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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

I thought your comment was great, until I actually read the link. Once I read the link I’m happy to see this experimentation and evolution of licenses. As someone who builds services and develops open source code, this approach seems more appealing than GPL and seems to cover the concerns of the Redis project nicely. Time will tell how it actually works out, but I think it looks promising.

> the License does not grant to you, the right to Sell the Software. For purposes of the foregoing, “Sell” means ... a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software

> Today, most cloud providers offer Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from software that was not developed by them. Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed

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According to this new clause, you may never provide consulting services for a fee if it involves these modules. Still cool?

No, the value of your consulting derives from your skill and effort.

Definitely share with them any proposed wording changes that could clarify the matter. I’m sure that’s not their intent. Lawyer friends may be able to help both with interpretation and comments.

Think of this as “license r&d” rather than a rush to verdict.

> For purposes of the foregoing, “Sell” means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.

If you consult for a company optimize a bunch of their redis queries, it could easily be argued that your consulting service has value that derives substantially from redis.

This licence worries me somewhat. I would definitely prefer a GPL and ask me if you want to licence it kind of situation as you definitely know where you are.

Guess we'll see what happens with this.

EDIT: IANAL

I think AGPL would suit them well.

I believe most of the modules that have been re-licensed under this new license were previously AGPL.

As for the consulting part, I doubt a license (short of a NDA) can restrict you from selling your expertise.

As for selling the software, there are creative ways of not distributing software technically, yet assemble proprietary and open-source bits at a customer's site such as using Docker with its layered images.

So while the intention might have merit, we have to wait if it holds up in court. My guess is it won't.

Edit: IANAL

You don’t even have to go that far. This clause says the license trumps the clause, and most permissive licenses permit relicensing. So relicense without this clause. Problem solved.

It’s certainly not the intent, but I believe it’s what it actually says. Of course, IANAL and you’re an idiot if you take this ad legal advice, etc.

Partly agree.

The comment is still generally great, except that it portrays redis labs as whiners while it looks like redis labs has put in some real effort to coniue to be as open source as possible towards the rest of the world while still trying to get some funding from the people who can afford it.

Right now, whats not to like about this for everyone of us?

That said: the parts of redis that this applies to is not open source anymore (as they admit) and I am afraid that a lot of other companies will try to abuse this to confuse users of their software.

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