[dead]
From where I left
461–470 of 472 posts
Re: From where I left
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But that doesn't actually provide a net "benefit" to the contributor, because then they have to take on the massive burden of maintaining a private fork. Well yeah, that's the point. Trading contributions vs maintenance burden. > My point in all this is that contributing to open source often benefits the contributor more than the maintainer And yet they choose to do it... Why?
I said it provides more benefit to the contributor than the maintainer, but I did not say that it provides no benefit to the maintainer. Your question doesn't logically follow.
That's exactly my point: It still benefits the maintainer. So they benefited from contributors, then fucked them over later, violating the social contract (but not necessarily the software license because CLAs yadda yadda).
Re: From where I left
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said it provides more benefit to the contributor than the maintainer, but I did not say that it provides no benefit to the maintainer. Your question doesn't logically follow.
That's exactly my point: It still benefits the maintainer. So they benefited from contributors, then fucked them over later, violating the social contract (but not necessarily the software license because CLAs yadda yadda).
Again, my point in response is that the contributor received more benefits (in the form of code review and ongoing maintenance) than the maintainer. We're talking in circles here.
As long as the contributor isn't a cloud provider, they can continue to use the software unimpeded under the new license. Their contribution continues to be maintained by the maintainers. The contributor hasn't been "fucked over" in any way.
If the contributor is a cloud provider, they can choose to enter into a commercial licensing / revenue share agreement and continue to use the software unimpeded. Or they can decline and use/create a fork, in which case any so-called fucking-over is clearly mutual, because the contributor wants to profit from the software explicitly without making its ongoing development financially sustainable for its original maintainers. That's parasitic behavior.
I must ask, have you contributed to Redis? Or are you just expressing outrage on behalf of other people who actually contributed to Redis and may not actually even share in said outrage?
If the latter, why are you so emotionally invested in this topic? And have you ever been on the other side of the coin, maintaining a widely-used open source project?
Re: From where I left
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, et…
Creating a commercial version of a thing is not a license change.
Of course, I said proprietary. You said commercial.
Proprietary refers to ownership and licensing. While I somewhat conflated it with closed-source in my comment, it nevertheless applies since we are talking about the ability to make it closed source.
You can relicense derivative works of MIT or BSD software provided that you satisfy the original license requirements (attribution). This is irrelevant of commercializing it.
Conversely, and to your point, you can sell GPL software you didn’t write, or sell a derivative work of it, but because of the copyleft nature, your derivative work must also be licensed under a compatible GPL license.
Re: From where I left
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
They both were the same project with the same codebase and the same contributors before they split. It was as much project A as it was project B.
> It was as much project A as it was project B. Valkey is as much Redis as it is Valkey? Then why isn't it called "Redis"? Clearly there's a distinction or the fork would never have happened. Is Redis also as much Valkey as it is Redis? Names signal who has control over a project, not anything about its history/implementation/license. Otherwise every piece of software that goes through a rewrite should change its nam…
"Valkey" is not called "Redis" because as much as the development is shared by the community, the trademark isn't.
A lot of developers and users are sticking with the community and the license instead of sticking with the trademark holder.
> Names signal who has control over a project
Trademark is a specific form of intellectual property and there are many others. I don't understand how you got to that conclusion to be honest. A restaurant in my neighborhood had to change name recently because it was too similar to a big chain, does that mean it's a different restaurant now?
Re: From where I left
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
For somebody, like you and many others, it was very important to retain an OSI license. But I feel that in general given that the new license is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what they can do with the code, and that the cloud situation was quite self evident, I believe that with better communication, and immediate developments/merges in the core, to counter balance the license switch, many people w…
> is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what they can do with the code I think the thing that hurts a lot of folks is the one thing they wanted to do with Redis is use a managed version of it in AWS. And now they can't. We're trying to figure out our migration path right now and it's almost surely going to be Valkey. Large vendors were never going to pay up and so it's all loss for everyone involved. I…
> I think the thing that hurts a lot of folks is the one thing they wanted to do with Redis is use a managed version of it in AWS. And now they can't.
Hum, I have not considered this aspect before - I mean I've realized that AWS probably cannot use Redis [until they pay back], but that users (customers) would be affected...likely I'm biased here cuz not using managed services of that sort, sat having Redis + Sentinel setup of our own.
Re: From where I left
#467Another thing that kinds of sucks about this whole "license rug-pull" kind of business is that other teams (like ours) who are publishing open-source software/tools are now suspects too. Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved? Folk can't take us at face-value (I'd argue demonstrated value) and level (unfounded) accusations at us; because some othe…
I look at bun in the JS ecosystem like this. They are open source for now but also backed by VCs. They will have to make money at some point. I have no interest in engaging with that product just to have a new pricing model thrown my way and disrupt everything.
It is not even the for-profit thing, it is the VC, because they will be expect to make millions and millions off the project and that is not really possible with just support contracts and similar
Re: From where I left
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
> although they are treated as radioactive by most companies Isn't this reason enough to not consider it an option?
AFAIK, the main issue of the GPL family of licenses is that they are rather poorly drafted. The GNU project has great evangelists but ideological-minded people make bad lawyers. Their licenses are long winded and hard to interpret, and often make assumptions about unsettled bits of copyright law. Their legal theories (eg. "GPL is not a contract") have been rejected by courts. In short, if you're a company wanting to…
The SFC think the GPL is a contract (as well as a license), and that is being tested in court at the moment:
Re: From where I left
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you link some info on the portion about contracts having been rejected by the courts? I’m having trouble finding specifics on that myself.
I'm not sure it even matters. If it gets to court you've got a plaintiff either claiming that defendant violated copyright or the defendant failed to follow the terms of GPL. In both cases the defendant will respond that they followed the terms of GPL. In both cases the court has to determine what the license means and then whether or not defendant followed the terms of the GPL. To do that the court has to decide wha…
Some of this is being tested in court right now.
Re: From where I left
#470All the conversations about SSPL seem to go the same way: - Someone complains about the extra restrictions imposed on AWS (lets be real, it's basically just about AWS) - People point out that SSPL is basically AGPL+, and that for the vast vast majority of people it doesn't make any difference - People counter that the SSPL is written ambiguously/untested in court, and so while it might seem like it's AGPL+ and doesn'…
> not be cannibalized by cloud providers
That would be discrimination against certain groups/persons, so not acceptable under the OSD.