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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

AWS leeches as much as Garantia Data no?

AWS are the largest leeches of OSS, syphoning off most the profits and contribute relatively nothing back towards the OSS projects they rent seek from.

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.

Except Redis was never meant to be “owned” by this company. They are both predatory.

It is not owned by the company. You are free to create your own fork of the code with all the attendant benefits, including monetization, if applicable.

Only one company is allowed to offer it as a service.

I think you are right about AWS leeching OSS.

If you own copyrights you’re not the leech.

Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.

I wonder if there is a qualitative analysis of the commits. Aka, it changed a line of comment vs it introduced a new feature or refactored and increased long term viability, etc.

I think you're right.

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

If you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some point. Other than that unless you are one of the contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of leeching.

Is buying the same as leaching now? Words really do get diluted to the point of meaningless...

It is if the thing they bought had contributions from many other people but pretty much all of them got nothing for it.

We don't know what they got. Perhaps some of them were paid to create the contributions. And, in any case, that's OK. The contributors knew or should have known the impact of the license. They could've picked a more restrictive/free license, depending on your point of view. I guess they can still revoke the license. They have not given up their copyrights and the license is arguably not irrevocable.

I'm sure their lawyers will be looking into it, you probably don't need to be concerned!

How does buying a copyright to a name, literally just being able to call it "Redis" equate to purchasing the code contributions that individual contributors make? They bought the rights to the name, not the project, the project was open-source until the license change and belongs to society as a whole.

The project still belongs to society as a whole! You can fork it too! You just can't profit off their future work.

I agree, I didn't make any argument against that, I just don't see the difference between <party with money that bought a name and sells the free work of others> and <party with money that didn't buy a name and sells the free work of others>. My only argument here is that there's not much difference between AWS and Garantia Data from my limited understanding of the situation.

It does not belong to the society (whatever that's supposed to mean). It is not in the public domain as far as we know.

It was bsd licensed. The code that you received before is still covered by the bsd license. You can pretty much do anything you want with that code except misrepresent yourself as the author.

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?

Your confusing copyrights with trademarks. The project belongs to the authors (perhaps in shares depending on the jurisdiction where it is being copied/derived) not the society. The options that were licensed under BSD generally remain licensed under BSD unless someone revoked that license. It does not seem that the latter has happened.

Often, as that's what rentiers are. Generally bad for society. And have captured many regulatory processes and got tons of tax breaks for producing nothing.

One of the well known flaws of capitalism, in the 'bad, but everything else is worse' sense.

Not that capitalism is the perfect economic scheme, but rentiers exist in many economic regimes. Communism probably has more rentiers than capitalism, i.e. many people take more than they contribute.

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