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Comment by drewdevault | Hacker News Reader

Substantial portions of Redis were written by AWS and Google. People are upset because Redis is a collaborative project with many people working on it and Redis Ltd wants the sole right to commercialize the work of an entire community.

LWN has a good overview:

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/8bc9d155d4e2afb3/

Redis Ltd is only responsible for about 20% of the work.

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Yeah, I think a key point is that Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original developer, maintainer and principle contributor[1] for 11 years, was not a founder of Redis Labs. He joined as an employee in 2015 but resigned in 2020. Perhaps he has equity in Redis Labs, but it's not clear he stands to profit at all from this switch.

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors

AWS and Google contributed those under BSD license, being fully informed that Redis Ltd can commercialize like this.

It makes perfect sense for AWS and Google to fork immediately after the switch, but for contributions before the switch, there is no basis for AWS and Google to complain Redis Ltd, either legally or morally.

Legally, they can't complain, but morally it is icky. Redis is a leech.

If you don't want to be leeched, don't contribute to BSD licensed projects.

>>Substantial portions of Redis were written by AWS and Google

Employees on their own time, or paid to do it?

So I'm clear though - if I wrote a SAAS product tomorrow that under the covers used Redis, I'm OK, but if I spun up a bunch of servers and offered managed Redis as a product, I would need to pay?

>So I'm clear though - if I wrote a SAAS product tomorrow that under the covers used Redis, I'm OK, but if I spun up a bunch of servers and offered managed Redis as a product, I would need to pay?

That's the pitch of the license, essentially, but in practice the SSPL is an utter nightmare to comply with (to the point of being deliberate) and it mainly exists to put a veneer of open source on a proprietary product. In actual practice you really just cannot offer Redis as a service unless you are Redis Ltd, which is the actual point of the license in the end.

> In actual practice you really just cannot offer Redis as a service unless you are Redis Ltd

Isn’t this exactly what the person you’re replying to was saying?

Yes, I realize I worded this poorly. I emphasized this point because this is what makes it non-free/not meet the Open Source Definition; you cannot retain exclusive right to commercialization. But I realize that was not actually something the parent commenter was asking about.

That's what many people seem to think, but it has not been legally challenged yet. We won't know for sure until Google or AWS decides to test the limits, in your jurisdiction.

You should probably ask Redis, Inc. what their intention is. Keep in mind, though, the run the risk of being re-rug-pulled. They have changed the license once and they can do it again.

Perhaps true but besides the point, actually - the same companies will happily take your code and make a saas offering out of it on their oligopolistic infrastructures, making it economically unviable to compete with.

...which, given LGPL, will be worse now as they'll simply not share their modifications because that's the legally safest option.

And well, why not? That is the idea. It's open source.

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