Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 14:10 UTC (Thu) by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
In reply to: Redis is no longer free software by paulj
Parent article: Redis is no longer free software

Redis is a private for-profit company, not a charity. Did said company share its profits with any number of open source developers who contributed code to their project during its history? If the answer is less than "100% of them" then they are in no position to make such morality-based demands.

Making software proprietary after happily taking in contributions from open source developers, while attempting to latch on the "open source" brand (yes, it is a brand) is also not sustainable for Free Software.

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 14:36 UTC (Thu) by wittenberg (subscriber, #4473) [Link] (2 responses)

Several models have been described as "not sustainable for Free Software". This leads to the obvious question: What model is sustainable for free software"? There are many companies which make a living developing free software. Many of them do a lot of the heavy lifting for important projects. Is there a model in which they can continue to release free software and continue to make a living? Not everyone can afford to donate their labor. It's important for all of us for those companies to be able to make a reasonable living.

--David

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 15:46 UTC (Thu) by mogul (guest, #3163) [Link]

Companies that offer support, consulting, and prioritized feature development for paying customers seem to do well. See for example Postgres.

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 22, 2024 3:50 UTC (Fri) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link]

It is partly the model, and partly the context, I think. There are definitely sustainable open source projects. I would be surprised if you could predict their success from the exact model or licence, but I am quite confident that you could predict their success quite well from the context. By definition, a sustainable open source project has a broad base of unrelated contributors, so any model that doesn't support that won't work but I am not sure about the causal relationship. Models that encourage many developers and reduce the power of individuals or for-profit entities may simply be the outcome of sustainable projects that had no grand ideas about models.

As to why sustainable open source projects exist at large scale with commercial, for-profit contributors: the answer is pretty simple. It makes financial sense for them to contribute: if the software does not have a lot of added value (such as an in-memory database that your end users have never heard of) why pay $100 of developer time to reimplement it when all you need to is to pay $1 to fix a bug or $10 to add a new feature? When lots of contributors make the same decision, you have a sustainable open source project, although it's hard to see this making any one very rich. From the point of view of the Redis investors, they can't be worse off going proprietary, so why not?

Redis might turn out to be pretty generic and it might not be worth very much to people like me, who use it. You can run Windows servers in AWS, but who does? But I guess for the investors there is not much else to try, now that they have learnt that you can't beat AWS at hosting.

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 15:25 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I'm kind of assuming that Redis Labs/Ltd. came into existence to directly support the author of the Redis software - though, he's no longer with them it seems - and continues to support all, or at least the bulk of, Redis developers.

But even if that assumption is incorrect, and Redis Ltd/Labs itself is also taking advantage of the software devs, my question still applies generally: What is the correct structure - legal entity and licence wise - to support the developers of some Free Software.

(I myself once worked for a 501.3c that had - I /thought/ - been setup to support the Free Software I helped maintain; but only for about 6 months - and now I think that kind of structure is not really ethical, and certainly at risk from perverse motivations and conflicts of interest).