Antirez very consciously and specifically chose the BSD license for Redis with the exact expectation that companies will be more likely to contribute back to upstream if they are adopting and improving it without a legal stranglehold requiring them to do so.

Maybe he has equity, maybe not. I hope he does. But a company profiting off of Redis without contributing back is a very conscious choice by the author and not at all the fault of weak copyright enforcement.

He worked for Redis Labs for many years. I'm sure they have a good understanding.

To be honest, your comment reads as if you think building a company such as Redis Labs is easy. Even with a tool like Redis freely available, it's hard and risky.

I understand the sentiment better with eg Amazon taking some open source, putting a sticker on it, and using their market dominance to extract free money from it. But that's not what Redis Labs is at all.

A lot of people didn't want Richard Stallman to be right (either him specifically, or the GNU ethos he espoused). But damnit, he told me so.

I really love the BSD concept, but on a dark night when I'm feeling morose, I wonder if the way my thoughts on public policy are skewed, in the same way that we say that people who vote for taxes on themselves suffer from a delusion of being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires'.

I want the option to build myself a business out of Open Software, even though it looks now like I may only do that once in my lifetime. But so do a lot of people who are much, much more selfish than I am.

I don't understand this argument. Hosting providers are providing... hosting. I don't see how the tools they host on their platform (eg redis) is relevant.

If they didn't offer automatically provisioned tools users would still use those tools, they'd have to set them up manually or using their own automation.

You're basing this whole rant on an assumption that he doesn't, that is not supported by any fact. The dude worked for Redis Labs for years, and was listed on the executive page of their website alongside the founders, and he now retired and assigned control over the project to the company. Does he strike you as a person who would agree to that without getting his share?

Arent there OSS license types that disallow commercial forks and/or service businesses? I'm assuming if someone chose a license that allows for commercial activity, they want it to happen.

No, there are not. Disallowing commercial use is a field-of-use restriction and thus violates the Open Source Definition.

https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor

> 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.

The GPL and AGPL require reciprocity but do not disallow commercial forks. Other licenses out there may disallow commerical forks, but they are not Open Source licenses.

Yes there are. MariaDB has built a license that prevents strip-mining of open source code and prevents Cloud providers from offering it as-a-service.

CockRoachDB followed suit and implemented the same.

Those aren't open source.

Right, and that may have consequences for whether a particular distro packages you or whether the OSI shines on you, but those are just part of the trade-off; a license like this is still a perfectly valid choice for a given endeavour.

AGPL was created for exactly this reason. It covers all SaaS, and requires all such services to open source all their software that directly touches any AGPL code (eg, as a library).

This is what GPL covers I believe? I want to be sure, but a lot of OSS license explainer sites I see aren’t super clear.

This is the point of open source.