“When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.”
Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine, thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they made to their investor.
IMHO it's important to take the quoted words into the context. And the context is:
1. Redis Labs anyway pays me full time and Fabio Nicotra (prat time) to just do BSD code. So they are not taking away anything from the OSS part.
2. Internal devs at Redis Labs submit pull requests to the Redis core BSD code base.
So this whole discussion is centered around modules, that is, their POV is that in the cloud era you have to do also things under different licenses. Now it's perfectly licit to disagree with that, however it's important to realize that Redis Labs is not taking away anything from the OSS effort around Redis, it's actually paying for such BSD code. Yet Redis Labs for some reason is getting a lot of criticisms despite other systems went completely non-open-source, core + accessory things. Something does not add up IMHO.
If that means that RedisLabs stays in business and Redis stays maintained (which is not otherwise guaranteed), it means that the general public still benefits from it.
Who says that antirez can be hired "that cheaply"? Assuming he also owns equity of RedisLabs, anything short of a good exit might not be worth the oportunity cost for him.
Of course that is baseless speculation, but so is assuming that Redis could be continued to be maintained "by just hiring antirez".
> The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies
No, the problem is exactly what the source mentioned. When FOSS became a thing, cloud computing wasn't even an infant thought and the licenses that spawned during the era addressed only known factors.
> I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others
How many of them are in this situation? Not really interested in the opinions of people that don't have skin in the game, and I'd wager these people don't have product's being exploited by cloud provider.
We have large businesses exploiting open source software (thanks to dated licenses) to make profit off the back of open source communities, while contributing little-to-nothing in return.
Fuck that. I didn't adopt Redis Postgres, or MySQL so that Amazon and Google could build off decades of good will to make money from them. They've all made significant improvements to these services, but refuse to add that value back into the community despite the fact that the opportunity only existed because other's worked for free.
So it's ok for cloud providers to profit from FOSS projects, but not ok for the original authors? Shameful, this attitude is absolutely disgraceful.
Please stop using open source if you don't also advocate for FOSS authors to reserve the right to try and profit from their work in a way that's compatible with the greater FOSS community.
“When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.”
Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine, thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they made to their investor.