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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

I like Andrew, but I think that this way of telling the story does not match the reality of the BSD license. With the BSD license, there are many potential forks of a project (with potentially different licenses) that compete at the same time in the "market" of the user base. Who puts the best developments, leads the race.

When I stepped back from Redis, I formally left it in the hands of the Core Team the was constituted by Redis Inc. (the one that included three Redis Labs programmers, one from AWS, one from Alibaba), but this was a formal act from my side: with the BSD license any third party can fork, change name, continue the project with a different trajectory and with different goals.

BSD code is a common good, and everybody can impress new directions, if willing to do so.

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Hi antirez. I like you too. I essentially agree with you, but I think you are underestimating the importance of network effects of users herding to one particular branch of the tree.

My blog post is an appeal for users to choose one branch over another.

This ignores the fact that the brand matters, though. If I fork postgres, nobody is going to just start using my fork over the official software, because the two aren't nearly the same. One has people behind it, the other doesn't.

Yes, it may end up that Redict has the backing of the community, and Redis falls behind, but we shouldn't act like all the mindshare isn't currently with Redis (the brand).

Branding is important but it's not Coca-Cola and we are not normal customers of something. I believe that in the end who wins is who provides technical excellence and a license that works for the use case. The reality is that most of the times nobody wants to put substantial work into OSS projects for free (I understand the reasons), and I don't agree with this post when Andy says that projects can be set in maintenance mode just doing minimal work to take them frozen, even when they are mature projects.

Moreover the current situation with Redis is not closed-but-maintained VS forks-possibily-without-development-force, because the SSPL is a quite open license. To put our destiny in the hand of what OSI approves or not is crazy IMHO. Actually for OSS to be viable in the future, we likely need many other licenses based on copyleft, that allows new projects developers to say, OK, I can use an open license because I have some protection from megacorps. Don't get fooled by a minority of strong voices, if you check Hacker News comments about Redis licese change, you will see that at this point many, many folks get that.

Stallman was now almost erased from collective memory but with GPL what happened was exactly what was happening now with SSPL. Initially copyleft was used, and later stronger copyleft was used in successive versions / modifications of the license, like AGPL. So this problem is not new and people a the core of the Free Software movement addressed them in a very similar way decades ago. But now suddenly if a small company goes along the same lines, that is a violation of everything, while big companies like Amazon posing a major threat to future of OSS is fine.

I agree with basically everything you say, and I agree that developers should be able to choose the SSPL, because usually the choice is between SSPL-and-maintained and open-but-languishing.

I think many people's disagreement here is that Redis broke its promise to always remain BSD (https://redis.com/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/).

I don't think you can say "yes but you can just fork it", because that ignores the reality that, sure, maybe eventually that fork will win, but right now the main fork (Redis) has a huge head start.

Con't comment on the fact that what was promised was not maintained, since I'm away for four years at this point. But I believe that in business sometimes, as the situation changes, or correction for monopoly positions are not likely to be taken by governments in the near future, changes are more or less forced. This is just speculation on my side as I was very little involved in the business side already when I was part of the company. Now zero involvement for four years. But the fact here is that many OSS projects needed to go towards this path one after the other. So I believe it is more useful to understand why they are willing to take this risk, what are the conditions that determine the bizarre fact that the main player in the development takes a marginal part of the cut.

> changes are more or less forced.

I agree, that's why I don't ever want to say that something "will always be X". Otherwise people might be upset when I have to break the promise.

I'm not saying this to you as the creator of Redis, by the way (you already said you've been away too long for that), just as one random HN commenter to another.

Yep, these are problematic statements, since what they actually mean is "as long as I'm in charge" from the POV of project managers, CEOs, ... depending on the context. And even when people don't change conditions change. Indeed it is much better to say something like: we will take the BSD license as long as possible. And actually it must be observed that Redis was one of the latest to change the license.

Yeah, exactly. And people take them at face value ("you promised it'd always be so"), without realizing that, over long enough time frames, all promises will be broken.

I guess on one hand, be careful what you promise, on the other, be careful what you believe.

Disclosures: I work for Amazon, but my positions as a long time Free Software advocate and copyleft supporter are my own. I do not speak for Amazon here. I served on the board of directors for Software Freedom Conservancy at its inception, but now I am only a financial supporter in an individual capacity. I do not speak for SFC either.

The SSPL isn’t the same as the GPL. The GPL is a tool that was invented to advance the Free Software movement agenda: protecting the freedoms of users of software. The SSPL does not do that. It protects the interests of companies that want to maintain exclusivity in offering software services.

This post from SFC can explain the problems with this far better than I can in a HN post: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

My parallel is between AGPL and SSPL. The SSPL protects from companies like Amazon: it can protect other companies, or can protect hackers that don't want to see their work exploited (and make zero profits from their stuff). It's a tool. I don't know if I would use it, but it makes totally sense IMHO.

It's simple to see things from the POV of other smaller but yet VCs-backed companies only, when evaluating the damage of Amazon. Things are actually more complex. For instance OpenRedis was one of the very first Redis SAAS services ran by the same folks that contributed to Redis in the first days, that provided the logo and so forth. Guess who is also impacted by the Amazon monopoly?

The needs of those who want to capture the majority of the value they create when they author digital goods like software haven’t been the concern of either the Free Software movement nor the Open Source movement. These movements are rooted in the nature of digital goods: they cannot be “exploited” (like strip mining for extracting materials from a mountaintop does) because they are naturally abundant. “Create more value than you capture” was the mantra.

The “free rider problem” has been used to justify licenses that protect the interests of software authors since before we called it “open source”, long before Amazon was made a scapegoat.

“The free rider problem is when someone is allowed to package free software in non-free or less-free bundles, and that's precisely the area of the GPL that I thought I needed to do something about in making the Aladdin license”—Peter Deutsch, October 1998 [1]

The point I am trying to make is that legal tools like the Aladdin Free Public License and SSPL do not protect FOSS, or advance the social movements that have produced a bountiful commons of digital public goods. Those that craft those tools and apply them to their works have every right to do so, but they do so because they choose to do so, not because a company like Amazon “forced them” to.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041013082602/http://devlinux.o...

The SSPL is useful exactly for the reasons you outlined, mainly. To preserve the ability to make money of the original authors is just a side effect. The SSPL point from the point of view of the Free Software Movement is (whatever was the reason for the creation of such license): people will start to write less and less free software (it is happening already) if they see their software exploited by megacorps. As less free system software is produced, the society captures less and less value. It's exactly the same idea as AGPL. Also if the original authors have a viable income, they no longer need to do things as a side project, and can write more and better free software, so also to avoid Amazon stealing the potential money output is a direct way to maximize the free software main goal.

There is more Free Software produced today than ever before, even if some firms are deciding they no longer want to produce it. There are far more who are continuing to add to the commons of public software unnoticed; those who publicly quit get far more attention.

I’m all about increasing the private provision of public goods. I don’t think that licenses that give firms exclusive rights to monetize the goods they produce advances that goal. That’s just the status quo of firms being landlords of their intellectual property, extracting rents from others who want to enjoy them. That’s just proprietary software, which is clearly a useful thing for society to have.

The thing that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth is when you apply your resources to produce common goods, and then one party declares that you are somehow a “bad actor” while changing the terms to enclose the goods and exclude you from enjoying that common good.

Luckily with FOSS, those who are excluded can move their efforts elsewhere. But the future goods will not be the same. And I think that’s a shame.

SSPL protects vendors from competition of likes of Amazon, cool, but is this what Open Source is about ? I belive first and foremost Open Source (term) is first and foremost about value for Users of Open Source Software.

As a vendor/developer you surely can chose not to provide software users some freedoms, but when lets not call it Open Source

More in this https://peterzaitsev.com/open-source-perspectives/

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