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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

Engineers have to eat too.

Nothing wrong with charging for support.

I love passion projects as much as anyone, but there is a reason they are hobbies, and people need to keep a day job. Eventually it does get tiring to do support for free.

Edit:

Ok. I was talking OSS generally. I guess Redis is being bad actor if they are taking OSS work and running away with it to get the money, and not compensating the contributors. That is very wrong. I don't know history on Redis and assumed it was the contributors that founded the company.

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I think the main issue is bait and switch. You start with a license, get lots of external contributors who are working for free, get ecosystem built around it for free and then change because you want to be paid.

I agree.

I'm not sure how nefarious this Redis move was. I guess I was assuming any move from 'free', to 'paid', will be met with some outcry regardless of how seamless they can pull it off.

  Or in other words, it is always a messy transition?

The issue is they took the name with them. If they forked it with a new name no one would have cared.

Bait and switch sounds wrong in this context. It's not like they planned this whole thing fifteen years in advance.

Does it matter if you intended to do something nefarious all along, or if you just now saw an opportunity to be nefarious? All that matters is that you are doing something nefarious.

My issue is the OSS contributors that were not paid for their work, but their work will be monetized now.

That's been going on for 30 years with proprietary BSD forks. That's what they signed up for.

I'd love to be corrected here, but my understanding is that the enterprise support and pro features model can be a pretty good business.

Big deployments generally need really good support and help to overcome scaling challenges. Who better than the library maintainers to offer that, and your customers have deep pockets.

Then on top of that, you run a business which basically creates proprietary Pro and Enterprise versions of a product which has tooling to operate the project at scale or in high uptime environments.

Then you offer your own cloud versions of the product as well (which I think Redis has been doing).

But in none of these cases are you creating a disincentive for anybody to use/adopt your product. You're simply creating value around the pain points.

I agree. People here always seem to react badly to companies that provide something for free and now want to make a bit of money. It’s weird because they themselves work in tech and have to earn a living to put food on the table. Having no way of making money isn’t sustainable.

The problem here is that this isn't putting food on the table for the people who actually built the software.

It's a company surprising everyone by pocketing the money from other people's hard, unpaid work.

The license change is only for future versions, though. The work already put in remains open source.

Then don't make an open source hobby if you want to pay the bills with it. Or accept you're going to have to be a consultant for the project to make $$. I don't expect jack shit back for my open source contributions nor do I care if Amazon uses it.

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