Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

For such a small need, you might also look at PouchDB. Inspired by couch but simplified to allow it to run in-browser.

I'm not a lawyer, so take the following with that grain of salt.

In the specific case of Rust, no, because as another user pointed out, their licensing prohibits it.

If my understanding of the licenses is correct, the X-11, BSD 3-clause and BSD 4-clause licenses also prohibit this.

The MIT, BSD 2-clause and ISC licenses don't appear to prohibit this.

Your post mentions a few issues which I believe are legally separate:

1. Naming your company after an open-source project. I believe this is perfectly legal under the latter listed licenses, and happens in practice (for example, a brief search yields that React is MIT-licensed, and "React Labs" is a company).

2. Selling a commercial version of an open-source project. This is legal, and in fact a license isn't considered open source by OSI or free software by FSF if it disallows selling a commercial version. Whether this will be profitable is a separate question--generally people won't be willing to pay for something if they can just get it for free. There are two ways around this that I can think of: a) providing services and development around the open-source project, and b) extending the open source project with closed source code. The latter business model is prohibited by copyleft--you can only sell closed-source extensions to copyleft software if you have rights to the copyright (i.e. you created the code yourself) so attempting to do this with an existing copyleft-licensed project would be prohibited.

3. Enforcing trademark on the name of an open source project. My understanding is that enforcing a trademark created after a open source project started using it isn't possible, not because of licensing terms, but because of "priority of use" or "first to use in commerce"[1]. That is, if an open source project "Foo" exists already, I can't create "Foo Labs" and then sue the Foo project for using my name--on the contrary, the Foo project could probably sue Foo Labs. Redis Labs avoids this liability because they obtained rights for the trademark from the original Redis developer (I'm not sure what terms they obtained rights to the Redis name under--if they have exclusive rights they could sue anyone using the Redis name, but contribution to the project over time would likely make this complicated). There's a separate issue which is that "Foo" and "Foo Labs" are arguably different trademarks--Foo Labs can't inherently sue anyone using the Foo name, but they could likely sue someone who started a "Foo Labs" if they were the first ones to trade under that name.

[1] https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/does-prior-art-apply-to-t...

In my mind a lot of the outrage is just generated through FUD that the big corps create when their ability to place themselves in a position to create false scarcity (and hence "value") is threatened. A big clue to these types of people are if they say anything about money or profit: e.g. "OSS devs need to make money too"

For the RMS believers, OSS is a more fundamental attempt to change mankind at a time before the greedy asshats could capture and restrict things. The birth of the electronic age, and software in particular was viewed as a golden opportunity to capture the value we created for EVERYONE. This is a HUGE reason you see so many OSS devs that will work thanklessly on code for years or decades for no pay, they are the doctors-without-borders of the tech world, they really give a shit about freeing humanity from usury and corporate value capture.

It's been really interesting to watch as the internet was captured, in a space where the cost of reproduction is literally zero, they've still been incredibly successful in strategically shunting a lion's share of the value for themselves where they then proceed with leveraging the artificial scarcity to capture that value monetarily.

Considering this in the face of what we've been taught about today's capitalist society, owning the means of production is really only a small part of the greedy antisocial playbook of those who market in false scarcity. Don't think for a second that this isn't an ideological war, one that will be fought with all the information weapons at the disposal of those who stand to lose in a free and open society.

And double thanks for providing an SPDX document for the contents of the image.