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Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

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Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#61

Post by ezrast »

djsumdog wrote: post #12
SloopJon wrote: post #5

"The community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed." Well, how lucky for the community that a wise startup came along and fixed open source. I get that open source business models are hard, especially in an increasingly commoditized space like databases. Still, it rubs me the wrong way when a business wants the goodwill of open source, then tries its hardest to bend the rules in i…

Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Are people going to take your stuff and not contribute back? Possibly .. that's why there's the FSF/Stallman and GPLv3 argument. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BS…

> Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BSD/MIT, does AWS currently mod stuff without releasing the results as FOSS? (Is Aurora DB really modified MySql or MariaDB under its core?)

Aurora is absolutely a fork of MySQL; they're careful never to explicitly admit this in most of their documentation and marketing but their CTO's blog[1] links to a paper that mentions "obtaining significant throughput improvements over the base MySQL code base from which we started," and given how tightly they mirror MySQL with things like version numbers and goofy configuration flags that only exist for backwards-compatibility reasons, it would be hard to believe they built it from scratch.

GPLv2 and v3 both allow this because they only require source modifications to be made available when the resulting program is distributed outside one's organization. Since the public only ever talks to an interface and never obtains the binary, Amazon doesn't have to redistribute. This is not true of the AGPL, which has additional redistribution requirements meant to prevent (what copyleft activists perceive as) this kind of abuse.

There's an argument that since Amazon's changes are focused around integrating the storage layer with their particular infrastructure, the general public would find their changes useless even if they were to be distributed. Personally don't think this is terribly relevant to the larger discussion around licensing, even if it's true.

[1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/05/amazon-aurora-d...

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#62

Post by burtonator »

djsumdog wrote: post #12
SloopJon wrote: post #5

"The community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed." Well, how lucky for the community that a wise startup came along and fixed open source. I get that open source business models are hard, especially in an increasingly commoditized space like databases. Still, it rubs me the wrong way when a business wants the goodwill of open source, then tries its hardest to bend the rules in i…

Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Are people going to take your stuff and not contribute back? Possibly .. that's why there's the FSF/Stallman and GPLv3 argument. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BS…

> Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself

Money is air... without money good luck competing against other technologies.

I find that the OSS community is insanely naive about where OSS comes from.

There's this assumption that it just comes for free like manna from heaven.

I seem HN geeks (saying that in a good way) say how they want to use Firefox vs Chrome because Firefox is somehow less evil.

But where does Firefox get its money from? Google. Google gets its money from ads.

If you track down the source of all the OSS we're using there's some root source that most HN people would not be too happy about.

And the flip side is also true too.

I often hear people complaining about how they don't want to pay for apps and expect things to come for free.

This REALLY screws over a lot of ISVs that are literally just trying to build cool apps.

This is really a tragedy of the commons that we don't address very often.

Most billionaires have figured out some way to exploit this issue - much to our collective disadvantage.

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#63

Post by skrebbel »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #60

I don't really see how cloud providers are using their "monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it". The fact that e.g. AWS is a (near) monopoly, or even just massive has little to do with it. They provide VMs, those VMs can run software, and if you want they'll manage the VMs with the given software for you if you'd rather not worry about it. Rackspace does the sam…

It's not about VMs, it's about "Amazon so-and-so is a fully managed cloud database that speaks the XYZ protocol", which is code for "we forked a popular open source product and we're not going to contribute our changes back".

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#64

Post by jaabe »

wmf wrote: post #16
djsumdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Are people going to take your stuff and not contribute back? Possibly .. that's why there's the FSF/Stallman and GPLv3 argument. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BS…

Why does one have to make money with open source? Making money is really a shorthand for sustainability. If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? They may not make any modifications and those modifi…

> If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users.

I agree with you, but I also work in a place where we operate 35 year old medical software that hasn’t needed a change in more than two decades.

I know that’s unique and most of the stuff we build today will be out of rotation and obsolete in 5 years, but maybe we should have a conversation about the sustainability of modern software?

I work in the public sector by the way, we operate around 10 different open source projects where I work, and we generally want them build to need as few changes as possible because developers are expensive. We do build for the web, as so many others, but we’ve actually achieved a ton of sustainable by using old slow moving techs like Django rather than more modern stuff.

The simple truth is that we wouldn’t be able to afford open source software if we build it like most people build software these days.

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#65

Post by akerl_ »

dcbadacd wrote: post #43
mrob wrote: post #3

The biggest change here is the name. Instead of "Apache 2 modified with Commons Clause", which risked causing confusion with Open Source software, and with Creative Commons licenses, we get the much clearer "Redis Source Available License". "Source available" is standard terminology for this type of proprietary software license, so nobody should be mislead. I approve.

I think it's still open-source, it's just not free (as in freedom) software. I'm annoyed how suddenly redis, even when source is available, is put into the same bin as say MSSQL, with rest of the "proprietary software".

It’s worth noting (and Redis Labs has attempted to note in the body of the article) that Redis (the database) remains open source, as it always has been. Neither the “Common Clause” change or this change affect the database, just the modules published to extend Redis, by Redis Labs.

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#66

Post by SXX »

gruez wrote: post #54
spectre256 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedHat is (was?) sortof an example, but their product wasn't the open source software per-se, it was the guarantees their consulting and support offers. RedHat makes, for example, patches for kernel vulnerabilities, but they actually give that away for free. What they sell is a promise that when there's a new vulnerability, you can get a patch from them quickly. They also spread this service across MANY different ope…

>RedHat makes, for example, patches for kernel vulnerabilities, but they actually give that away for free. What they sell is a promise that when there's a new vulnerability, you can get a patch from them quickly. What's preventing someone from freeloading? It sounds like regardless of whether you're paying, you can still get the patches.

> What's preventing someone from freeloading?

If you catch any bugs specific to your systems or need special feature Red Hat is always there to help because a lot of open source software developers are as well Red Hat employees.

If you use CentOS or whatever other RHEL-based distribution there is no support at all other the one community might provide.

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#67

Post by bonzini »

gruez wrote: post #54
spectre256 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedHat is (was?) sortof an example, but their product wasn't the open source software per-se, it was the guarantees their consulting and support offers. RedHat makes, for example, patches for kernel vulnerabilities, but they actually give that away for free. What they sell is a promise that when there's a new vulnerability, you can get a patch from them quickly. They also spread this service across MANY different ope…

>RedHat makes, for example, patches for kernel vulnerabilities, but they actually give that away for free. What they sell is a promise that when there's a new vulnerability, you can get a patch from them quickly. What's preventing someone from freeloading? It sounds like regardless of whether you're paying, you can still get the patches.

Nothing, in fact Oracle is freeloading with Oracle Linux. But people prefer getting the thing from people that have a better track record and have direct access to the developers.

It's much harder for freeloaders to accept feature requests from customers, for example, because that would result in a fork.

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#68

Post by johncolanduoni »

skrebbel wrote: post #63
johncolanduoni wrote: post #60

I don't really see how cloud providers are using their "monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it". The fact that e.g. AWS is a (near) monopoly, or even just massive has little to do with it. They provide VMs, those VMs can run software, and if you want they'll manage the VMs with the given software for you if you'd rather not worry about it. Rackspace does the sam…

It's not about VMs, it's about "Amazon so-and-so is a fully managed cloud database that speaks the XYZ protocol", which is code for "we forked a popular open source product and we're not going to contribute our changes back".

I don’t believe that DocumentDB actually runs any MongoDB code. On the other extreme, there aren’t any apparent Amazon-only features in their services that are simply hosted versions like they do with Redis (via Elasticache). If that was the issue these companies could have just gone with the AGPL. The problem isn’t that they’re maintaining internal forks with changes they won’t contribute back, it’s that they’re either (a) running unmodified versions or (b) cleanrooming the whole shebang.

I don’t see how to make the first impossible without effectively using a proprietary license, and banning the second would hurt open source much more than it would help it

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#69

Post by e12e »

ezrast wrote: post #61
djsumdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Are people going to take your stuff and not contribute back? Possibly .. that's why there's the FSF/Stallman and GPLv3 argument. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BS…

> Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BSD/MIT, does AWS currently mod stuff without releasing the results as FOSS? (Is Aurora DB really modified MySql or MariaDB under its core?) Aurora is absolutely a fork of MySQL; they're careful never to explicitly admit this in…

Good points. But regarding:

> This is not true of the AGPL, which has additional redistribution requirements meant to prevent (what copyleft activists perceive as) this kind of abuse.

It's important to note that the "kind of abuse" AGPL is fighting is denying the end user the four freedoms. Eg freedom zero: if Amazon shuts down aurora, you lose the right to run the program.

Upstreaming of modifications is kind of orthogonal to the GPL licenses - sure if A sells a program to B under the gpl, B modifies it and sells it to C, C will have the [ed: new and modified] source and may give it to anyone - including back to A.

But the main thing gpl tries to enforce is that C will be able to use and improve the program as needed.

The AGPL is a reaction to the rise of rent-a-program (SaaS etc) - where the user has very few of the four freedoms guaranteed - both if the provider goes bankrupt, and if the provider makes changes.

Re: Redis Labs Changes Its Open-Source License Again

#70

Post by zokier »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #22

Dammit TechCrunch... neither this nor the previous license were/are "open source". My comment from another thread: >As an outspoken critic of the original change, I applaud this move. I still wish it were open source, but this solves a lot of the confusing nomenclature I took offense with. Kudos. That being said, this is some serious bullshit: >But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other…

The only place TechCrunch refers to it as open source is the title. The article body even explains that it isn't open source

> By definition, an open-source license can’t have limitations. This new license does, so it’s technically not an open-source license.

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