Redis tightens its license terms, pleasing basically no one Leading in-memory database vendor Redis is switching to a dual-license approach, imposing far more restrictive terms. The official announcement of the change gets right to the point: Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1 …
Sure, they need to eat like everyone else. No argument there.
But I thought they were contributing code on their free time, meaning they already had a job.
It would appear that I was mistaken. These devs are coding Open-Source full-time and expect to be paid for it.
That wasn't how Open Source started. Maybe it's time to go back to the roots ?
Open source != amateur.
Whilst you can release code that you write as an amateur as open source, if it becomes popular then you're going to need to spend more and more time on it, and being paid for that time isn't an unreasonable expectation... particularly when others are making substantial profits using the fruits of your labour. And for many of these larger projects it's not just one person coding them on a couple of hours in the evening in their back room.
The alternative is that the demands of users take up too much of your time and you just drop it...
It's very debatable whether being paid is a reasonable expectation. Yes, if it's benefiting more people than yourself morally the correct thing to do is contribute money or resource to improve the project. If you're a company, and making money from free labour, you should definitely be contributing. However this is yet another case of 'someone should do the right thing' yet no-one wants to be 'someone'.
It's not particularly different from volunteering in other areas. Volunteering provides benefits to other people, occasionally also to people who make money. It can become equivalent to a job. At some point ultimately if what you're putting in isn't matched by a vaguely equivalent output (which can be being involved in a community, it doesn't have to be in income or products) it's wise to quit. I volunteered long term, it was providing a benefit to other people, but for far too long there was minimal return or consideration for me, so I quit. Should have done it before..
If you're in a situation where people are either taking advantage or providing minimal benefit, get out! You will not be appreciated until people are reminded there is a cost to your services.
Whilst you can release code that you write as an amateur as open source, if it becomes popular then you're going to need to spend more and more time on it, and being paid for that time isn't an unreasonable expectation
It is unreasonable if you've released it under a truly open license. If you expect to be paid down the line should it become popular there's probably a more suitable license to choose upfront. It's well known that big business will take handy open source libraries and use them in their money-making enterprises. You're either down with that or choose a better license.
I work for an Open-Source company, full time. I get paid for my efforts. The core product is available, on GitHub, under the Apache license. I think I have the necessary expertise to answer.
Most of the code that I wrote is not "contributed", it goes into our product. A small proportion of the code I wrote goes into other OSS products. I don't "contribute" it, either, rather my employer agrees that it is part of how we work. Using OSS tools had this great advantage that we can actually add small bits and get the tools that work for us.
Like Redis Labs, we offer our products on the cloud, or with "enterprise" support, for those who need it. This is how we make a living, so it is actually reasonably important to us. We don't have a competing cloud supplier,, yet. When we start having one, we will indeed have a problem. OTOH, if the name of that vendor thymes with "OWS", we will simultaneously have a major problem and be raking in many millions a year.
Yes, the software industry is a tough place. No, OSS is not a bunch of long-haired hippies - although that, too.
Open source software began as an initiative to provide individuals with software solutions that could rival commercial products, particularly for those who could not afford such commercial offerings. Initially, this movement was driven by developers, many of whom came from privileged backgrounds. These individuals had the luxury of not needing to work traditional jobs, which allowed them the freedom to explore and innovate. Fuelled by a sense of rebellion, they sought to disrupt the established order of the software industry, positioning themselves as benefactors of the wider community in the process.
This concept quickly gained traction. However, it wasn't long before large corporations recognised an opportunity to exploit the open source model. They saw the potential to utilise the contributions of these well-meaning but somewhat naïve individuals for their own ends. By leveraging the fruits of open source labour, these companies could significantly reduce their research and development costs without compensating the original contributors.
As time progressed, the landscape of open source software underwent a significant transformation. Projects that were once small-scale efforts began to serve as the backbone for businesses generating billions in revenue. Despite the critical role these projects played in their success, the companies profiting from them often did not share their financial gains with the creators of the software.
The original ethos of open source was not about enabling corporations to amass wealth. Instead, it was rooted in a philosophy of sharing, collaboration, and mutual benefit. The intention was to democratise access to technology, not to subsidise the research and development costs of wealthy corporations.
Your description sounds as though open source only started in the 1990s, if not the late 1990s:
"This movement was driven by developers, many of whom came from privileged backgrounds. These individuals had the luxury of not needing to work traditional jobs" - huh? It was started by some developers - but also by students and lecturers and researchers. Unless by "traditional jobs" you are going to discount anyone who, say, works at Lawrence Livermore Labs or otther "privileged backgrounds"?
"Fuelled by a sense of rebellion, they sought to disrupt the established order of the software industry" - or they were working before "the software industry" as we recognise it existed! Although there was a (reported) feeling of "Sticking It To The Man" and "Information Wants To Be Free" (although not everything that happened under that banner was strictly kosher; 'nuff said).
"positioning themselves as benefactors of the wider community in the process" - you make it sound so self-adulating, instead of "We all just shared, why wouldn't we? I got X from him, then found I could help him with Y, so I did".
"As time progressed, the landscape of open source software underwent a significant transformation" - true, but mostly because of the massive change due to microcomputers being everywhere leading to the majority of people only knowing about off-the-shelf commercial software and not *needing* to club together with a group that represented 91% of users/operators of Big Purple Box Mark IV's, as it was the only place to get help/advice - oh, and the newsletter told you about this new copy of a Runoff clone, now available on Club Tape Library Vol 6. The old guard were still there but young turks didn't always bother to find out what they did, as is the way with YTs.
However, your last paragraph is spot on.
It's also perhaps worth noting that published source code and both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech software all existed long before Stallman invented the free-software religion and "open source" became associated with that. That doesn't mean there's no place for FSF-style militant "free software" or for any of the many things that might or might not be included under someone's personal definition of "open source" (or FOSS or FLOSS or whatever your preferred flavor is); but the history is a hell of a lot more complicated than "a bunch of privileged rebel developers did X".
And therefore there is no "original ethos of open source"; that's a bogus concept which originates entirely in various mythologies about open source, such as the OP's. There have been many motives for publishing source code, and many different opinions about the ethics surrounding that practice.
> As time progressed, the landscape of open source software underwent a significant transformation.
One of the big changes, that happened relatively early on, was the availability of executables and installers for the popular platforms, specifically the x86 Linux/Windows, so people no longer had to compile the code themselves, so open source very quickly went from something developers could read and utilise to commodity off-the-shelf products available to all.
> Instead, it was rooted in a philosophy of sharing, collaboration, and mutual benefit.
This is the “hippy” academic counter-culture thinking that Stallman crystallised in his free software advocacy, whilst this may have worked well within early 1980s academia, I’m not so sure how well it works within modern academia, which has become more interested in the IP and the potential earnings from that it, that its staff create.
Open Source wasn’t originally commercial, it had to become commercial to survive and prosper, just one small example many are now able to download executables with their associated installers, rather than download (open) source code and compile it themselves.
The original ethos of open source was not about enabling corporations to amass wealth. Instead, it was rooted in a philosophy of sharing, collaboration, and mutual benefit. The intention was to democratise access to technology, not to subsidise the research and development costs of wealthy corporations.
The problem with such an open model of sharing and collaboration is that you don't get to choose who benefits, and those who aren't so generous will always just take take take. I believe there's a license for that.
It's a bit like leaving an unwanted kids bike on the sidewalk with a "free to a good home" sign on it. Chances are it won't be going where you intended.
Redis was selling a product all.along, hosting..giving away redis was an attempt to grow market share, monetisation was based on trying to convert some of those to paying for hosted redis. It's not that AWS ripped off Redis Labs. They were both making money by renting servers, but one was much better than the other. Redis and others all had this business model, which is "compete with AWS" and it was a mistake..now they either want AWS customers to pay a licence fee or to stop using AWS.
We'll see what happens. A key value database is exactly the sort of boring infrastructure project that open source does well. Something that lots of people find useful enough but not so important that it's worth paying to reimplement what other people are already using under open source.
Redis does have advanced features but it already had them under a non free licence. I doubt this will work out well for Redis Labs but it's not as if the current situation seems very sustainable.
One can't help feeling that once they resort to licence-engineering, software vendors might find they'd make more money becoming full-time lawyers.
The interesting thing about the SSPL is that it appears to be, essentially, a "poison pill" licence. Because it requires adopters to make available every aspect of the service, including "hosting software", it effectively precludes using any piece of proprietary software in the provision of the service as well as imposing the burden of distributing not only the software implementing the service, but all of its dependencies.
The interesting thing about the whole situation is there is, basically, no shortage of code: as the article says there are forks and alternative implementations. In that sense, the Open Source movement has over-delivered: we actually have more code than we need.
The problem is maintenance and support, as we all know, and no-one seems yet to have found the solution. However, I doubt that it will be found in staking territorial claims that result in more forks and re-implementations and hence in more precariously-maintained code than we started with.
> I doubt that it will be found in staking territorial claims that result in more forks and re-implementations
Interesting in this respect, how RedHat are effectively removing forks to encourage people to use £RedHat.
Obviously, a key consideration is how far RedHat can shutdown forks before their actions create a market backlash…
Bollocks.
We all know that OSI claims to have created the term (yes, they "created" it, not just "adopted" it!) but even Wikipedia (known for forgetting the past because they can't find a URL for it) point out that the phrase was already in use.
The OSI have their uses[1] but gatekeeping all of open source is not it[2].
[1] e.g. I'll applaud their early collection of OSS licences in one place, which seemed to help slow the increase in "My One Licence Terms"; OTOH their lack of even references to analyses of the licences and when they are appropriate is a *major* hole.
[2] I'd have more respect if they used wording like "The OSI compliant Open Source Definition" or, even better, had managed to trademark the phrase they "created", but as it stands they are guilty of the same grandstanding and self-adulation that we roast other companies for.
[Author here]
> We all know that OSI claims to have created the term
You miss my point. You are arguing about what species the trees are, but I'm writing about the forest.
What I was trying to say was this. I will break this down into several levels.
#1, surface meaning:
Although officially the OSI is the official guardian of whether particular licences are considered OSS or not, there are bigger questions.
#2, deeper point:
They get to say if it's FOSS. I will not argue with them. They own the term, rightly or wrongly.
#3:
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the OSI says is OSS or not. It doesn't even really matter if it is GNU Free Software or not. The definitions are changing and if the OSI is unable to move its definitions to keep up with reality then we can replace the OSI.
#4:
Maybe we need to move the goalposts to make this stuff pay.
If you give stuff away for free, then some evil sods will exploit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
We need licenses that say "use this if you will keep it free but if you make money you must give us a percentage."
#5:
"Free Software" was a bad name. My proposal would have been "Software Liberty" but it's too late now.
#6:
What really matters is that licenses are evolving and changing. That's good. Change is good. Evolution is good.
We need to find some new ways to protect the freedoms of FOSS. For example, new licences that say "if you want to use this gratis, and not make any profit at any time, then you are at liberty to take it, use it, change it, adapt it... but, you must contribute the changes back to the wider world, and you can't lock it down.
But if you take this for free, you may not build something and charge money for it.
#7
P.S.
Note: Redis was BSD. This matters. BSD is a permissive license: it lets you take FOSS and make commercial software from it. The original BSD means you must give credit. The 3-clause BSD doesn't require that. That's why I linked to an explanation of the license.
Read the links, people! Read ALL THE LINKS.
Using BSD was a bad plan. It was too permissive.
Now they have gone over to something so restrictive that the OSI doesn't think it's FOSS at all.
IOW: from one extreme to another.
"Read the links, people! Read ALL THE LINKS."
Really? How about if I read the links which interest me, would that be okay? If the article couldn't be understood without reading one or more of the links, at a minimum the article could have said that.
I'll admit to a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the way that sentence was phrased; and, maybe, just maybe, possibly, sometimes, every now and again, I have found the OSI really getting on my wick :-)
However...
> #4 We need licenses that say "use this if you will keep it free but if you make money you must give us a percentage."
Yes. It'd be hard to get right but, yes. One of the really hard bits is making sure that the Tragedy isn't solved by having the County Council selling off the Commons (i.e. forgetting that they are the stewards and convincing themselves - and others - that they are the owners).
> #5 "Free Software" was a bad name. My proposal would have been "Software Liberty" but it's too late now.
English is a wonderful language for poets (and sarcasm) but getting a pithy yet totally unambiguous description of what all this software gubbins is about.
> #7
The BSD licence was a beautiful thing, a child born in the long afterglow of the Summer of Love - and a time when most of the people copying and using the code probably personally knew the author from conferences, mailing lists - or just the tea room in the department next door. And when the licensed code was probably short enough to actually read, 'cos otherwise it was too large to fit your box!
Not quite the same situation as Redis exists in, so, yup, with you there.
The problem with the concept of licenses that state it's free only if you don't try and monetise something that uses it, or if you monetise a product using it then gives us a slice is that it just becomes like the international tax system - a race to the bottom on who'll offer the least.
Is your library/product so damn good that someone else cannot create one with similar functionality with a more permissive license? If no then yours doesn't get taken up, the alternatives do.
How do contributors get paid? If you have a "free if not monetised else pay a cut" license and generous little me makes some really nice feature or performance improvements how am I remunerated or can I "go get f*cked" in which case you're now acting like big businesses are now?
It just really isn't that simple is it?
There are many reasons for writing open source code:
- it may lead to future job opportunities
- it may lead to recognition of your work
- it may lead to others that cannot afford commercial alternatives to be able to leverage the functionality
- etc etc
What it doesn't always lead to is remuneration for your efforts. If you want that get a job writing code.
officially the OSI is the official guardian of whether particular licences are considered OSS
Is it? Which officials have appointed them, and under what authority?
They get to say if it's FOSS.... They own the term
Which term do they own? "Own" in what sense? What authorities recognize that property right?
The Wikipedia article notes, for example, that OSI was unable to secure a trademark for "open source". Are you claiming that's wrong? As far as I can tell, OSI has control over what they claim "open source" is. Well, they're not the boss of me.
“officially the OSI is the official guardian of whether particular licences are considered OSS”
You get my vote - the OSI is a self-appointed organisation that has no authority whatsoever over anything at all. I don’t know why anyone refers to them as “proof” of the status of any software licence
We need licenses that say "use this if you will keep it free but if you make money you must give us a percentage."
There are many and you can easily write another one. Don't be surprised when it doesn't count as open source. I'm not just referring to the OSI, because I don't see the OSI as a perfect judge of such things. I value their <a href="https://opensource.org/osd>definition</a> more highly, and I can evaluate by reading the license whether it meets the definition, kind of might meet the definition, or definitely doesn't meet the definition. The "pay us if you make money" bit is very contrary to parts 1 and 6 and can be and likely is contrary to parts 3, 7, and 8. Specific licenses, such as the SSPL, also are contrary to part 9, intentionally so so they can claim not to be proprietary.
This is important to me and may be to others. If you don't want to be free or open, don't be. There is nothing morally wrong with proprietary software. Many proprietary databases exist, and there is no harm in making your business on selling another one. Oracle seems to make plenty of money doing it. The reason I use an open database, most of the time anyway, is because I want to avoid having to deal with the licensing disaster. For instance, I have many Postgres installations. Sometimes, it's because I really want to use one of the many features that Postgres has and other databases don't, but sometimes, I just want a database where nobody will ask to audit my licenses or exactly what I'm using it for and if that's commercial or not. When I write code, I decide when I've done that whether I want to sell it, in which case I don't release it or I put restrictions on the license, or whether I'm comfortable giving it away with the knowledge that I will likely not be able to sell it. I can try to sell support, and that will work on larger projects, but it is not guaranteed. If you want to sell it, go and sell it. Just don't pretend you're not.
You'd think that the logical flaw in trying to make big money off the back of building FOSS would be obvious, the 'free' should be a clue.
I'm not sure that these poisonous licenses are a solution though, as they try to straddle the OSS and commercial worlds and fail at both. Full commercial; great, pay the money and it's all sorted. FOSS; great, you get what you pay for, and it's your problem. AGPL or SSPL; run for the hills.
The gut reaction most operations have to seeing the terms is the same one as seeing Oracle on the license. A big fat NOPE.
Also slightly flawed if you throw the license grenade and someone else can just fork it and carry on...
"You'd think that the logical flaw in trying to make big money off the back of building FOSS would be obvious, the 'free' should be a clue."
You'd have thought people (particularly on here) would understand the difference between free speech and free beer - but apparently not.
No, I don't expect people to understand that, especially when they react as if free speech is somehow a lesser thing. The freedoms available with free software are more than just not paying for the software. Yes, you can make me pay for a copy, but the freedoms that Stallman advocated for, and he was the one who popularized that phrase, mean that I am within my rights to give copies to anyone I like, I can do it for free, or I can charge them and not give you any of the money. That's a core part of the freedoms: the freedom to distribute. He often made the distinction to clear up the situation for people who understood it as "software for free" and got it mixed up with what we call "freeware" (I.E. here's a binary, you pay me nothing, what do you mean source code). Requiring people to buy it from you so you're compensated for the work is not what he was talking about there.
If they had started out with a non-free licence, would anyone have adopted it?
For example, when I was setting up my Nextcloud, I had three options. I evaluated them and went with Redis. If it hadn't been free software, I would have gone with one of the other options. And, if it hadn't been free software, Nextcloud probably woudn't have offered it as an option.
To me the SSPL sounds no different to GPL. Yes, it has wider scope but the principle is the same, and MANY people have no issue with GPL at all. Personally, I despise the GPL; I think it’s the one thing I ever agreed with MS on when they called it viral - I have no issue with stating you can’t keep the code to yourself but I draw the line when the licence tries to make a land grab for something it has no business with. But that’s just my personal opinion and lots of people think it’s fine. So, back to where I came in, I don’t understand the issue with SSPL beyond the same arguments one may put against GPL
The GPL requires you to distribute your modifications to the software under the same terms. The SSPL requires you to distribute basically every bit of software you run on the same computer under the same terms. The GPL can be complied with, you just might not want to. The SSPL is intentionally written to be essentially impossible to comply with. It's not just that your entire cloud service software stack has to be SSPL-licensed. That would be bad enough, but it is theoretically possible. The dependencies, the software you got from other sources, and depending on where someone tries to draw the line, system firmware, would have to be licensed as well. It is intentionally written so that buying the proprietary alternative is the only choice that is feasible.
“ The GPL requires you to distribute your modifications to the software under the same terms”
But that misses my point. Yes, the GPL requires you to distribute your modifications. And I don’t have much of an issue with that. BUT the GPL does more than that - it makes a land grab for all your code that uses (links to) a piece of GPL code with no regard for how significant or insignificant the original GPL is; in theory, linking 1 line of GPL code into a billion gigabytes of non-GPL code makes that billion gigabytes GPL too. This is no different to SSPL except the latter widens the scope.
So, I say again, why the controversy over SSPL when so many people seem to think the GPL is ok?
Mostly because linking into GPL is something programmers choose to do. There are two important elements to this which I will take separately:
1. Programmers, not users. The SSPL comes into effect when you run the software on a computer if you use it for a certain purpose. The GPL does not care when you run it or why you did it. In fact, you are perfectly free to include the GPL software in your software as long as you don't distribute it, I.E. to use internally. You don't need to educate anyone putting the software to use on what the license means. You only need programmers that might modify or use it in their own software what it means. They have probably seen open source before, so they already understand what restrictions apply to them.
2. Choose to do, rather than find that they've done: If you choose a GPLed dependency, you know you did that. When you pick something off of GitHub, you know that you'll have to read the license because it can be something proprietary that you are not allowed to use, so you know when the terms apply. You can understand the conditions on what this applies to, because it's anything you're linking this with, so you know what you have to put under GPL if you go ahead. With SSPL, neither applies. You may not know whether you are in the set of users that have to put software under a certain source, especially because all you did was install it on a server. If you decide that you are one of the group that has to do that, you don't know what comprises all the software the SSPL is demanding, and it's mostly going to be unrelated stuff written by other people (which you couldn't put under the SSPL anyway). Unlike the programmer and their own code base, it's the user trying to list all the pieces of software that come under a nonspecific category, which the average nontechnical person, even a Linux user, has no hope of doing. Even the most familiar person will have to spend a long time sorting things in and out of the list.
Many of us who care put some importance on the Open Source Definition. The GPL meets this definition. The SSPL specifically violates this part of it:
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open source software.
It also violates, both in letter and in spirit, this part:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This is what I care about and the reason why the SSPL is not open source.
Thank you for the clarification. I get it now - much appreciated.
One thought - the last bit “ 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor”, doesn’t that mean GPL 3 is not open source as it contains the clause regarding patents and the thing about encrypted code? It’s a rhetorical question - I’m not looking for an answer
I don't think it is. Patents are applicable to any industry, and encrypted code is a technique that can be used in anything. The SSPL's fields of endeavor thing is more obvious, because it specifically mentions SaaS providers as having different terms to anyone else, but the GPL doesn't have different rules for encrypted code depending on what you're using it for, so the same terms apply to all people.
Consider that the AGPL is the only supposedly “FLOSS” licence that tries to put provisos on Freedom Zero—your freedom to use the software as you wish. Copyleft licences like the GPL put provisos on Freedom Three—your freedom to redistribute the software as you wish—but we can consider those “grandfathered in” because RMS created the copyleft concept at the same time he came up with the Four Freedoms. AGPL is very much an afterthought.
For this reason, I don’t think it should be considered a “Free Software” or “Open Source” licence.
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