Re:Software Below the Poverty Line
by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday June 13, 2019 @01:01PM
(#20176702)
That is the nature of most of my consulting work (it's generally related to wlroots or Wayland in general). But it doesn't work for any of my end-user software, makes it hard to work on several unrelated projects like I do, and sets up an unhealthy power dynamic that makes you subsurvient to authorities who care more about a bottom line than the project (see Redis for an example of this gone wrong). Those pitfalls you mentioned are numerous and difficult pills to swallow, too.
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Care to say more about the Redis case? I haven't followed it carefully enough to make sense of their organizational trajectory.
RedisLabs switched a bunch of their software to nonfree licenses and antirez can't really do anything about it. No matter what he says, I don't think he's in a position (i.e. financially) to oppose that decision by RedisLabs, even though it's clearly against the interests of the open source project.
Sorry but this is absolutely inaccurate. Redis Labs switched the license of a set of modules I never developed a single line of, so it was completely their work I never took part into. The Redis codebase that I and the community developed in the latest 10 years is, probably, one of the last few examples of popular codebases yet under a BSD license. It sounds quite natural that I don't have the right to say Redis Labs what to do with the code they created around Redis itself. I expected the power to say what to do with the codebase I was working on, the Redis core, and indeed it is yet BSD.
Expected this comment. That's why I wrote:
>No matter what [antirez] says, [...]
Yep but it is important to have arguments. I'll show mine, and then it's your turn to convince others. So this is the timeline:
- I start the Redis project, BSD.
- I get sponsors.
- Finally the sponsor becomes Redis Labs.
- I continue to develop Redis with my private roadmap, still BSD.
- Redis Labs creates modules and other forks with enhanced capabilities, that were mostly out of the scope of the original project.
- Redis Labs changes the license of such add-ons to a proprietary one.
- The project on Github that everybody is participating to, and the only one I continue to develop, remains BSD.
Given the above, it's up to you to tell exactly what went wrong with Redis. If you believe for the story to be right that I had to force Redis Labs to license their code in a specific way, I think your reasoning is odd.
I'm not going to let this get derailed into a public fight with you about this. Take it to email if you want: [email protected].