I guess I don't really understand the blowback when a project tries to monetize, but not when AWS takes your free shit and monetizes it for themselves.
Your starting premise of "monetization" being the issue is incorrect ... which then causes the misunderstanding of the blowback.
Instead, the blowback is about changing the license as I outlined before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951361
It annoys the community when Redis starts out with a permissive license that attracts outside contributors including employees from Tencent+Alibaba+Amazon+Bytedance+etc who collectively commit more code than Redis employees [1] ... and then later change the license which destroys the goodwill that attracted the outside contributors in the first place.
[1] code stats since 7.0.0 release: https://lwn.net/Articles/966631/#:~:text=Top%20changeset%20c...
> It annoys the community when Redis starts out with a permissive license that attracts outside contributors including employees from Tencent+Alibaba+Amazon+Bytedance+etc who collectively commit more code than Redis employees [1] ... and then later change the license which destroys the goodwill that attracted the outside contributors in the first place.
This is a very fair point.
If I choose to open source something it’s because it’s either a passion project or it solves a problem that myself and others struggled to solve. I don’t open source it under the expectation of eventual profit. In fact, i hope by putting it out there it might become better as others improve upon it and we all benefit.
I agree with this. The problem is, you've open sourced it and someone else does profit to the tune of millions/billions. That seems unfair and is why I'm sympathetic to these sorts of license changes sometimes. Seems like they went into this knowing full well many would move to forks.
> If you didn’t want to license it that way then don’t do so from the beginning and you probably won’t get as many of the aforementioned benefits.
Fair point. Was that foreseeable in 2009? A lot of the actions we take now are based on what's reasonably foreseeable in the future. I honestly don't recall.
The company now known as Redis didn't acquire the redis trademark until 2018, and didn't change their name to include redis until after that. That is probably the better timeframe to think about.
And second thing is, often the pricing of these monetization turns is just exploitative.
You can be generous without wanting to be taken advantage of. Using a product is one thing, reselling it and becoming the defacto place people use it is another.
Another take is that if Amazon eats everyone’s lunch, we will have nothing else.
The blowback is because of the deal being changed.
personally i appreciate Amazon for sticking it to Oracle with Corretto after the JRE licensing changes.
Unless your primary product involves selling a hosted version of Redis, simply using it shouldn't affect anyone. Is this not the case ?
All of these open-source-no-wait-lol-jk companies want to have their cake (widespread adoption because it's open source) and eat it too (be rentiers paid to host and support the software they released).
It's especially egregious in the case of Redis as Redis Labs hasn't been the primary contributor for a number of years. As is always the case with closed source relicensing it's a landgrab.