Yep still the biggest leachers. Token hires and flowery PR campaigns doesn't entitle them to most of the profits of other vendors products or absolve them of their predatory behavior.
But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.
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 ;(
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.
AWS, along with Google and others have created a fork already. It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time). Denigrating their work for no reason other than to “win” an internet argument.
We’ll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also never created redis). Both contributed to its maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We’ll see which fork wins out.
> It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time).
I've called AWS's hiring of a single developer a token hire that they then go on to write flowery PR posts about to camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS vendors.
For concrete numbers they contributed 165/12111 commits for a total of a 1.36% of the commits.
Whilst that qualifies as a valuable contribution to any project, it's also dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs and doesn't absolve AWS from being a called a "leacher" by helping themselves to the majority of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back.
It’s funny that you would use commits to quantify investment from AWS, but you’d use $ to buy shares in future profits to quantify investment from redis labs. Why not use the same yardstick for both?
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Everyone who put in effort into redis did it knowing the license. There’s nothing wrong in relicensing future commits. There’s nothing wrong with forking. There’s nothing wrong in using whichever fork works better for you.
You’re insisting up and down that AWS and others were leeching because they didn’t own the copyright to redis. I’ve never heard this interpretation of OSS before, but sure maybe you’re right. But we’ll see which fork comes out on top a year from now.
That's fair in isolation, but one can justifiably argue that a repeated pattern of behavior is clearly predatory.
Specifically: have the major cloud providers ever created a successful FOSS database, cache, or fulltext search index project from the ground up? By this I mean, a FOSS project with its own protocol, own community from scratch, not a fork or a re-implementation or based on another FOSS project, nor a late-stage company acquisition.
I'm struggling to think of even a single example. Even for broader infrastructure (not just db/cache/search), there's few examples, only Kubernetes comes to mind rapidly.
If the cloud providers are widely practicing "FOSS for thee but not for me" with respect to creation of new infrastructure projects, that's predatory and unsustainable.
Have any major software company ever created a successful software from the ground up ? No, they all base their work on some language ! They are predatory !
Wait, does any language team ever created a successful implementation from the ground up ? No, they all base their work on some hardware people ! They are predatory !
Wait, does any hardware manufacturers ever created a successful product from the ground up ? No, they all base their work of some software ! They are predatory !
Not even remotely the same situation at all. It's not about using some other existing language/hardware/software and building something on top of it.
Rather, it's a question of cloud vendors repeatedly building open source competing drop-in re-implementations of external db/cache/search products when those original products switch away from FOSS licenses to survive, despite the cloud vendor being a million times larger and better resourced than the original db/cache/search developers. The cloud vendors aren't building something on top of these products (like your examples), but rather they are aiming to competitively replace these products and capture the mindshare of their communities.
This strategy allows the cloud vendor to skip the hard steps of developing a unique product from scratch, designing a client/server protocol from scratch, building a community from scratch, and so many other things.
Separately, the cloud vendors do also build their own unique db/cache/search products, but they just don't ever make them source-available or self-hostable when they do so -- let alone FOSS. That is what makes the pattern of behavior predatory: the big cloud vendors use their dominant positions to bring non-FOSS products to the market, while using FOSS re-implementations to destroy competitors who dare move away from FOSS themselves.
None of the 3 examples you described above are in any way related to this scenario.
To repeat a comment by another user upthread: hence the relicensing.
I suppose I’m not understanding the point of your position. Software authors cannot fix a licensing mistake by changing the past, but they can use a different license moving forwards.
Yes, they paid. And they can use the code they paid for. But it doesn't give them right to leech of any future code written by someone else IN THE FUTURE.
Calling it leech isn't right, because what makes aws any different from another user? Just because they're selling the hosting, doesnt make it any different to a regular user.
Code contributions from amazon would've been leeched by other parties using redis as well - something which amazon is accepting (and probably encouraging).
And considering Redis Inc hasn't contributed the majority of the code, they won't be able to leech off other people's code because why on earth would anyone contribute to this trainwreck!
AWS are the largest leeches of OSS, syphoning off most the profits and contribute relatively nothing back towards the OSS projects they rent seek from.
The "Free for all except mega cloud corps" license changes are to disrupt this status quo which currently sees the mega cloud corps with impenetrable moats from capturing most of the value of OSS products others spend their resources into building, AWS are then able to use their war chest profits to out resource, and out compete them, using their own code-bases against them.
It's unfortunate organizations need to resort to relicensing stop this predatory behavior, but its clear in AWSs 20+ year history they're not going to change their behavior on their own.
It is not owned by the company. You are free to create your own fork of the code with all the attendant benefits, including monetization, if applicable.
Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.
I wonder if there is a qualitative analysis of the commits. Aka, it changed a line of comment vs it introduced a new feature or refactored and increased long term viability, etc.
Some projects require signing copyright transfer before making commits (legal document claiming that you are a) copyright holder and b) you transfer those rights to them ie CLA [0]) so single entity holds whole copyrights.
They usually have a GHA that checks it when proposing PRs.
It doesn't look like redis has any of this.
So they run RedisLabs purely on trademark + admin rights on GH on redis/redis.
If that's the case then they also cannot legally change licence of code that's already there because they're not sole copyright holders of that code.
ps. as a side note that's why ie. SQLite doesn't allow external contributions at all, even though their code is Public Domain – because they can legally claim full copyright/authorship.
If you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some point. Other than that unless you are one of the contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of leeching.
How does buying a copyright to a name, literally just being able to call it "Redis" equate to purchasing the code contributions that individual contributors make? They bought the rights to the name, not the project, the project was open-source until the license change and belongs to society as a whole.
Your confusing copyrights with trademarks. The project belongs to the authors (perhaps in shares depending on the jurisdiction where it is being copied/derived) not the society. The options that were licensed under BSD generally remain licensed under BSD unless someone revoked that license. It does not seem that the latter has happened.
I agree, I didn't make any argument against that, I just don't see the difference between <party with money that bought a name and sells the free work of others> and <party with money that didn't buy a name and sells the free work of others>. My only argument here is that there's not much difference between AWS and Garantia Data from my limited understanding of the situation.
It was bsd licensed. The code that you received before is still covered by the bsd license. You can pretty much do anything you want with that code except misrepresent yourself as the author.
Public domain isn't the only form of free software. You can literally use it in exactly the same way as you did before. Nothing has been taken away from you.
We don't know what they got. Perhaps some of them were paid to create the contributions. And, in any case, that's OK. The contributors knew or should have known the impact of the license. They could've picked a more restrictive/free license, depending on your point of view. I guess they can still revoke the license. They have not given up their copyrights and the license is arguably not irrevocable.
Often, as that's what rentiers are. Generally bad for society. And have captured many regulatory processes and got tons of tax breaks for producing nothing.
One of the well known flaws of capitalism, in the 'bad, but everything else is worse' sense.
Not that capitalism is the perfect economic scheme, but rentiers exist in many economic regimes. Communism probably has more rentiers than capitalism, i.e. many people take more than they contribute.
