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Redis will remain BSD licensed

antirez.com

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Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#111

Post by ccleve »

Yiftach wrote: post #55

Hi, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. For avoiding any doubt - commons clause (as defined in commonsclause.com) is applied only to add-ons (modules), on top of Redis (e.g. RediSearch, Redis Graph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, Rebloom) that were developed by Redis Labs . We initially released these modules under AGPL li…

Yiftach (and Antirez),

Please talk more about AGPL. MongoDB has a similar problem, and they solved it by making their product dual-licensed, AGPL + commercial. They then clarified the AGPL to say that in their opinion, it did in fact prevent cloud providers from building managed services around the modules.

https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing/faq

The AGPL is lengthy and a bit convoluted, so it's possible they're wrong. Could you talk through your reasoning?

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#112

Post by dahdum »

dilap wrote: post #23
antirez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly my colleagues did a poor job with such an announcement there, and I did not get a chance to read it (which is actually a good thing, it means that the OSS division, I'm part of, is independent and can work to the Github repositories without caring about what the commercial side does). But it was kinda of a manifest to announce that certain things made inside Redis Labs are now Common Clause licensed. In doub…

It was clear to me from a careful reading that the page did not refer to Redis, but it also seemed deliberately designed to suggest that it did. It seemed pretty scummy. And the name itself of "Commons Clause" is practically a tiny version of fake news, since it tries to give an "open source" feeling to what is essentially a proprietary license. As a practical/PR matter, I think Redis Labs have likely shot themselves…

I'll second that the reputations are entwined at this point. My fear is that the "killer" new features will be implemented as RL source-available addons, to differentiate RL from AWS/Cloud providers.

I totally get why, as long as I can compile the addons and run on a server myself I'll be pretty happy.

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#113

Post by dilap »

fizzybeetle wrote: post #98
sikhnerd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll pile on here as well, we were thinking about shifting from elasticache to RL, but this has made that decision super easy.

Elasticache is a totally closed source implementation that does not contribute back to the community. How did this situation change your decision?

what would they contribute back? elasticache is just vanilla redis. aws is selling you compute time and ram.

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#114

Post by quotemstr »

I've seen saying for years and years that we're going to see a resurgence of proprietary software. Free software was one of those ideas that spread so successfully that people temporarily forgot that life could be otherwise, which means they stopped caring about the idea, which in turn led to a complacency that, at first, shifted software licensing to a BSD-style permissive model, and now, is starting to allow 1990s cancer like this commonscause.com license restriction to come back.

There's nothing new in the software ecosystem driving this.

Well, this commonsclause.com crap is such a move toward proprietary software. We're here.

> The Commons Clause is a first step at starting an important discussion

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#115

Post by maxerickson »

quotemstr wrote: post #114

I've seen saying for years and years that we're going to see a resurgence of proprietary software. Free software was one of those ideas that spread so successfully that people temporarily forgot that life could be otherwise, which means they stopped caring about the idea, which in turn led to a complacency that, at first, shifted software licensing to a BSD-style permissive model, and now, is starting to allow 1990s…

The baseline is pretty high to call anything a resurgence.

I guess by revenue dollar most software is already proprietary, it's just billed as a service or whatnot.

Considering all the code inside of companies, it's probably the case that most lines of code are also proprietary.

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#116

Post by Yiftach »

ccleve wrote: post #111
Yiftach wrote: post #55

Hi, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. For avoiding any doubt - commons clause (as defined in commonsclause.com) is applied only to add-ons (modules), on top of Redis (e.g. RediSearch, Redis Graph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, Rebloom) that were developed by Redis Labs . We initially released these modules under AGPL li…

Yiftach (and Antirez), Please talk more about AGPL. MongoDB has a similar problem, and they solved it by making their product dual-licensed, AGPL + commercial. They then clarified the AGPL to say that in their opinion, it did in fact prevent cloud providers from building managed services around the modules. https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing/faq The AGPL is lengthy and a bit convoluted, so it's possible they…

Well - I can only say that what MongoDB has is not complete. There are still many holes, and we prefer to avoid them. And of course this doesn't solve the other issue, where developers cannot use AGPL in large enterprises.

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#118

Post by yeahforsureman »

ccleve wrote: post #111
Yiftach wrote: post #55

Hi, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. For avoiding any doubt - commons clause (as defined in commonsclause.com) is applied only to add-ons (modules), on top of Redis (e.g. RediSearch, Redis Graph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, Rebloom) that were developed by Redis Labs . We initially released these modules under AGPL li…

Yiftach (and Antirez), Please talk more about AGPL. MongoDB has a similar problem, and they solved it by making their product dual-licensed, AGPL + commercial. They then clarified the AGPL to say that in their opinion, it did in fact prevent cloud providers from building managed services around the modules. https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing/faq The AGPL is lengthy and a bit convoluted, so it's possible they…

I'm not speaking on anyone's behalf but MongoDB's interpretation of AGPL is very contentious and extreme.

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#119

Post by mrfredward »

vmlinuz wrote: post #80

This could have been made clear in a few simple sentences: We have created a new software license which we are calling the 'Redis Labs License' (RLL), by adding the Commons Clause terms as extra restrictions on top of the Apache 2.0 License. We recognise this will no longer be a true Open Source license, but we consider it a fair trade-off between our business needs and our responsibility and commitment to the Redis…

Redis went out of their way to obfuscate what they were doing with deceptive license names. Now they are struggling to control the damage caused in all the confusion. There's a lesson here...

Re: Redis will remain BSD licensed

#120

Post by yarosv »

antirez wrote: post #33
lbriner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parts that I noticed were missing from the original announcement include more specifics about the parts of the system that would change licence and also whether the intention was to charge people to use these new parts. It was unclear whether the intention was to stop these cloud providers or to make them pay in some way for what they were doing.

Yep, now finally this is updated to specify exactly what changes license. Incidentally: nothing I ever worked to directly. It would be way cooler if also things like RediSearch or RediGraph could still be totally open source, but it's apparently very hard, Common Clause at least will allow it to be free-as-beer and with the source code available.

> Common Clause at least will allow it to be free-as-beer and with the source code available.

The license is very vague. According to this

> a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.

What if I have big online shop with huge catalog and my software value "derives from the functionality of RedisSearch"? Do my only option not to host it at Redis Labs?

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