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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

With open-source software, a license is as much a social contract as it is a legal one. People contribute because they want to be part of a community building something which is beneficial to everyone. Everyone contributes where they can, and in turn takes what they need.

Redis Ltd. broke the social contract. They decided that the short-term profitability of the company was more important than the project as a whole, the community which had grown around Redis and the future of the software. Probably a wise decision from a business perspective, but that doesn't make it any less of a rug pull from a community perspective.

You're right that no pre-relicense code was lost. People could and did fork. But something far more valuable was lost: the community's trust. First they relicensed the code solely for their own benefit, now they tried to take over third-party libraries and started behaving in a hostile way towards the community forks. Why would anyone volunteer their time and effort when it is mainly going to benefit a company which is so openly antagonistic against its volunteers? After all, what's the next shady move going to be?

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Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts. It is not a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you gifts. The old versions of Redis are yours for all time. No one can take that away from you. In fact, Redis is still giving you gifts to this day, just with a different wrapping. The new license seems perfectly reasonable, given how much companies like Amazon have exploited the gift economy to the point where it threatens these startups survival.

> Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts

I think op was talking about contributors, who essentially gifted back. One might take offense if they were exchanging gifts with someone, and they open a pop-up store and sell what was gifted.

Also, it's also a tiny bit hypocritical to expect revenue sharing with Amazon without doing the same for contributors.

I guess there's a blind spot here.

antirez gave

community gave

most people assume that this create a new thing, a group, which has a shared past and value .. and should continue (i would agree to that personally)

"pure" open source advocacy would claim "nothing is ever to be expected in any future" (i can understand that too but find it a bit sad)

I wonder how the oss community will react if the sequence of events were a little different.

1. Redis Inc creates a fork of Redis and names it say RedisNext or anything else(xyz) without a reference to Redis name at all.

2. Announces that, xyz is a fully compatible next gen version of Redis with enterprise features but it is only available under SSPL license.

3. Also announces that original Redis software is feature complete and will be under maintenance with only critical bug fixes.

This will be them playing by the same rules as any other third-party.

Will the community still manage to find fault with Redis Inc?

Will it feel entitled to continued updates or the Redis brand demanding a project handover to a different "group"?

Cannot speak for the community, but I'd assume that the right thing would be to handover Redis brand to a FOSS foundation.

Anything else just complicates things, like we see today, where Valkey and others are referenced as being Redis compatible (at least as far as RESP is concerned), and we either have specific clients (such as valkey-go), or existing Redis clients, that seem to want to maintain compatibility with most (all?) of them.

Redis has a CLA so contributors can't use their gifts as leverage to control others.

https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-...

I don't think you should conflate CONTROL with resentment or distaste or feeling betrayed or feeling misled. They aren't the same.

Even without a CLA, Redis was originally licensed BSD. Releasing code under a BSD license is making a promise that you are OK with people using your code for commercial purposes. If you as a developer express personal feelings of dissatisfaction that someone is doing with your gift what you gave them permission to do, in such a way that could be construed as reneging on your promise, then that would make you dishonorable and untrustworthy.

> Releasing code under a BSD license is making a promise that you are OK with people using your code for commercial purposes.

That's just a microcosm of the larger issue, isn't it? Contributors : Redis :: Redis : AWS - Redis gave Amazon the permission to host and make money off of Redis, but Redis was evidently salty about the state of affairs. I think contributors have reason to be salty too.

> in such a way that could be construed as reneging on your promise

Nothing could be construed in such a way, because such a reneging is not possible.

Well in this case, antirez literally promised[1] they wouldn't change the license of the core away from BSD, and then Redis Labs did just that, and now antirez is speaking favorably of that decision.

[1]: https://antirez.com/news/120

Wow, I wasn't aware. @jart, do you have any harsh comments on the actual reneging of an actual promise? @antirez, do you have any kind of comments?

That post was from literally thousands of days ago and seems to be in relation to some confusion at that time.

Honestly to me you can see the tensions that led to the license change in that post. It’s largely consistent with what antirez has said in the post and in this thread.

Ok so just because something is in the past it's become irrelevant? So no promises are ever worth trusting? The creator of redis LITERALLY said "Redis will remain BSD licensed". And it's no longer BSD licensed.

Where is there a "promise" in that post? Where is there any wording about it remaining BSD forever?

It's a post from 2018, about a specific license confusion situation that occurred in 2018. Context matters.

In the title: "Redis will remain BSD licensed"

You can try to be a smartass and add random caveats but that's not how language works.

Imagine if everyone thought like you did: "Sure I promise to do X" (not saying that I mean for the next 5 minutes and will then ignore my past promise)

Again, where is the word "promise" in this post?

The post title in its original context is clearly referring to the confusion discussed in the very first sentence: "Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license." The title is saying that Redis core's license was not switched to Common Clause at that time in 2018. That's all. It is not titled "I promise that Redis will remain open source forever".

> This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed.

True, he doesn't explicitly say for how long, but I don't think it is unreasonable to read "will remain" as "will remain indefinitely" and not as "will remain so until we change our minds".

> I don't think it is unreasonable to read "will remain" as "will remain indefinitely"

That's a reasonable interpretation. But it involves an assumption on behalf of the reader, of words that are not there. I think it's a stretch to consider that specific post a "literal promise" by Antirez.

That said, I just did more research and must admit I am completely wrong with regards to the bigger picture there. My genuine apologies. In the HN commentary on that same post [1], the cofounder/CTO of Redis Labs (Yiftach) apparently made a much more direct statement that "Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license". Due to use of the word "always", that I think can unambiguously be called a literal promise that was broken by the Redis company.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818647

You don't have to use the word promise to make a promise. It's inferred.

People sometimes change their mind about decisions over time. That isn't the same thing as breaking a promise. You can infer a promise from any declarative statement, but that doesn't mean your inference is correct.

They're also stealing the name of the community.

I feel like once a software is open sourced the name of that software should also be required to remain open sourced as well, and any closing of the source must come with a requirement of forking the software and changing the name.

It's honestly pretty horrible that a group of people can take centuries of man hours away from the community and tell the community to kick rocks when the software they're stealing would NEVER NEVER NEVER have had the traction it has if it were not OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE TO BEGIN WITH.

There is a rash of thefts going on in broad daylight, and I think people need to start litigating. Its obscene and soulless and doesn't belong as an acceptable thing to do in society.

It is absurd to call this license change stealing when the previous work is still available under the original license. This is more like someone who is giving to the community, still continuing to give, but with a slightly more strict license. Do you expect someone who is doing philantropic work, gets contributions from others, but later becomes less philantropic to change their name?

> NEVER NEVER NEVER have had the traction

There is plenty of even closed source software which has traction in many domains, let alone software released under a license which as anti-rez points out allows the users to freely run their websites on redis, modify and redistribute code etc.(with the exception of running hosting services like Amazon).

For instance, it would be amazing and a great improvement if there was a top-quality CAD program with a similar license to Redis.

You clearly feel very strongly about this topic; out of curiosity, are you a Redis contributor? If so, was your contribution done via your day job (paid time) or was it an outside/independent contribution?

> I feel like once a software is open sourced the name of that software should also be required to remain open sourced as well, and any closing of the source must come with a requirement of forking the software and changing the name.

Who should enforce such a requirement, and under what mechanism?

Open source licenses are copyright licenses, whereas product names are trademarks. These are separate legal concepts. Meanwhile "the community" isn't even a legal entity at all. As I understand it, there's nothing to "start litigating" here, and no one to litigate it.

Are you proposing that the OSI should change the OSD such that open source licenses must include mandatory trademark assignment to an independent nonprofit foundation? That's a rather extreme view if so.

> Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts.

Certainly, but if you exchange gifts with someone every christmas, have been doing so for a decade, and they suddenly stop giving you one, or give you an unpolished one where they previously cleaned it to a shine, you are perfectly within your rights to be a bit miffed at that, and withold your own.

People can say the new license is reasonable (and by all reasonable measures it probably is) but that’s not how it feels, and that’s the important part.

Reciprocality over time building trust is in fact the basis of gift economies. Please read some David Graeber.

Open source is not a gift economy, and is in fact a different, and long established social contract. Never has this misplaced metaphor been used to describe open source, nor do the contributers demand any return that amounts to an "entitlement to future gifts".

If a company's survival is threatened by people using its open-source software, then maybe it shouldn't be open source. Open source software (to me) says I should be able use the software for any purpose, including commercial ones.

That isn't really the case here. It didn't start with a company. The company came along independently, effectively took control of an open source project that was already well established. They found that support alone wasn't enough to be profitable on and have been lashing out at the community that built around the original project, including independent opensource clients.

It's not that the company shouldn't have the code as open source. The company shouldn't exist in the first place and we're all suffering for it.

I agree. It seems that "open core"[1] is a failed experiment. I'm hopeful the idea will be replaced either by governments being smarter about the computers, or companies agreeing to sponsor foundations, or... something. But clearly taking venture investment to build OSS and turn it into a profitable enterprise is an idea that has been thoroughly shown to be flawed.

[1] aptly named if you think about the nuclear power analogy :)

It’s the entire premise of public goods, and the sustainable funding model for that would be through government funding or funding of open source foundations like the CNCF. For example, the IETF standards body is founded by the global charitable organization the Internet Society. How do we continue to build on this public goods funding model for projects like this?

> seems that "open core"[1] is a failed experiment.

I don't think the jury is out. If you look at nginx, you won't see a lot of complains over nginx plus. The nginx brand still has a lot of goodwill and a few open source projects seem to be peacefully building upon it without any issue.

> It is not a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you gifts.

I'm not sure that the developers contributing code from outside the company see it that way. An easy way to tell if contributors see a license change as a rug pull is if the forks that happen after the rug pull get traction.

> The new license seems perfectly reasonable, given how much companies like Amazon have exploited the gift economy to the point where it threatens these startups survival.

Most of the time, though, open source limits growth - and doesn't threaten the original author's startup. This is a really important distinction because there is a trade-off in choosing open source as a marketing strategy - you do potentially face competition from other contributors, users and parasites that will moderate growth.

It absolutely is though. Do you not see any value in bug fixes? Do you think software never needs to be updated? We all know security updates are crucial, and pretending you can just run the old version forever is insane. If I contributed to redis in the past I did so under the assumption that I was contributing to a product that I could actually keep using. But instead they took all those contributions and gave the contributors a huge middle finger by denying them security updates and fixes.

And sure, you can say "just do the bug fixes yourself". But if I knew that was going to be the case, I'd never have bothered to contribute.

> If I contributed to redis in the past I did so under the assumption that I was contributing to a product that I could actually keep using

It sounds like you also have an assumption that the maintainers will spend the effort to maintain your contribution forever, after already spending the initial effort to review and integrate your contribution. This all takes time and money, which has to come from somewhere.

You're asking "Do you not see any value in bug fixes? Do you think software never needs to be updated?" from the contributors' and users' point of view. But the same exact issue exists from the maintainers' point of view.

A lot of people in this thread are commenting as if an open source contribution is a purely altruistic act by the contributor which then solely benefits the maintainers. That's far from the case in reality. Many third party contributors are writing their contributions as part of their day job (meaning they're paid to do it), and the contribution directly benefits themselves and/or their employer by fixing some problem they encountered or adding some feature that they needed.

> It sounds like you also have an assumption that the maintainers will spend the effort to maintain your contribution forever, after already spending the initial effort to review and integrate your contribution. This all takes time and money, which has to come from somewhere.

Correct, that's generally how open source works. You make a contribution, they merge it, and then the assumption is that it is maintained by the maintainers. You seem to act like this is an odd assumption, even though it is and has been the reality for pretty much every open source project ever.

> But the same exact issue exists from the maintainers' point of view.

Right, it's their "job". Maintaining the software. It's pretty much in the name. That's what happens when you accept contributions. They get merged into the software project, and then you (the maintainer) are responsible for maintaining it, or removing the functionality in a subsequent release. That's why code review happens where you consider the maintenance burden, and features sometimes don't get merged.

If this doesn't sound appealing then don't become the maintainer of an open source project.

> Many third party contributors are writing their contributions as part of their day job (meaning they're paid to do it), and the contribution directly benefits themselves and/or their employer by fixing some problem they encountered or adding some feature that they needed.

Sure, and they could've kept it private so it only benefits them and/or their employer. But instead they chose to open source it in the hopes that

1) The maintainers will maintain it

2) It might benefit someone else

That's the whole deal. You're essentially trading your contributions for future maintenance.

I'm well acquainted with open source maintenance; one of my open source projects has been downloaded over 2 million times, and another is imported by over 8000 other repos on GitHub. I'm not "acting like this is an odd assumption" but rather my point was to consider the economic side from the maintainers' point of view, which many people in this thread are completely ignoring.

As you said above, maintainers don't have to accept your contribution, and if they do, they always have the option of removing it in a future release. And if the maintainers use a CLA or other copyright assignment mechanism, they also have the option of changing the license for future releases. So why are you assuming you can keep using future versions of the product forever if you contribute to it and sign a CLA?

> Sure, and they could've kept it private so it only benefits them and/or their employer

But that doesn't actually provide a net "benefit" to the contributor, because then they have to take on the massive burden of maintaining a private fork.

My point in all this is that contributing to open source often benefits the contributor more than the maintainer, and yet people act like it primarily is an altruistic gift from the contributor which solely benefits the maintainer / product owner.

> But that doesn't actually provide a net "benefit" to the contributor, because then they have to take on the massive burden of maintaining a private fork.

Well yeah, that's the point. Trading contributions vs maintenance burden.

> My point in all this is that contributing to open source often benefits the contributor more than the maintainer

And yet they choose to do it... Why?

I said it provides more benefit to the contributor than the maintainer, but I did not say that it provides no benefit to the maintainer. Your question doesn't logically follow.

That's exactly my point: It still benefits the maintainer. So they benefited from contributors, then fucked them over later, violating the social contract (but not necessarily the software license because CLAs yadda yadda).

Again, my point in response is that the contributor received more benefits (in the form of code review and ongoing maintenance) than the maintainer. We're talking in circles here.

As long as the contributor isn't a cloud provider, they can continue to use the software unimpeded under the new license. Their contribution continues to be maintained by the maintainers. The contributor hasn't been "fucked over" in any way.

If the contributor is a cloud provider, they can choose to enter into a commercial licensing / revenue share agreement and continue to use the software unimpeded. Or they can decline and use/create a fork, in which case any so-called fucking-over is clearly mutual, because the contributor wants to profit from the software explicitly without making its ongoing development financially sustainable for its original maintainers. That's parasitic behavior.

I must ask, have you contributed to Redis? Or are you just expressing outrage on behalf of other people who actually contributed to Redis and may not actually even share in said outrage?

If the latter, why are you so emotionally invested in this topic? And have you ever been on the other side of the coin, maintaining a widely-used open source project?

It is really hard to believe that no one defends antirez&co as protecting themselves from greedy overpriced SaaS businesses who were parasiting others hard work. What about them saases breaking a social contract of giving reasonable prices adequate to the effort put into a product (or a wrapper around the product)?

It's possible to hold both positions at the same time.

In the world of legal consequences it is not.

Or please explain.

Erm I am not sure if I was understood correctly - I meant legal consequences from the perspective of redis guys on one side, and saas guys on the other side..

One simply can't admit that they both were doing a valid thing

Lots of people defend these licenses on exactly those grounds. I, too, find it pretty mystifying that this seems to be a minority perspective here. At least this seems to be the case among the people who speak up when this comes up here. It's hard to know if there is a less noisy majority who feels differently about it.

I think the "silent majority" is just fine with this change. The OSS "extremists" will certainly be the noisiest about this - everyone else will continue on with life as usual, especially if they have an understanding of the concept of business pressures.

That's what I think too, but it's hard to know for certain.

If you just call SaaS "hosting" does that change your view of things? Because I remember when commercial hosting for free software was actively encouraged.

Yeah, this is weird. The one restriction is one you probably dont care about because you're not amazon or azure yet some people still freak out like youve taken their toys away.

Truly odd.

It's not that weird. With a FOSS license, I know I can use a program for anything I choose to and the terms will never change. I might launch a startup with a friend tomorrow using a package and complying with its license terms, and a million dollars later we're still legally entitled to use it.

Adding constraints later is a non-fallacious slippery slope. The restrictions Redis added aren't directly onerous to 99.999% of users, but now the world is divided into people who are allowed to use it at will, and people who can only use it in certain ways (or not at all). That's an enormous change from a FOSS license. And if they change it today specifically to lock out Amazon, will they change it again tomorrow to lock out my startup? The thing is, now that they've established precedent, there's no way of knowing what'll happen later.

Again, I know I can use GPL or MIT or BSD software for anything I want as long as I play by the exact same rules as everyone else. There's nothing that says you can use it but I can't. The difference between Free to non-Free is vast, even when I'm not affected (yet).

Your answer is "it's not that weird what if I wanted to launch a startup competing with azure and amazon"?

Well, Id say in that case youve got waaaay bigger problems than a license.

>Adding constraints later is a non-fallacious slippery slope.

No, it's very much a fallacious slippery slope. Constraints are the very essence of licenses and contracts.

> But something far more valuable was lost: the community's trust.

But before that the community turned its back on Redis Ltd., when it let those cloud offerings from others thrive. Once the “community” got that going, these consequences were inevitable.

> With open-source software, a license is as much a social contract as it is a legal one

Funny how when these license changes started happening people said the exact opposite - that the license is the license and if they didn’t want to be Jeff’d they should have used a difference license.

> Why would anyone volunteer their time and effort when it is mainly going to benefit a company which is so openly antagonistic against its volunteers?

Thing is, this sentence could equally be applied to the big cloud free riders.

Why should anyone, business or volunteer, write software that benefits FAANGs that don't pay their fair share?

I'm no fan of FAANGs, but what is "their fair share"? The entire point of OSS is that they don't have a fair share to pay. It's entirely voluntary.

That's a strong argument against open source then, at least as currently formulated.

No well-known permissive open software license includes any promise to do future development, much less to make it available under the same license terms. A key draw of permissive licensing is that anyone can fork and put new work under new and different terms.

Who would promise perpetual maintenance for nothing? What organization would sign up to be the only one that can't change terms for improvements?

I don't think "social contract" makes sense here. There's no sovereign power involved. In the sense used, "social contract" essentially means "not in the contract"---as in not in the terms. It's a back door for saying things that were never put down ought to be treated like they were in the license file, just because one side really wants them and doesn't want to DIY or pay for them.

If there are disappointed expectations, that's another thing. But being even very disappointed, and being able to find other like-minded people who would prefer no disruption and new freebies forever, doesn't make unfounded expectations enforceable, nor should it.

I'd be extremely careful speaking of any singular "community". And of assuming that everyone in it expected Redis or another similar project to work just like Linux or other exceptional projects. Most devs dealing with open source have a project relicense---among many others than simply grind to a halt---at some point in their career. For some devs, Redis may have been the first. Others "adopted" Redis knowing the risk and accepting it.

> With open-source software, a license is as much a social contract as it is a legal one

Says who? I completely disagree. A license only applies to the current work done. It does not compel someone to keep dedicating time to a project for free because they also did that in the past. People are allowed to change, even if they once released some code under a different license.

Is the old code still available under the same license ? That’s the only contract I care about , both legal and social.

I am just as much a member of this FLOSS community as others , and I never got the memo about this social contract story. I don’t think it’s true. My trust hasn’t been affected at all.

I understand your point I just get annoyed being lumped into it. Not everyone feels that way.

(But of course my opinion does matter less than actual contributors to Redis ! That’s totally fair.)

And it's obviouse that when contributors feel their efforts may be co-opted or undermined, they’re less likely to engage

I read this as you saying...

You gave us a bunch of stuff for free. You are now putting some conditions on that for new stuff you do. And that makes me sad.

I get the "feelings" part of this. When the world changes, even for the better, it can make us sad.

Equally this license better supports the stuff I am getting for free, and penalizes some giant corporation with buckets of money. And I keep getting stuff for free. So (frankly) I'm happy.

So meh. Is trust broken? Is the community harmed? Should we expect more moves along these lines? Do I see all decisions as clearly black and white - good or evil? Or is there more nuance?

For those upset at AWS no longer getting Redis for free, you can of course fork it and carry on developing for AWS. Those who don't like new redis can carry on running the old one. Those who want new redis can, well, download and use it.

Frankly they didn't hurt my feelings. They're developing. I still get it. I'm happy, not sad.

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