If Heroku, AWS, Google, IBM, whoever make money piggybacking Salvatore's work, shouldn't Salvatore actually ALSO make money from his work?
If not, what's the reason for him to continue? Elasticsearch faced the same problem, Redis too.
It's unfair to the developers if cloud providers make money and not contribute or give back a portion to the OSS developers.
Myself, I would never be so liberal like Salvatore had I been in his shoes. I would feel cheated if AWS was making millions, not from EC2 usage but from AWS charging for Redis and I would get nothing. All my suppressed anti-capitalistic ideas would popup in an instant and I would go left all the way.
I have no idea what's the relationship between Salvatore and Redis Labs but, as a hard core Redis user of +8 years, I want Salvatore to be rewarded for his work based on the Redis market value and revenue - wherever it is generated (Redis Labs, AWS, GCP, IBM, Heroku etc). Same for all other Redis contributors.
Back in the day I asked Pieter Noordhuis if he's interested in paid consulting work, knowing Salvatore has publicly stated he is not interested or has time. Back in 2012 that was the contribution I could do to support Redis (Pieter declined as he was working for VMWare).
It's not some anonymous geek building Redis. They are people who have families, obligations, problems, responsibilities. They create open source code and have every guy and his brother blame them for their open source software bug or feature missing, flame them and get aggressive in many non productive ways for what they developed and offer for free. "F that" - read it tons of time in twitter from open source developers.
Sorry, I want my money to go into Salvatore's pocket, not Bezos's.
Salvatore is an employee of Redis Labs since 2015. AFAIK he still owns Redis itself personally, which is a very good thing.
That doesn't mean Redis Labs is the only Redis provider you should consider though. For instance, OpenRedis has been founded before Redis Labs (early 2011) by people who have been very involved with the community (contributed the Ruby and Lua clients, the original website...). They are a much smaller company than Redis Labs (bootstrapped, when Redis Labs raised over $50M...) so it wouldn't make financial sense for them to have Salvatore on their payroll.
Thanks catwell (saw in your profile you are pchapuis and I'm very appreciative for your work and contribution to Redis, from your content to your weekly newsletter and all).
I wasn't aware of OpenRedis and I agree with you that also OpenRedis should be supported. It makes sense to have diversity and all community efforts be supported to be viable and prosper for the benefit of the whole community.
Again, thanks for the link and your contributions.
