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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me.

You're right that it's probably not a great business model most of the time, but what is a good business model to collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating years of your life to something loved by millions of people? It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service with ads, or something.

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> People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation.

Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller managed hosting providers and consultancies.

That is a sustainable funding model for an open source database project. What isn't sustainable is building a business around the idea that only your company will ever profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are shared with the whole community.

> This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me.

Yes, monetizing with a proprietary license, whether source available or not, doesn't seem unethical to most people outside of Free Software ideologues.

“The licensing model isn't unethical but competing ones are” isn’t why open source licenses became popular over proprietary (including source available) licenses, the fact that they commoditized the underlying software, enabled competing orojects evolved from the same codebase on essentially equal terms (which also allowed a competing project to fully replace the original if the original at some point failed the community) and, as hosted offerings became more common, the zero licensing friction for hosted solutions, that's what did it.

It does mean charging monopoly rents for a hosted service isn't a viable way to recover development costs and pay returns to VCs, but until fairly recently, no one was trying to do VC-backed startups around single open-source products with that as their whole business plan, and the arguments as to why that would be a bad idea were well developed by the mid-1990s

There is no requirement to make money to have a successful open source project.

That being said. Monetizing open source is fine so long as people are up front about from the beginning. People are upset because switching the license is effectively changing the rules in the middle of the game.

It is like going out to a restaurant and in the middle of your meal they change policy from having free refills to charging per cup. Either policy is fine, but changing policies is a scumbag move. A lot of people would have never sat down to eat there if the extra drinks weren't going to be free. Especially if free drinks was the sole reason a lot of them were going there.

> Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation.

Redis Labs can start by compensating its external contributors (Tencent, Amazon, Alibaba among them) if they care about fairness this much.

Don't forget it's dependencies like the Linux kernel developers or GCC etc.

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