Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

I want to give just a few info about this:

1. SSL is going to be merged in the next days, I'm in this moment here in SF in the same room with the patch author, she made a wonderful work and the patch is "opt in", simple, and good, so this is going to happen.

2. Forking is a right that open source gives you. Have fun coding Josiah!

3. I really will push for any fork not being called Redis. I care a lot about the details, the stability, the quality and the ideas in my project, and I really want that when people say "Redis", it's Redis, and not a Redis fork.

4. I'll be a bit disappointed if the license of the fork is so that it will be possible to merge my(1) BSD code but I will not be able to merge back potential change. It's legal, it's possible to do for this approach, but it IMHO ethically speaking sucks.

(1) my as mine and a number of other contribs.

As far as 3 goes, the Perl5 community tends to deal with that with software licensing. I doubt it's possible to do that with Redis at this point, but the Artistic 2.0 license (Perl5 comes under both GPL and Artistic 2.0, with the choice between them) lets you make forks of the project and call it something else without having to release those changes. I'd definitely agree about 4, at least except where he talks about the cluster stuff, it sounds like there's more murky waters there than I know about.

https://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0

You don't need a different license; trademark is what regulates the name, so having a liberal copyright license doesn't mean they can use the same name.

For example, you can get Firefox under the MPL, which says nothing about having to rename, but you still can't use the name "Firefox" if you distribute a modified version, due to Mozilla's trademark policy.

Murky waters with cluster? No. Just being concerned about corporate liability / risk. I might have spent too long working under business folks, as some companies won't consider using open-source software unless there is a vendor they can call at 3AM and complain at. I'm saying that if someone needs distributed transactions in cluster, and they want to run my software, I would take that call and help them fix it.

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