It's not a moral and ethical calculation, it is a simple calculation of time. One of our main goals in the software industry is to reduce redundancy. Antirez's decision is increasing it.
Arguing simply based on incentives is also a fallacy. If we were to look at everything from that perspective, no one would donate to charity and far fewer open source projects would exist.
The code is right there. Any of your BigCorps are free to grab it and make it work. They are not free to demand the time of an open-source dev.
> Forking the project is less than ideal.
> Client libraries will have to spend time making sure they
> comply with both versions
> development in general will slow as each project will have fewer total
> devs.
There are some OSS projects that maintain first-class Windows support, but nobody should be surprised that when they find out that Windows is poorly supported by an OSS ecosystem that is predominately focused on producing software for UNIX descendent systems.
As for Reddis, the cost of supporting another operating system -- especially one as different as Windows -- is quite high. If you don't use Windows, there's little cost justification for doing so.
The latter of which, at least, has done exactly what you say you don't want to have happen. Also, neither of those companies are even remotely BigCorp, they're quite small and nimble.
> has to spin up %nix boxes just to run Redis, there will be tens of thousands of hours wasted as each company gets this new environment up and secures and maintains it going forward.
Perhaps an incentive for them to find a way to make an unobtrusive patch that might be accepted into Redis mainline. Or an incentive to press Microsoft for real POSIX support.
None of this is an incentive for antirez, VMware, or anyone else, other than the people who want to run Redis in Windows.
At best, you're arguing the good of society, but getting agreement on what that means requires someone to have made a lot of moral and ethical judgements similar to yours.