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Is buying the same as leaching now? Words really do get diluted to the point of meaningless...



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.


The project still belongs to society as a whole! You can fork it too! You just can't profit off their future work.


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 does not belong to the society (whatever that's supposed to mean). It is not in the public domain as far as we know.


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.

Does this address your concern?


It is if the thing they bought had contributions from many other people but pretty much all of them got nothing for it.


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.


I'm sure their lawyers will be looking into it, you probably don't need to be concerned!


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.




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