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Redis is no longer OSS (fosstodon.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] litchralee -6 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Irrespective of debates on what the definition of "open source software is" or who gets to define it, it is very clear that the SSPL is not a FOSS -- free and open source license -- and that's a shame. Sure, open source still means we can look at the source code, but we do not have the full freedoms to use the code for any purpose. You might retort "but I'm not a aaS provider" so my rights aren't affected.

But that's the thing: the erosion of free software rights is never the end, but then beginning of the end. Much like free speech, such rights must be jealously guarded. Need I mention what happens when there's no one left to speak up?

That some users of Redis never contributed back to the project is beside the point: truly free software is free as in libre: if you want thanks for your work, release it as freemium or some other license. But a FOSS license like BSD-3 has always been thankless and the OSI is correct in calling out the SSPL for not meeting the OSI's Open Software Definition's anti-discrimination clause, nor the FSF's zeroth freedom, amongst four.

Free means free. AGPL is free. But SSPL carves out an exception, making it not free. No amount of sweet talking changes this reality.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That may be but it is the best course of action to have it free for people to use and if you get to a certain size you have to pay for that shit. That is just fair.

Like pirating music and games when you are poor and then buy those things at a later date when you got the means for it.

Giving a company like Amazon who forbids their employees to piss crucial infrastructure for free ist just a slap in the face of decency.

I think there has to be a change in philosophy. It is free as long as you can't afford it. But as soon as you can afford it you have to pay. And if your company uses it to operate and generate money then the project has a right to an percentage of that money.

Everything else is just not feasible in the long run. As we see time and time again.

[–] litchralee 0 points 11 months ago

One of the drawbacks of software licensing with community projects -- although there are some (controversial) ways to sidestep this -- is that the license needs to be selected at the onset of the project, and you'd have to have everyone agree to that license or change the license.

If all the initial parties agree to use a FOSS license, they and all subsequent contributors under that license cannot complain that someone is actually employing that software per the terms of the license. A project might choose FOSS because they want to make sure the codebase only dies when it disappears from the last developer's disk.

If instead, the initial parties decided on some sort of profit-sharing license -- I don't know one of the top of my head -- then they and future contributors cannot complain if no business wants to use the software, either because FOSS competitors exist or because they don't like the profit split ratio in the license. If that ratio is fixed in the license, the project could die from lack of interest, since changing the license terms means everyone who contributed has to agree, so a single hardliner will doom the already-written code to obscurity.

The sidestep method -- which is what appears to have been used by Redis to do this relicensing to the SSPL -- is that all contributors must sign a separate agreement giving Redis Inc a stake in your contribution's copyright. This contributor agreement means any change to the Redis codebase -- since its inception? Idk -- has been dual-licensed: AGPL to everyone, and a special grant to Redis Inc who can then relicense your work to everyone under a new license.

Does the latter mean Redis Inc could one day switch to a fully-closed source license? Absolutely! That's why this mechanism is controversial, since it gives the legal entity of the project all the copyright powers, to level-up to FOSS or level-down to proprietary. Sure, you can still use the old code under the old license, but that's cold comfort and is exactly why hard forks of Redis are becoming popular right now.

In short, software projects have to lay out their priorities at the onset. If they want enduring code, that's their choice. If they want people to pitch in a fair share, that's fine too. But that choice entails tradeoffs, which they should have known from the start. Some mechanisms allow the flexibility to change priorities in the future, but it's a centralized, double-edge sword.

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