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Commons Clause

redislabs.com

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Re: Commons Clause

#31

Post by adrianratnapala »

matchagaucho wrote: post #27
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.

You are right that they are making something new available, but they are not open sourcing it according to the commonly accepted meaning of the term -- and the original article actually says "... any software under this new license is non-open source by definition".

Now you might think that commercial use is a small semantic detail. But it is one that the open source / free software community has always insisted on, up to and including left-loonies like Stallman.

Of course none of this means that it is wrong or unfair of RedisLabs to do this. It merely means that what they are doing is not open sourcing anything.

Re: Commons Clause

#32

Post by rch »

ryanworl wrote: post #22
freedomben wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looks like you could still develop and ship your own modules, even for profit, along with core redis.

Re: Commons Clause

#33

Post by lozenge »

googlryas wrote: post #17
jonny_eh wrote: post #11

So if you're a cloud provider that provides generic cloud VMs, with a button to "Install Redis onto VM", is that allowed? What if it's one of hundreds of similar buttons to install various software onto the VM? What if there's no button, but a user can run `apt-get install redis`? Is that in violation?

That is allowed and fine. What you can't do is, if you are Amazon, release "AWS Sdejt" which is simply a managed wrapper around Redis.

Can you explain how you interpreted the license to say that's fine? Isn't the value of the service "substantially" its ability to run redis? And isn't the package manager a form of distributing redis? (Referring to the shared source modules, not the BSD licensed part)

Re: Commons Clause

#34

Post by bigiain »

int_19h wrote: post #21
googlryas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep - the comment would have made a lot more sense if it'd left RMS out and used ERS instead.

Re: Commons Clause

#35

Post by anothergoogler »

wkoszek wrote: post #28
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.

I don't think Morgan Stanley is about to sell Redis hosting, but what do I know.

Re: Commons Clause

#36

Post by bigiain »

lozenge wrote: post #33
googlryas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is allowed and fine. What you can't do is, if you are Amazon, release "AWS Sdejt" which is simply a managed wrapper around Redis.

Can you explain how you interpreted the license to say that's fine? Isn't the value of the service "substantially" its ability to run redis? And isn't the package manager a form of distributing redis? (Referring to the shared source modules, not the BSD licensed part)

This is the problem (at least for me) - the wording is vague and open to interpretation, which means if it ever needs to be clarified, it'll need expensive lawyers to get that done.

A reasonable man would say "Of course the value of, say, Digital Ocean's service is not "substantially its ability to run redis" - even though any linux vm customer can run their OS choice's version of 'apt-get install redis'".

But we do not live in a world were a "reasonable man's interpretation" is an acceptable risk-mitigation for a business.

I'm pretty sure there'll be other people who, like me, are considering how best to risk manage the use of redis going forward...

Re: Commons Clause

#37

Post by hlieberman »

For the record, this license is obviously incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines; I suspect it is non-free enough to not even be shipped by Red Hat and the other semi-commercial *nix's.

Re: Commons Clause

#38

Post by jarofgreen »

bobsky wrote: post #6
phpnode wrote: post #3

Yikes, the wording around consulting seems especially worrisome - are they effectively prohibiting third parties from providing redis technical support? This move will likely kill the project as it is today.

This is limitation around selling software/product not consulting, per bottom of post: "...if your product is an application that uses such a module to perform select functions, you can use it freely and there are no restrictions on selling your product. However, if what you sell is basically the functionality of the module packaged as a cloud service or on-prem software, Commons Clause does not allow it."

But the blog post is just a blog post.

Legal people are going to go by what the actual license says - and that is vague.

Re: Commons Clause

#40

Post by marcinzm »

mmastrac wrote: post #7

This is the license below. I'm pretty sure this is going to be vague enough to cause problems with a ton of legal departments. They want to be the only ones hosting it and the the only ones you call in to help with it. I get where the Redis folks are coming from, but this is basically a nail in the product and guarantees a fork if they don't turn back. === 8 The Software is provided to you by the Licensor under the L…

>substantially

Wow, that's a legal landmine. Is there even a legal standard or consensus for what "substantial" means?

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