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Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that.

Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey.

Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses.

Sorry, but non-open source companies aren't getting sympathy from me because they are hating on open source projects.

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These were open source projects that had to change licenses away from open source because of AWS. I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.

I think there's plenty of room for people to object to the "had to change licenses" framing. They chose to change licenses, same as they chose the original license.

That original license probably helped them with goodwill and to gain a community; when those benefits no longer exceeded the downsides of using that license, they changed licenses to one that suited them better.

Naturally, this change costs them some amount of goodwill, a portion of the very goodwill that they harvested by choosing an open-source license in the first place.

I don't see this as an issue with the company. They were happy to release their code as OSS, as long as that allowed them to make enough money to develop the software. It was a win/win, and them AWS came and took advantage of that.

If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts coming every day and taking the entire crate, I don't blame you for discontinuing the convenient apple sales, I blame the thief.

This analogy falls apart because there wasn’t a price for the software.

It’s like someone said “free whole apples, or $2/lb for sliced apples.”

And someone came, took all the whole apples, cut them, and sold them themselves.

Sure, but presumably you can engage with the spirit of the analogy?

Let's be pedantic, and say someone gave apples away in exchange for donations, and when everyone only got a few apples and donated, things are fine, but then someone decided they can just take all the apples and sell them elsewhere.

Is it the fault of the first guy for not offering free apples any more, or is the second guy why we can't have nice things?

> but presumably you can engage with the spirit of the analogy?

What you’re calling “the spirit of” the analogy, others are seeing as “the bias embedded in” the analogy and you seem annoyed that people aren’t accepting your proposed analogy as a valid analog to the topic under discussion.

You think they’re changing the subject; others, including me, experience you as the one doing that.

Why is an analogy needed? Just engage with what actually happened.

The donation example tracks.

In this allegory, did AWS take all the apples in the crate while paying them $1 for every apple, thus becoming the bad guy?

No. It took the entire crate and paid nothing.

I think there's a massive difference between "paying what was required by the offer" and "paying less than was required by the offer" and only one of them makes you a thief.

I think there's a massive difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and saying "but the letter of the law didn't say I couldn't!" doesn't make you any less of a thief.

> "but the letter of the law didn't say I couldn't!" doesn't make you any less of a thief.

Yes it does. And it's moot because the apples were offered for free, no restriction on usage.

Most of the companies behind Valkey were writing significant code for Redis. It was certainly not a case of them paying nothing.

Valkey has some of the (formerly) most prolific Redis contributors for the era in which it was forked.

There is no bad guy. The OSS license meant that AWS was perfectly free to do as they did. If the companies who licensed their software as OSS didn't want that, then they shouldn't have used an OSS license.

Ok, then fine, the companies who licensed their software as OSS did that for as long as they wanted to, and then they moved away. What's the issue here?

There isn't one? Either with the change or with the ensuing forks, in principle.

> I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.

The formerly OSS companies, you mean.

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