I'm sure you do, but that changes nothing about the problematic nature of Amazon's relationship with a lot of projects it interacts with, which is really what this is about: "Amazon thinks that by throwing some contributions at a project offsets for depriving a project of its main revenue". Well, it doesn't. My landlord and Tesco doesn't accept code contributions as payment. This is why this keeps happening again and again with all sort of projects. You reap what you sow.
> My landlord and Tesco doesn't accept code contributions as payment
Your landlord and Tesco aren't an open source project.
If for instance I get paid $X to specifically work on Redis by Y. The open source project now has effectively a full time engineer they aren't paying for, one that likely would not be a full time engineer for redis otherwise.
You cannot have "Amazon engineers contribute to redis" and "Amazon pays redis $X every month" and Amazon is only an example here, it could be Costco or IKEA or whatever.
So your argument is that instead of having OSS contributions from some of the best engineers in the world, redis (and other now OSS software) should compete with FAANG to pay those engineers.
Guaranteed one of the FAANG companies would just develop the tools internally instead if paying redis.
> You cannot have "Amazon engineers contribute to redis" and "Amazon pays redis $X every month" and Amazon is only an example here, it could be Costco or IKEA or whatever.
Wouldn't be better for both Redis, community and OSS movement if
1) Redis was fully OSS
2) AWS has a deal with Redis Labs were they share some X% of the revenue of their income for managed Redis (ElastiCache)
3) Redis Labs with that revenue can hire more maintainers
3a) Redis Labs with that revenue can pursue a competitive offering to ElastiCache (booom!)
4) AWS can still hire their developers and try to make them core maintainers to steer Redis development into implementing features they want/need
It's really impossible for me to paint AWS as the good citizen here and Redis Labs as the villain.
EDIT: I also wonder what history would have been if antirez started or moved to an AGPL3 licensing early on.
All this hinges in redis being a for profit with OSS software and not competing with AWS, that isn't happening though AWS won't happily fund their competitors and definitely wont contribute developer time to it.
Redis is partly where it is because of large FAANG companies contributing to redis, that cannot be discounted.
I don't have the time but go strip out all commits from FAANG companies employee and see if redis would be the product it is currently.
I'm not saying AWS is right but at the same time that is what redis decided to allow when they used the model they did. Now that they see they could be making a ton of money they want to retroactively change their licensing which is arguably also bad.
It's a money grab both ways which is what I have an issue with.
I'm pretty sure we will see AWS fork redis just before the license change and keep developing from there. They could even also then have all new code be proprietary as far as the current license allows that.
My argument is the industry in general is probably going to be worse of after this move than before.
> Redis is partly where it is because of large FAANG companies contributing to redis, that cannot be discounted.
Redis is offered as a managed offering by AWS and other because it was already very popular between developers that were clients or potential clients of cloud vendors. That it is/was used also by FAANG companies doesn't change a thing in this part of the story. (And no, I don't believe Redis is popular because it was used by FAANG companies which also contributed back)
AWS has no problem with running and contributing to AGPL projects. This entire wave of taking OSS closed started with Mongo switching away from AGPL for the same reasons that Redis is doing it today.
All of these companies trying to sell OSS are unhappy that AWS is competing with them on maintenance. AWS is more or less fully living up to the ideals of OSS - they share the code, they contribute to the core, they share processes and so on (to a greater or lesser extent). That's why the FSF or SFC have no problems with AWS.
However, these companies don't want to collaborate with AWS on building Redis or Mongo or whatever. They want AWS to be their customer, or at least to stop being their competitor. And FOSS has never been about preventing others from becoming your competitors.
> All of these companies trying to sell OSS are unhappy that AWS is competing with them on maintenance. AWS is more or less fully living up to the ideals of OSS - they share the code, they contribute to the core, they share processes and so on (to a greater or lesser extent).
Can you point me to the code describing some of the secret sauce used by AWS? If AWS was a real good OSS citizen, they would use FLOSS software and create FLOSS automation to operate it at scale, no? We have hundreds of such tools out there: Linux kernel, IPVS, keepealived, HAProxy, Kubernetes etc etc etc. These are all plumbing that are FLOSS. Why isn't AWS publishing their own plumbing as FLOSS so I can potentially run a mini-AWS in my datacenter?
I was only talking about their Redis service or Mongodb service. As far as I know, they are sharing their contributions as required by the license (or even beyond, in the case of Redis' former BSD license).
> instead of having OSS contributions from some of the best engineers in the world, redis (and other now OSS software) should compete with FAANG to pay those engineers.
This already happens. Amazon is never the main contributor. That blog post talks about 33 commits for MariaDB for 2023. Like, that's great and all, but that project doesn't run on those 33 commits. It's the same with Elastic; when they did their license change I looked a bit at the commit history, and something like >95% was by Elastic.
And all these projects that did license changes are fine.
> At that time Redis created an open governing board that took over, with a majority of contributions coming from the community during this time (~25% of contributions came from Redis engineers, ~75% from the community, including ~3% that came from me personally).
So, while I believe you're true in the general case, you appear to be wrong about Redis in particular.
I question whether AWS is depriving Redis of their revenue. You just can’t pay every single open source author for their work, too much overhead in maintaining all the contracts, especially if the software is offered as a service. You need the billing in place, certifications, support contracts, data sharing agreements, etc. As a company you want to optimize the number of business partners you have to deal with, and this is the value AWS offers, not Redis.
