The company now known as Redis did not invent Redis, it started as a company trying to make money hosting other peoples' work. After it finally hired the creator of Redis, it specifically promised not to do what it has just done (move away from three-clause BSD as the license for Redis core) at least twice.
In the development cycle from 7.0.0 until a few days ago, Redis isn't even the majority contributor to the codebase. The largest single contributor is from Tencent. (All of this is in the article.)
If Redis had been doing all the development, had not promised it wouldn't move away from the license, then I might agree that people have little to complain about.
But this situation isn't as you've suggested here where a community is all about "take, take, take" from a company that's been doing all the work. The company was founded on the idea of trying to do what it now complains about Amazon doing, and their claims that cloud companies do not contribute is clearly false -- just look at the code contributions.
I don’t typically ask people to RTFA because that’s against the rules, but you would have known all of the above if you bothered to read the article.
It’s like complaining that there are too many implementations on GitHub of the same thing.
You're spot on. People are bellyaching that the world doesn't operate according to their arbitrary rules.
Perhaps I'd be happier in a geocentric universe, but it doesn't make a non-geocentric universe bad per se.
At the same time big corps use it as carte blanche to basically pirate software in a legal way, while following the letter of the licence.
Going back to the open core/demo versions (aka Shareware/Public Domain/Trials) is the only sustainable way to make a living.
aka, just sell software, rather than make it open source.
What is being balked at is the idea that you can use open-source as a foot-in-the-door marketing and growth hack, which you then reap after some level of popularity/network effect is reached. Some call it bait and switch.
Blaming big corps for "leeching" is just self-serving. They are doing exactly what the license allows them to do - a license for which was chosen at the start to allow for it! If you expected to be paid to make this software, don't opensource it.
Eh no. What an overly broad generalization to read. Whether it is enough to make a living is another question, but that does not mean one must paint all of the communities the same color.
You seem to believe that all open source projects are in this category. That is not the case. You also seem to believe that there is always one company doing the most work and everyone else is just leeching off. That is also not the case.
They bought an open source project, and now that the original founder has stepped away they're trying to squeeze it for all they can.
The "big corps" that you claim are using it to "pirate software in a legal way" (a) have been contributing to the formerly open source redis project, and (b) are now specifically forking it to keep maintaining it as open source.
Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
By using BSD license Antirez has freely given it to the whole world, not the name Redis but the code. No matter how big the corporations, the cloud providers are just using that code the way Antirez intended when he used the BSD license. You can't blame the cloud providers for that.
> Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
But one can become famous by writing quality open source software and this fame can be used to get very high paying jobs.
Nor with increasingly unnecessary and niche features aimed at "enterprise" customers, it seems.
One could probably even argue that buying the rights to the name of a popular permissively licensed project is a terrible way to pay said bills.
How is it terrible?
The community has been doing the heavy lifting over the years and Redis Inc has been trying to reap the benefits off of that by providing the software as a service. Which the community was fine with. Turns out other companies with deeper pockets for infrastructure can do the same. Now Redis Inc is trying to save their broken by design business model by changing the license. This casts a whole lot of doubt on the future utility and licensing of the Redis project. And this is what the community balks at.
I, for one, will take the risk, reap the benefits and move on when factors are no longer conducive to my goals.
It's "buy the naming rights to an already popular piece of open source software and try to make a quick buck"
I'm sure that (FL)OSS core/demo versions is not the ONLY sustainable way to make a living. There is no need for hyperboles.
You don't even need to author software to sustainably make a living. Don't limit yourself.
I think it is valid to find this immoral. The solution is pretty simple though: do not contribute to open source projects that require you to sign a CLA.
Developers should be aware of that and, personally, I think contributors should never accept to sign a CLA. If the project requires a CLA, don't contribute.
What is considered immoral is to take the copyright from the contributors without giving any compensation.
And I think Open Source is based on the very few who decide to take it upon themselves to be the ones spearheading a specific project/task and share it with everyone else. Maybe it's not every single time me, sometimes it's you, sometimes it's Lucy or Mark, and that's how the roll keeps rolling for everyone.
So if a project goes down and nobody comes up to replace it, either it wasn't worth much or this is the time nobody took it upon themselves to do it (yet).
People who use open source are very entitled. They'd be very angry also if the license was changed to GPL or AGPL.
I doubt most of this people have meaningful contributions to FOSS.