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Comment by shepardrtc | Hacker News Reader

Saw a presentation by them at this week's Open Source Summit. Seems like a lot of the major contributors to Redis have moved over to this project. And it seems like AWS is a major supporter of it. I suspect their Elasticache Redis will soon be Elasticache Valkey.

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I would personally never contribute to a project with non-free license without getting paid. It's basically working for a company without pay.

The problem is that an open source project you contribute to can become non-free from under you at any point. This pattern is becoming more and more common now.

There are ways to prevent that which in retrospect we should have paid more attention to. For example, (L)GPL with no CLA cannot be changed later.

That's the decade old philosophical fight about what to consider free software. GPL/GNU vs BSD.

I think both opinions are fine, if you don't want your contributions to end up in a commercial product, you can't contribute to a project with BSD/MIT license. On the other hand most companies prefer to support projects with a permissive license over projects with copyleft (GPL). For many projects (except the big ones like GNU/Linux) copyleft seems to be more of a burden.

In retrospect, Redis Labs is about to learn a lesson that many have learned before.

Community willingness to maintain popular software under the old license means that attempting to make free non-free will result in a fork taking over.

As a prior example look at what happened a few years back when Oracle tried to make Hudson non-free. Now nobody has heard of Hudson, but everybody uses Jenkins. Which name was chosen for the sheer mockery value and reference to the then infamous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4.

There are people who think we need the legal protection of the GPL. But there are others who trust in community pressures to make the right thing happen.

A lot of younger folks probably never heard of XFree86 or OpenOffice.org. In a few years Terraform and now Redis might end up just like them.

Was Jenkins a Leeroy Jenkins reference? Seemed to be just continuing the butler theme from Hudson.

It served as both, but at the time I definitely saw people referring to it as a Leeroy Jenkins reference. With the fact that can also refer to a butler as a bonus. Though I'm sure some saw it the other way.

It's a kind of pun that programmers like. For example when I asked, Larry Wall said that he named Perl, Perl after he had two acronyms. Namely Practical Extraction and Reporting Language and Perfectly Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

antirez wanted to allow it, not prevent it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39863371

Thanks, that's a perfect summary of the problem and the reasons why the BSD license was picked. It's perfectly fine though to disagree and do it differently.

This is only half true in my opinion. Only future versions will be non-free, all the contributions before the license change stay free and can be forked.

Any project with a permissive license (BSD/MIT) can always be made into a commercial product. I could fork Valkey any minute, change the name and start selling it.

I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid. Saying this as a developer who is paid for exactly that, not it any inside knowledge that points to ulterior motives, but just the idea of giving a company free labour is unsettling.

It is almost same as transferring your hard earned money to the founders of the company. Of course it is unsettling.

Technically you do that all the time when you buy any sort of product. Ideally you derive value of some sort for your payment.

Like the Go project?

Of course "it depends", and people should make their own mind up with what they're comfortable with.

Google doesn't monetise Go, so I would have less problems contributing to it. Redis, before the license change, is a perfect example of what I wouldn't contribute to.

> I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid.

Based on what I've seen, a lot of people contribute to VC/commercially backed projects for resume/career growth reasons.

It's fair to say that in the early days of the FOSS movement, people were contributing for prestige and recognition. The commercialization into "Open Source" meant that work was appropriated for profit by organizations that weren't interested in either the "free as in beer" or "free as in freedom" aspects. Naturally people followed their mercenary lead and started to work on them for the financial benefits.

I'll do small contributions if I wanted to learn about the software and discovered bugs or other small issues.

Commercially backed is a pretty big bucket and includes things like Linux and a lot of Apache Foundation projects (iirc Apache projects need to maintain a sponsoring organization but it doesn't have to be for profit)

> I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid.

I understand that position, but I think it depends on a few more factors.

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