The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

In the case of Redis, I think that it's a really deserving project and I fully trust the integrity of the people behind it.

As someone who created a popular OSS project outside of Silicon Valley, I can relate to how difficult it is to be an outsider in this industry and I understand why Redis Labs would feel entitled to capture a tiny fraction of the enormous value that they created.

I think that if the Commons Clause is just related to optional things like plugins or addons then I honestly don't see any harm; at least the plugins/addons are still available for small companies to use for free so it's still a step up from the typical OSS freemium model where they sell the plugins.

I will steal an argument from a friend who has been doing free software/open source for 30+ years now.

Y'all created a bunch of open source software, it became valuable. Y'all think that you should get to extract some percentage of that value, and that others being able to do it instead is "bad behavior".

But this is very very wrong, and if that is your understanding of open source, you really should say screw it, and take your ball elsewhere. Try it. See if you can create the same amount of value.

In fact, it is your attempt to "extract your share" that is the bad behavior. You cannot, in fact, have your cake and eat it too. If you and others all get to extract your "fair share", that software will cease to exist. This is not theoretical, this is what has happened every time. That is because the value exists because you made the software free. If you didn't, people would have used something else that was free and worked well enough. Also not theoretical. When i review diligence from companies as part of M&A, the vast majority (90-99%) of software is free software, not commercial software.

This paradox has existed since free/open source/etc software was created. The solution traditionally is for developers to just be happy creating cool software and making a living on it. I have rarely, if ever, seen this fail to work at the scale seen here. It certainly fails in smaller scales, but you are not solving that problem even a little.

Instead these claims of bad behavior only seem to come up when people see a billion dollar ecosystem and think they deserve 50% of it.

You are pretty much never going to get anyone worked up over that. Because they shouldn't be. Of all the injustice in this world, this doesn't even register.

It made more sense when you could release a product openly and then start a business around supporting it, consulting and training and selling "enterprise" versions for serious customers. But now that's even hard to do when everyone just wants to use AWS, etc to use this software.

It's a double edged sword and we take for granted. These projects have grown and become so feature rich because of the investment in them and the ability to hire hundreds of developers to contribute full time. But then this is harvested by someone who isn't paying for it and not just a little bit - a whole lot. What will eventually happen is we won't have feature rich products that are open source in the future without a change in how we think about licensing. The Apache License is not compatible with running a business around an open source project any longer.

With an actual license text publicly available, this is way beyond just an idea, wouldn't you agree?

> His ideal 'solution' is to just fold it all up and try to forget it ever happened

This was not proposed as a solution to the problem(s) that Commons Clause wants to solve, problem(s) BTW that I can't see clearly articulated anywhere.