so there are a lot of words that I don't quite understand. basically decisions have to be made and perhaps they'll lead to bad outcomes, but having that outcome is better than not making any decision and one can always reverse the decision.
decisions that lose community can be reversed, but the consequence of those decisions (losing community) might not be reversible at any cost. Which it seems to be in this case.
As an example, at the company I switched to, they no longer use redis internally (not selling redis as a service, just using it as the internal caching layer of the product and never directly exposed to users, so would be a valid free use case under the switched to license) and instead use valkey.
While these use cases might never have made Redis Inc any significant amounts of money, they were free advertising that they gave up and even with the 2nd license change, is not something they've gained back as external contributors are more interested in valkey than redis.
And that goes to the email I wrote to leadership before the decision was publicized. 1) what are we trying to accomplish 2) what would be the negative consequence of the decision 3) is there another way to accomplish #1 while minimizing #2.
It was always clear to everyone that #2 would be a fork. Everyone already knew that Amazon was managing their own internal Redis repo where they did their own internal development and then would drop changes that they would benefit from not having to carry (vs Redis Inc doing a lot of their core redis work in public vs dropping completed things)
If #1 was to prevent Amazon et al from using redis trademarks, I don't think the license had to change. If #1 was to enable more non BSD code to be part of redis, I don't think the license of the core had to change. (how this would have impacted redis naming in linux distribution that only want to ship OSS code is a semi open Q but I think solvable).
Personally, I think keeping the core as BSD but including the the non BSD source available portions could have been an effective "trojan horse" for getting the community at large to be more invested in those pieces.
Also personally, I think what caused Redis Inc leadership to go down the path they did was Amazon cloning a non bsd source available redis module that Redis Inc published (RedisJson, to the point that they cloned the entire api including "easter eggs" that weren't really meant to be used, i.e. an API alias named after a (former) executive JSON DEL vs JSON FORGET named after former sales VP Jason Forget). That was the point of Amazon no longer playing nice in a competitive friendly way on the BSD code level, but to try to undermine how Redis Inc tried to distinguish themselves from just the BSD code. That's the right, but it perhaps caused Redis Inc to make bad decisions. (and as an aside, in today's day and age of AI, I wonder what protection these source available licenses have from AI oriented cloning).