Redis was open before the trademark was acquired from antirez by Garantia Data, who then re-branded themselves as RedisLabs, and then as Redis. This was definitely not a predestined outcome, there are plenty of other foundational open source server software that transitioned to a software foundation. While I worked on the redis core team (https://redis.com/blog/new-governance-for-redis/), I advocated to move it to a foundation.
Yes, but the point is that the project started as, and gained success as, a not-paying-the-bills endeavour. The fact that RedisLabs desires to get enough to pay a bunch of staff is not actually a requirement for redis to exist and thrive, they just happen to own the trademark.
Exactly. Redis (the company) had plenty of opportunity to monetize either a cloud offering or their enterprise offering. They have a lot of cool technology like vector search and time series extensions that people will readily pay for. They could have found a path of moving the core to a foundation and continuing to make money with their added value. They're choosing to get the value they can out of the open-source stack. It might work out well for them, but I can't believe it will be good in the long term for Redis users.
> Maybe such is the destiny of foundational open source server software... If it's "cloudable" no profitable business will come out of it.
I really hope it's not true, but many clues suggest it might be.
I like the concept of open core with a very liberal license. Perhaps there should be a special "MIT-X" (an example, it would be certainly not compatible) license with a clause borrowed from that of Llama2 for large organizations, as Additional Commercial Terms [0].
"2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights."
