From where I left

I would like to clarify since I am one of the people who is always present in these threads debating these licenses:

I think these licenses suck compared to even kind-of-bad open source licenses, like AGPL, though some suck more than others. For example, the SSPL is a poorly-conceived liability nightmare. BUSL, on the other hand, may not be much better, but it is pretty interesting. Software that is BUSL today is theoretically open source eventually. As long as this holds up in court, it is an intriguing alternative to other "business" licenses.

However: it was never about this. My complaints always center squarely around two things:

- One, deception. If you release a product and you call it "open source" or otherwise try to imply it is open, but actually it is not open source, this is bad. This is bad because like it or not, people have a perception of what open source is that has been shaped by the careful guarding of the definition of the term, and when people misuse it, it dilutes this while also deceiving people into thinking it's the same thing they've come to know.

- Two, violation of expectations. I get that the contributions made by open source contributors rarely compares much to the contributions made by those employed at companies, but even still, the CLA breaks the fundamental mutually beneficial relationship that open source contributors have with the projects they're contributing to, and I think that this aspect of CLAs is troublesome. That aside, I personally evangelized Redis within organizations with the understanding that it would always be open source, because why wouldn't it be? And I reckon that big open source users like MediaWiki also never envisioned that Redis would cease to be open source some day. Don't get it twisted, I think Redis is great software that can stand on its own, but it doesn't matter: it didn't. It got a healthy boost from participating in the open source community, and then one day, it suddenly left said community in the dust, which is why we have to fork.

However, despite that... I am not ideologically opposed to closed-source, source-available, or any other kind of software. It's fine. I use software that is "non-free". I pay for software. I pay for JetBrains Toolbox. This does not bother me and is not my issue. It's literally just those two things that bother me.

So why don't I care about MaxScale? Honestly, it's pretty simple: It's outside of my purview. It may very well be an important project used by a lot of people, but it just doesn't seem like it was ever a huge open source project: according to GitHub, it has a total of 39 all-time contributors, most of which seemingly after the relicensing, versus Redis's 729. I've never used MaxScale and I'm not sure what depends on it. If someone else is mad about this relicensing, I do not necessarily blame them, but I just simply have no dog in the race.

MySQL and MariaDB themselves remain as open as ever, and that's really all most people are concerned with IMO.

>Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust

I'm not seeing this being a factor in the broader community of users. Redis is still 'go-to' solution in its space. Haven't yet had anyone bring this up.

>I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally. It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms. That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis, there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects. I'm sad about that.

I think the biggest thing is - that you acknowledge- that companies (particularly big businesses, like the cloud and service providers) build entire lines of business on this tech without contributing back, monetarily or otherwise, or even worse, try to shorehorn a project into prioritizing what they want over what may be better for the long term health of the community.

These license changes I've seen so far are all attempts to address that. How else are they able to do it with any long term success? They already aren't getting the funding they're looking for, clearly, while businesses build multi million and in some cases billion+ dollar businesses on top of the technology.

I'd argue that old permissive licenses aren't sustainable in the long run for any project like Redis

Yes it does. You can make a private, proprietary app that’s just tweaking a few bits of a BSD project. You can’t do that with the GPL.

Following that, unless the project has a CLA (so that the owner of the project reserves all rights of the code that’s contributed and essentially owns the contribution), any contributions made under the GPL cannot be made closed source, can’t be switched to an incompatible license, etc, because the contribution itself is GPL’d.

If you want to prohibit hosting then yes you're going to need a non-OSS license (by definition), but that's moving the goalposts: I was replying to a post that said others should be allowed to sell the software as a service, but that they should be forced to share their changes even if they're "hosting" and not "distributing"... AKA the exact point of the AGPL existing.

> people have a perception of what open source is that has been shaped by the careful guarding of the definition of the term, and when people misuse it, it dilutes this

That's true, but it's an unfortunate accident. In my mind the core problem is that OSI chose to take an existing term/concept (source code being "open" which previously just meant the code was publicly available) and conflating it with a new, much more specific definition relating to copyright license terms.

And then because the term "open source" already had previous usage in the industry, OSI couldn't get a trademark, which means discussions of "misuse" and "dilution" are purely matters of opinion which are very prone to holy wars. If they had just chosen an actually new/novel term which could be trademarked (e.g. "sourceware" was one alternative floated at the time), I suspect a lot of confusion could have been avoided.

> the CLA breaks the fundamental mutually beneficial relationship that open source contributors have with the projects they're contributing to

It reduces some of the benefits for the contributor, but it's still a mutually beneficial relationship that (imo) benefits the contributor more than the maintainer. Most third-party contributions are features/fixes specifically needed by the contributor, and having them merged upstream typically makes life much easier for the contributor, despite the possible risk of future relicensing due to the CLA. From the contributors' point of view, that's still generally better than alternatives such as either maintaining a private fork forever, or re-implementing the software in-house from scratch.

> I personally evangelized Redis within organizations with the understanding that it would always be open source, because why wouldn't it be? And I reckon that big open source users like MediaWiki also never envisioned that Redis would cease to be open source some day.

A lot of people made this assumption, but at the end of the day, in retrospect this was akin to assuming that ZIRP would remain the status quo forever. And that's understandable, given how the industry skews young and that means a majority of folks have worked their entire career in this low-interest-rate, massive-tech-valuation bubble. And even for older engineers, it's easy to get lost in the bubble when most of your coworkers are younger and have 100% internalized those market conditions as being "normal".

So then when the bubble deflates a little bit, people start vocally blaming Redis and Hashicorp and RedHat and Elastic and MongoDB and every other previously-open-source company that gets added to this ever-growing list. That's human nature I suppose; when enough people make the same bad assumption, they're going to blame the external symptoms and not blame their own bad assumption.

> It got a healthy boost from participating in the open source community, and then one day, it suddenly left said community in the dust, which is why we have to fork.

Changing the license doesn't leave the community in the dust though. I mean, "we" don't "have" to fork, unless "we" are cloud providers, right? I don't think it is a coincidence that a number of the Valkey contributors work for cloud providers.

But I find it curious that many of the loudest voices in these threads aren't actually code contributors to the software being discussed. (I'm not referring to your comments, to be clear; I found your writing quite insightful and nuanced, even though I disagree with some of it.)