Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 16:58 UTC (Thu) by AlecTavi (guest, #86342)
In reply to: Redis is no longer free software by DOT
Parent article: Redis is no longer free software

There is tension between freedom and control of software. Freedom includes using, modifying, and redistributing software. Freedom includes private improvements to software that are never given back to the public. Copyleft licenses remove that particular freedom to encourage the growth of the other freedoms.

The financial exploitation of software capital (license fees, SaaS subscriptions, etc.) makes those freedoms contingent on financial compensation.

The companies that ban AGPL are rational to do so: they want to ensure they have no obligation to give their users those software freedoms. They want to retain control of their software to enable it's exploitation as a form of capital. paulj asked how to prevent this private exploitation.

Inevitably, if the software is less-exploitable by private entities, it will be less-adopted by them. This is another tension, between private exploitation and forcing public benefit through the legal system. It's not good or bad, but we developers need to make the choice of which to emphasize for any software project:

give people the maximum freedom with widespread adoption but no reciprocation (permissive licenses)
retain some control by withholding some freedom that reduces adoption but allows you to demand compensation (copyleft, dual-licensing, unfree software, etc)

Without a mechanism to force the financial or software-development contribution from users of software, some users of the software will choose not to "give back."

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 23:19 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Inevitably, if the software is less-exploitable by private entities, it will be less-adopted by them. This is another tension, between private exploitation and forcing public benefit through the legal system.

And it's not a zero sum game. Do you want a small slice of a large cake, or a large slice of a small cake? The problem with trying to force public benefit is you are then likely to have pretty much all of a very small cake. Go the other way, and your small slice is likely to be much larger than the small cake.

Cheers,
Wol

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 22, 2024 16:33 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

That's a massive oversimplification. GCC and the Objective C frontend is an older case where the GPL caused the Objective C frontend to be available to everyone. Linux, which became a very large cake, has had decent returns from commercial users; BSD seems to have had relatively little, with the exception of some end-of-life stuff tossed out. Even then, e.g. AdvFS (from BSD-based OSF/1) was released as GPL-2, not BSD, for use with Linux.

Working with giants like AWS and Azure is hard; they have every intent on being compatible with Redis only so long as they have to. They want you locked into Amazon Elasticache or Azure's version. Can a BSD version keep even a tiny slice of cake against that? I'd suspect Redis is going to drift into oblivion as open source users drop it and AWS & friends ignore or duplicate any changes.

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 22, 2024 1:10 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

> Freedom includes private improvements to software that are never given back to the public.
> Copyleft licenses remove that particular freedom to encourage the growth of the other freedoms.

This is incorrect, copyleft licenses only require giving to your users, not back to the upstream project or the public in general. You can certainly keep improvements private if you don't have any users or your users aren't technical enough to use or request the source or publish it anywhere.