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Comment by lethedata | Hacker News Reader

I think the long term game works if you look at it from a Broadcom style prospective. You're not looking to snag many users but rather the few very expensive ones who have built themselves around the product. From the Businesses prospective they'll pay the increased prices to avoid moving completely or in the short term during migrations.

To avoid the short term, providers could "buy time" and keep prices low until the project deviates far enough from forks, making migration much harder, then increase prices.

Either way, long term they can end up with a lot of money from a few companies rather than continuing to support many mixed sized companies.

I don't like it either but I can see it working.

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Do those users actually exist, thought?

Broadcom is able to screw over its customers because they have to choose between either reworking a core part of their infrastructure, running legacy code without support (provided you have a perpetual license), or paying a huge license fee. With Redis, the current version is already open-source: you can maintain it yourself, switch to a drop-in replacement community fork, or pay one of the dozens of SaaS companies to run it for you. Switching away from the official Redis flavor can be as simple as a one-line change in your infrastructure recipe. If they increase their prices, why would anyone stay?

I think MySQL is probably a better comparison. After Oracle's acquisition they have been trying quite hard to add vendor lock-in and extract money out of it, but these days MariaDB has essentially made it completely irrelevant. I wouldn't be surprised if the future of Redis looked quite similar.

MariaDB had a chance but most have moved back to MySQL after the fork moved further away

The reason this inevitably faceplants is lack of access to real user feedback.

Invariably, someone looks at the numbers and realizes "We could make way more money if we only catered to the top 2% of our customers!"

Unfortunately, opinions and needs of the top 2% of customers != a generally useful product.

Thus, the reason to try and maintain user volume is better product-market feedback to guide development, instead of revenue.

What are you talking about? At some megacorp I work at, we had a similar situation where some other braindead product changed its license. Even since, there's, on average, 30% engineering position, maintaining the old deprecated version before the license change.

When it comes to large corps, the prices paid for these products is already so large, because of the scale, that it often times makes more sense to employ your own, instead. These kind of decisions are taken all too often. We'll spend a good few sprints exploring possibilities/mapping differences/POCing to more accurately estimate all these findings and their ROI before deciding. This can also include tough migrations. At a previous megacorp; ELK did a nasty? Migrated to OpenSearch.

So, hard no on your take.

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