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Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

Err, after this license change Redis Inc will be the biggest leechers considering they didn't contribute the majority of the code.

> Yep still the biggest leachers

Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever they want. That's not leeching.

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Redis Labs was a long time sponsor for the full-time development of Redis then later compensated the creator of Redis for their rights to Redis Technology and branding who was ended up retiring from technology to write Sci-Fi books. By contrast AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back, making them the biggest leacher and the primary motivation for the relicensing to prevent mega corps with unfettered access to their future contributions that AWS repackages to compete against them.

So whilst their previous license allowed AWS to leech off them, it's now been relicensed to prevent them from profiting off their future investments without compensating anything back.

During an all-hands around 2008 I asked AWS leadership whether AWS was going to open source their technologies the answer was we're thinking about it. 16 years later it has not happened, nor it will given the record ;(

How does one buy rights to an open source technology?

You buy the trademark/name from the original author. I'm the case of GPL or other assigned work licenses, you sell the baseline copyright and they can change it.

> By contrast AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back

You do understand that AWS profits not off redis but by offering redis as a managed hosting provider.

Microsoft and Google do to, it's just that they're not as popular as AWS.

They're not re-skinning or re-selling Redis, they're selling a separate product - the managed operations for operating and scaling Redis.

You may not appreciate this (most on HN never do - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) But the value is evident to thousands of customers.

Do you have some data to back this ?

  AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back

It appears that AWS and friends are not "leeching" at all, according to the LWN article.

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