Software vendors dump open source, go for the cash grab

100% this. I see neither legal nor moral problems.

It will still cause financial problems for the user that currently use redis offered by those clous companies as they will 100% increase the prices to cope with the changes and at the same time make more money.

That’s the worst case scenario.

That code is now untouchable. Open, I can use it. Now that I can read it but not use it, if I accidentally reproduce it there’s a case for me having stole it. If it were fully closed, there’s no case.

Very little good comes from non-open source you can just happen to read.

My understanding is that it is only true for Redis versions post licence change _and_ produced by Redis the company. The amazons of the world can still take a BSD version of Redis and host it for money, they can even start maintaining forks under BSD or other licenses. The gamble from the Redis Co here is that newer versions provide enough additional value for customers to either pay them directly or amazons to provide it as a service in their clouds and pay money to Redis the company as per the licensing agreements.

I predict most forks will go nowhere because the success of a fork requires developers to contribute to it. In most cases the forks are being driven by people who just want free stuff and are angry they can't be subsidized anymore. They don't want to actually do any work.

Open source is not about just leeching free stuff. It's supposed to be a gift economy where you give back either directly or indirectly by promoting, educating, or donating. The F in FOSS is supposed to stand for Freedom not Free-as-in-beer.

A full revolt is in progress against the entire SaaS enterprise leeching off open source. Larger often business backed projects like this changing to source available licenses is the most visible manifestation, but I also see more and more indie devs using licenses like the AGPL or not open sourcing at all.

Open source will die as anything but a dumping strategy by mega-corps to crush competition if we don't deal with this. The OSI is fully captured by companies that benefit from the status quo, so I don't see them doing anything about it.

It is one of the big enough projects that companies actually pay for their own devs to develop it. And they lose little by providing those changes to others. I think reality is that you need that sort of scale for it to work.

> The amount of repeat work avoided by building on that is infeasible to estimate. It doesn't appear to be at risk of being suddenly proprietary.

They may not be as featured, or run everything, but if that were to happen I'm hoping FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD would step up to the plate - although Linux would certainly be forked as well.

It’s GPL and they haven’t made contributors sign a CLA. So if anybody wants to relicense the Linux kernel, they need to get permission from every single copyright holder retroactively. This is infeasible.

CLAs exists to get this permission up front before any code makes it into the project, which is what enables projects like Redis to relicense.

BSD style licenses being more permissive than the GPL also contribute to this; you can incorporate BSD-licensed code into a new non-free version but you can’t do that with GPL-licensed code.

Two key differences: Linux is (mostly) licensed under the GPL version 2.0 only, and has diverse copyright ownership. No single person or entity can change the license. That means no one can pull the rug from under the community like the Redis change (and so many other corporate-controlled, copyright-assigned, non-copyleft projects).

(Linux also has a huge pool of users and contributors, which discourages hostile forking, even if the licensing wasn't a factor.)

1. It is GPL, so you can't change the license without permission from all contributors 2. It has lots of contributors. And now that I think about it I guess some of those are not even alive anymore to grant any sort of permission

I wouldn't call Redis a failure.

Source available and commercial is a great compromise.

OSS is not a business model and we live in reality.

The less free money goes around, the closer to reality business will be.

Redis didn’t go “suddenly proprietary”. They switched to a source available license. Cloud providers will need to pay if they’re making money selling redis.

GPL with CLA still allows such stunts.

This has nothing to do with the license in question per se, and the GPL wouldn't help at all. It has to do with who owns the copyright. The copyright owner can re-license going forward to whatever they want, whenever they want. If you're really concerned about a license change then you need to be wary of projects with sole-ownership, either via CLA or not accepting contributions (it's the project of one person/company that they're putting out as open source for whatever reason, and very much not a community project).

I actually think the descriptive language commonly used here is a little distorting in that regard. A copyright owner does not, and cannot, "take something closed source", it's more that they're forking the project under a new license (which granted is a specific kind of fork only they can do, everyone else has to fork under the same license). Every single bit of code up until that moment remains under the open source license, so if there is interest customers or whomever else can take that and continue the same open source project going forward, and even surpass the original holder's new proprietary effort. As a practical matter that's rare because there has to be serious interest, but it does happen. OpenZFS for example is a wonderful project that has long since eclipsed the Oracle fork of Sun's code.

In turn I also think it is often a little more complex then (from the opinion):

>"switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions"

Let's be serious: rarely are these projects getting more then a token percentage of code from contributors, let alone anything else (though Redis definitely is). It's frequently 90%+ a single-company effort, and indeed this is nearly a truism. Because if the company is only a small component of the effort vs the community it is extremely likely any attempt to do a proprietary fork will fail and the open one comprising the majority of effort will dominate, and by definition there is major interest. This doesn't make it non-irritating, but it's still a net positive, a lot of useful code was contributed open and is a much easier springboard. And it's a much MUCH better situation then the even more common proprietary-all-along-software changing terms which happens all the friggin' time, like going subscription-only. If nothing else you get a much better off ramp.

Companies forking from open source to proprietary with their projects can suck, for sure. But I think in the last year it has started to also get a little overhyped. I'd still rather have years of open source first. And again, everyone can always evaluate who owns the copyrights. Diversity is important for longevity ANYWAY too. Like, if all the effort is happening by a few devs or a single company, what happens if they get hit by a bus? Go bankrupt? Simply get old and tired of it? At some point the community has to step up, or not.

Or “weak” licenses are used by people that don’t care about the things that the license allows for. Or better yet, actively want that degree of permissiveness.

All this license hubbub is often just people not actually thinking thriving which license they want to use. “MIT sounds like a pretty good university”.

How is that inaccurate?

Windows has at a few points in time become 'source available' but nobody (+dog) thinks they can take that code and use it for anything.

People can do whatever they want with the BSD released code but, going forwards, they can't use any newly licenced proprietary code. I'm no legal expert but this seems to include all the code that was previously released as BSD if one were to reference the new and improved 'source available' release. It stands to reason that all the future releases are now off limits even though they contain identical code from the BSD releases.

If you signed a CLA to contribute, you've granted Redis a broad license to do whatever they want with your contribution. If you contributed to a BSD licensed project, then you contributed to a project who's licensing terms says "do whatever you want, just retain the copyright notice, and this license is not an endorsement".

You basically have no grounds for suing, especially since the re-licensing is not retroactive. The exact contributions that you provided as still available in the exact form and license that you contributed them to.

You need to be much more specific about what you want to prevent.

I think you must transfer copyright for the code to the organization - thus they can change it at will. For example in Linux that is impossible as everyone keeps the copyright claim to the code they contribute.

Redis is everywhere and a lot of corporations aren’t going to change their short term roadmap to migrate to a fork.

That could be a huge money shot for Redis.

But it’s probably only a one-shot, not a viable business model. Sure the company is going to tank sooner than later, but if founders jumps from the ship at the right time, they may be rich for multiple generations.

Factually correct. But clearly a road to serfdom for anyone that writes software.

Problem is that these companies that do this were never actually making money. They might had revenue, but that is not same as making profit.

The model was fundamentally broken in most cases. You can not expect to give out something for free and the product being free being one of the reasons for picking it up and then at same time make huge amount of money.

Okay, will they pay the contributors then?

The people living in a rented house aren’t the one making these decisions.

I doubt any of the people making these decisions are housing insecure. What’s really changing is that the culture around open source had a lot of inertia from the era where most people ran it on their own servers and maintainers could make money selling support or consulting around that, but now a ton of usage has shifted to cloud providers who are not obligated to share changes with the community or compensate the original developers. People have been talking about that for ages but it was easy to ignore the issue when VC money was flying around to give companies valuations far greater than their revenues would support. What we’re seeing now has been developing for a long time and it’s going to come to a head nor that the finance people are expecting hard revenue.

SSPL is not open source, it's source available. Different kettle-o-fish.

"Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code."

https://opensource.org/osd

(The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a California public benefit corporation, with 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, founded in 1998.)

I agree. People seem to be angry that the project which received contributions under BSD changed to the project licensed under SSPL, but this is explicitly what you are doing when you contribute to BSD projects and all contributors should have known so.

If you don't like it never contribute to BSD projects, or projects requiring CLA. Contribute to GPL projects without CLA.