This is what I am confused about so what right do they have to enforce AWS from selling Redis when they do not own it?
Basically Redis Inc is the one making the fork, which retains the Redis name since they purchased it from antirez.
Some projects require signing copyright transfer before making commits (legal document claiming that you are a) copyright holder and b) you transfer those rights to them ie CLA [0]) so single entity holds whole copyrights.
They usually have a GHA that checks it when proposing PRs.
It doesn't look like redis has any of this.
So they run RedisLabs purely on trademark + admin rights on GH on redis/redis.
If that's the case then they also cannot legally change licence of code that's already there because they're not sole copyright holders of that code.
ps. as a side note that's why ie. SQLite doesn't allow external contributions at all, even though their code is Public Domain – because they can legally claim full copyright/authorship.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
Public domain isn't the only form of free software. You can literally use it in exactly the same way as you did before. Nothing has been taken away from you.
Does this address your concern?
One of the well known flaws of capitalism, in the 'bad, but everything else is worse' sense.
The "Free for all except mega cloud corps" license changes are to disrupt this status quo which currently sees the mega cloud corps with impenetrable moats from capturing most of the value of OSS products others spend their resources into building, AWS are then able to use their war chest profits to out resource, and out compete them, using their own code-bases against them.
It's unfortunate organizations need to resort to relicensing stop this predatory behavior, but its clear in AWSs 20+ year history they're not going to change their behavior on their own.
Doesn't AWS employ Madelyn Olson? I mean, AWS have paid for Redis development.
Not exactly a leech.
But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.
> Yep still the biggest leachers
Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever they want. That's not leeching.
So whilst their previous license allowed AWS to leech off them, it's now been relicensed to prevent them from profiting off their future investments without compensating anything back.
You do understand that AWS profits not off redis but by offering redis as a managed hosting provider.
Microsoft and Google do to, it's just that they're not as popular as AWS.
They're not re-skinning or re-selling Redis, they're selling a separate product - the managed operations for operating and scaling Redis.
You may not appreciate this (most on HN never do - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) But the value is evident to thousands of customers.
AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back
We’ll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also never created redis). Both contributed to its maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We’ll see which fork wins out.
I've called AWS's hiring of a single developer a token hire that they then go on to write flowery PR posts about to camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS vendors.
For concrete numbers they contributed 165/12111 commits for a total of a 1.36% of the commits.
Whilst that qualifies as a valuable contribution to any project, it's also dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs and doesn't absolve AWS from being a called a "leacher" by helping themselves to the majority of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back.
It’s funny that you would use commits to quantify investment from AWS, but you’d use $ to buy shares in future profits to quantify investment from redis labs. Why not use the same yardstick for both?
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Everyone who put in effort into redis did it knowing the license. There’s nothing wrong in relicensing future commits. There’s nothing wrong with forking. There’s nothing wrong in using whichever fork works better for you.
You’re insisting up and down that AWS and others were leeching because they didn’t own the copyright to redis. I’ve never heard this interpretation of OSS before, but sure maybe you’re right. But we’ll see which fork comes out on top a year from now.
If you don't want others to monetize your work, don't license it under a license permitting them exactly that.
Specifically: have the major cloud providers ever created a successful FOSS database, cache, or fulltext search index project from the ground up? By this I mean, a FOSS project with its own protocol, own community from scratch, not a fork or a re-implementation or based on another FOSS project, nor a late-stage company acquisition.
I'm struggling to think of even a single example. Even for broader infrastructure (not just db/cache/search), there's few examples, only Kubernetes comes to mind rapidly.
If the cloud providers are widely practicing "FOSS for thee but not for me" with respect to creation of new infrastructure projects, that's predatory and unsustainable.
Yes, but there’s another explanation. Repeating the same mistake countless times and expecting a different outcome is naivety.
I suppose I’m not understanding the point of your position. Software authors cannot fix a licensing mistake by changing the past, but they can use a different license moving forwards.
Wait, does any language team ever created a successful implementation from the ground up ? No, they all base their work on some hardware people ! They are predatory !
Wait, does any hardware manufacturers ever created a successful product from the ground up ? No, they all base their work of some software ! They are predatory !
Rather, it's a question of cloud vendors repeatedly building open source competing drop-in re-implementations of external db/cache/search products when those original products switch away from FOSS licenses to survive, despite the cloud vendor being a million times larger and better resourced than the original db/cache/search developers. The cloud vendors aren't building something on top of these products (like your examples), but rather they are aiming to competitively replace these products and capture the mindshare of their communities.
This strategy allows the cloud vendor to skip the hard steps of developing a unique product from scratch, designing a client/server protocol from scratch, building a community from scratch, and so many other things.
Separately, the cloud vendors do also build their own unique db/cache/search products, but they just don't ever make them source-available or self-hostable when they do so -- let alone FOSS. That is what makes the pattern of behavior predatory: the big cloud vendors use their dominant positions to bring non-FOSS products to the market, while using FOSS re-implementations to destroy competitors who dare move away from FOSS themselves.
None of the 3 examples you described above are in any way related to this scenario.
It's lose/lose!
Code contributions from amazon would've been leeched by other parties using redis as well - something which amazon is accepting (and probably encouraging).