquired from antirez by Garantia Data, who then re-branded themselves as RedisLabs, and then as Redis. This was definitely not a predestined outcome, there are plenty of other foundational open source server software that transitioned to a software foundation. While I worked on the redis core team (https://redis.com/blog/new-governance-for-redis/), I advocated to move it to a foundation.

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Foundations don't pay the bills either; see Linkerd.

Yes, but the point is that the project started as, and gained success as, a not-paying-the-bills endeavour. The fact that RedisLabs desires to get enough to pay a bunch of staff is not actually a requirement for redis to exist and thrive, they just happen to own the trademark.

Exactly. Redis (the company) had plenty of opportunity to monetize either a cloud offering or their enterprise offering. They have a lot of cool technology like vector search and time series extensions that people will readily pay for. They could have found a path of moving the core to a foundation and continuing to make money with their added value. They're choosing to get the value they can out of the open-source stack. It might work out well for them, but I can't believe it will be good in the long term for Redis users.

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