GitHub is proprietary and not ideal, but when trying to get developers on board after a fork, using GitHub and using the same license as the original avoids spending innovation tokens / weirdness budget unnecessarily.
Changing the license was an absolutely essential requirement, and this is a crucial time to evaluate and commit to that change. As far as we're concerned, not being copyleft was a bug that was exploited by Redis Ltd, and a fork which doesn't fix that bug isn't addressing the underlying problem.
Disclaimer: I don’t have anything against the relicensing to LGPL. I think it’s your right and I root for you.
That said, correct me if I’m wrong, but, as far as I understand, what Redis Ltd did, they could do regardless of the license. Copyleft wouldn’t have stopped them, given the CLA.
Moreover I wouldn’t call that exploitation. To people outside of Redis Ltd who don’t want to be Redis Ltd customers this move is indistinguishable from them just closing down business and stopping development of Redis. Would that be exploitation? Are they obliged to provide free work on Redis indefinitely? They can’t retroactively change the licence of previous versions of Redis, so they can’t actually take anything away. The existence of the 2 forks is proof of that.
Redis never had a CLA and Redis Ltd does not hold the copyright for the work, it's held in aggregate by all contributors. Redis Ltd did use a CLA for their products surrounding Redis, like RedisJSON, but Redis itself did not use a CLA.
>To people outside of Redis Ltd who don’t want to be Redis Ltd customers this move is indistinguishable from them just closing down business and stopping development of Redis.
Redis Ltd was only ever responsible for about 20% of the development of Redis. If they wanted to shut down operations in good faith they would just hand it over to the other 80% to manage. Instead they used their trademark to try and do a hostile takeover of the IP.
I find it amusing that you called it "weirdness budget", but then again that pretty accurately describes the feeling I get when I see someone using a fairly niche DB instead of something like PostgreSQL, or something like NixOS instead of a regular Ubuntu LTS or RHEL-like. Not that it's a bad thing, there's plenty of specific use cases out there for sure.