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Commons Clause

redislabs.com

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Re: Commons Clause

#21

Post by int_19h »

googlryas wrote: post #12
willlll wrote: post #5

Redis is no longer free and open source software with this move. It is now proprietary software.

Pragmatically, this is still open source software, because the software source is freely available. It might not be Open Source Software now, perhaps according to some zealots like RMS et al. > According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the…

RMS is all about Free Software. We're talking about Open Source, which is the less ideological / more pragmatic side of the F/OSS world.

Re: Commons Clause

#22

Post by ryanworl »

freedomben wrote: post #19
pdeva1 wrote: post #14

To be fair, Redis itself still remains BSD licensed. The other modules for Redis developed by RedisLabs [1] are under the new Commons Clause license. The big 3 cloud providers provide Redis as a cache service and don't use these modules anyway, so their offerings will remain unaffected. [1] https://redislabs.com/community/oss-projects/

If this doesn't affect the big 3 cloud providers, then why are they doing it? From reading the post, I got the impression they were specifically trying to stop the big cloud providers ...

Redis Modules are more and more becoming an important part of the Redis ecosystem. I would imagine many features are going to be added as modules rather than as new commands in core Redis.

Not being able to offer these while RedisLabs can is what I think they're going for here.

Re: Commons Clause

#23

Post by wkoszek »

Weird. Company full of Open Source guys, but I think they didn't get the right advice on a business model. The reason why MIT/BSD/Apache licenses are there is that there's a group of people who want to let companies use their stuff. If you want people pay you, you just release commercial software, without showing the source. License is something that once put in, it's too late to change later, and not disrupt how your technology is used in the field.

e.g.: I was contributing to FreeBSD because I wanted to contribute to BSD licensed-software, with a hope people from FANG would use it, and maybe hire me later. If FreeBSD made a chance to the license, it'd no longer be FreeBSD. It'd be FreeCommonsClause--different project. I wouldn't like to contribute to this.

As a CEO fo a software company, if I were to go and analyze what this license change means to my business, and probably get uncertain answer, I'd rather fork Redis from before the license change, and run on the copy.

Why? Because the fee for a US software engineer is $X, for a over-sees is $0.3X or $0.5X. Fee for a US copyright lawyer with expertise in software is 10$X. Pay that much money for no value-added to my business makes no sense to me.

Re: Commons Clause

#25

Post by dragonwriter »

googlryas wrote: post #12
willlll wrote: post #5

Redis is no longer free and open source software with this move. It is now proprietary software.

Pragmatically, this is still open source software, because the software source is freely available. It might not be Open Source Software now, perhaps according to some zealots like RMS et al. > According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the…

> Pragmatically, this is still open source software,

No, it's free of charge shared-source software. The OSI and FSF open source and free software definitions are virtually identical despite their very different philosophy because any less freedom than they call for quickly collapses the benefits of the arrangement.

Re: Commons Clause

#26

Post by wkoszek »

freedomben wrote: post #19
pdeva1 wrote: post #14

To be fair, Redis itself still remains BSD licensed. The other modules for Redis developed by RedisLabs [1] are under the new Commons Clause license. The big 3 cloud providers provide Redis as a cache service and don't use these modules anyway, so their offerings will remain unaffected. [1] https://redislabs.com/community/oss-projects/

If this doesn't affect the big 3 cloud providers, then why are they doing it? From reading the post, I got the impression they were specifically trying to stop the big cloud providers ...

That's the thing--it's just a copyright headache. If Amazon wants, they'll use Redis anyway.

Re: Commons Clause

#27

Post by matchagaucho »

willlll wrote: post #5

Redis is no longer free and open source software with this move. It is now proprietary software.

RedisLabs developed proprietary sharding and scaling capabilities for Redis.

Best I can infer, they want to open source the module, but not compete against themselves if others get into the Redis cloud hosting business.

Re: Commons Clause

#28

Post by wkoszek »

h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #24

Sounds like MBAs and lawyers are swooping in. Abandon ship.

It'd be much better if they asked people who understand business of open source on how to drive more $.

For example: it could as well be: "If you're any of: FB, APPL, MS, .... and you use this software in your cloud, you owe us $2M/yr"

It'd be much easier to analyze the impact.

Re: Commons Clause

#29

Post by smnrchrds »

pdeva1 wrote: post #14

To be fair, Redis itself still remains BSD licensed. The other modules for Redis developed by RedisLabs [1] are under the new Commons Clause license. The big 3 cloud providers provide Redis as a cache service and don't use these modules anyway, so their offerings will remain unaffected. [1] https://redislabs.com/community/oss-projects/

I wonder if it will follow the path of Android: start with a huge open source base and some propriety bits on top, and as they go on, move more and more of the functionality to the propriety part until the open source part is useless by itself.

Re: Commons Clause

#30

Post by pdeva1 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #29
pdeva1 wrote: post #14

To be fair, Redis itself still remains BSD licensed. The other modules for Redis developed by RedisLabs [1] are under the new Commons Clause license. The big 3 cloud providers provide Redis as a cache service and don't use these modules anyway, so their offerings will remain unaffected. [1] https://redislabs.com/community/oss-projects/

I wonder if it will follow the path of Android: start with a huge open source base and some propriety bits on top, and as they go on, move more and more of the functionality to the propriety part until the open source part is useless by itself.

that definitely seems to be the plan. this is the first step towards it.
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