Redis the project/tool existed long before Redis the company owned it.
Vagrant existed before HashiCorp owned it.
Significantly: both companies dropped permissive licensing after the creator of their (original) products stepped away, and both are venture capital backed companies.
So we could just as easily say "I see that long term people will preemptively fork projects the moment they are owned by a VC backed company"
The above applies to private people as well. You use how many different pieces of software, what are you doing to ensure they stay maintained. (if you are like most nothing...)
We are probably not going to see mass investment by VCs in free software for awhile (perhaps never, but that is pretty strong), but developers will keep scratching our itch.
And maybe more and more developers and users will realise that AGPL/GPL/LGP are the only licenses which truly protect one’s software.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of the cause of the issue with redis, or hashicorp, or elasticsearch etc;
This wasn't some nefarious third party taking all the community good will and contributions and creating a private fork to kill the original projects.
If you don't want some corporate asshole to turn your open source project into a get rich quick scheme, don't give control of your project to that asshole.
I think you somehow missed the point where Redis the project existed and was extremely popular before it was owned by what is now Redis the company.
The competition for redis in the early days wasn't paid alternatives, it was other open source alternatives; Redis just provided a more featured solution.
It wasn't a "demo" for a paid product funded by corporate dollars or VC funding, it was just a thing that someone created, and released as an open source project.
It's hilarious that you think the companies dropping open source licenses for the products they bought are going to stop the industry using open source. As I said originally, it's going to have the opposite affect: it's going to make the industry embrace the very nature of open source and create forks of projects, the moment there's a sniff of a corporate buy out, specifically because of this type of activity.
I find it hard to believe many if any would see "create an open source tool" as a method to become a millionaire.
The ongoing uptake in open core, shows where it goes.
What we are seeing here, as others have pointed out, is that companies are buying Open Source solutions and then close sourcing them because they view it as a money maker which in the end leads to forks.
so the original owner of said OSS being sold is making money by selling it to this company (who might be told, or is sold the idea that said OSS could be monetized).
This is no different to a startup making their own acquisition the end goal.
What does not work, not long term, is trying to build a business around selling a FOSS solution - RedHat is probably the only notable exception here. But having multiple companies invest in a common tool that they all use as part of their infrastructure has worked wonders.
Kubernetes - Gooogle, Microsoft, Amazon,...
Python - Facebook, Google, Microsoft,...
clang - Google, Apple, Intel, IBM,...
It sounds like a win-win to me.
For personal projects maybe yes, doesn't work for companies, they can't chase for thousand different forks of Redis and try to understand why feature isn't working properly on their version. Unless single fork emerges as a winner
I'm predicting such a fork backed by several core committers, and possible several cloud providers will emerge pretty quickly because they all need this to continue to exist as free and open source. AWS is not going to pay Redis a cent. Nor is Azure. Or Google. Or people commercializing open stack. All of those offer Redis support currently. Lots of their users use it.
To avoid the short term, providers could "buy time" and keep prices low until the project deviates far enough from forks, making migration much harder, then increase prices.
Either way, long term they can end up with a lot of money from a few companies rather than continuing to support many mixed sized companies.
I don't like it either but I can see it working.
Invariably, someone looks at the numbers and realizes "We could make way more money if we only catered to the top 2% of our customers!"
Unfortunately, opinions and needs of the top 2% of customers != a generally useful product.
Thus, the reason to try and maintain user volume is better product-market feedback to guide development, instead of revenue.
Broadcom is able to screw over its customers because they have to choose between either reworking a core part of their infrastructure, running legacy code without support (provided you have a perpetual license), or paying a huge license fee. With Redis, the current version is already open-source: you can maintain it yourself, switch to a drop-in replacement community fork, or pay one of the dozens of SaaS companies to run it for you. Switching away from the official Redis flavor can be as simple as a one-line change in your infrastructure recipe. If they increase their prices, why would anyone stay?
I think MySQL is probably a better comparison. After Oracle's acquisition they have been trying quite hard to add vendor lock-in and extract money out of it, but these days MariaDB has essentially made it completely irrelevant. I wouldn't be surprised if the future of Redis looked quite similar.
When it comes to large corps, the prices paid for these products is already so large, because of the scale, that it often times makes more sense to employ your own, instead. These kind of decisions are taken all too often. We'll spend a good few sprints exploring possibilities/mapping differences/POCing to more accurately estimate all these findings and their ROI before deciding. This can also include tough migrations. At a previous megacorp; ELK did a nasty? Migrated to OpenSearch.
So, hard no on your take.
Do you not see how incredibly entitled this is?
If everyone does this then there's no money to maintain the fork, and you're looking for slaves to run it. Or else everything FOSS just gets maintained by employees at massive tech companies that have other businesses which fund it.
People are not using open source for the hippie philosophy. They are using it because it is free (as in beer), but even more importantly: they are using it because non-free licenses are a terrible pain in the ass.
Legal aspects are a headache, and the amount of effort to get someone in your company to pay even a tiny amount for some library or service is a serious hurdle.
I would not be surprised if adopting a non-free library would take a typical company ~40 man hours of work. At current rates, that translates to quite an expensive license.
Getting close source is even more work though - now we need someone to negotiate license terms (that is make sure our proposed use is compatible with the license we buy). We also make sure there is no risk of using their code (what if the closed source binary library has some AGPL3 code in it). I'm not even sure how to go through that process.
Someone like Microsoft or Google could take software like this, pay the original developer, and still see tons of ROI offering it as a canned cloud service. And to a certain degree they don’t care about the profitability of that 1 thing if it helps sell the rest of their system. Quite honestly, they won’t care about competition using it if it’s already common. People want X, they’re using it, you can offer it. You’re paying a handful of people for street cred, a guarantee it will continue to work well with your stuff, and input into direction.
Folks like RedisLabs, MongoDB, Hashicorp, etc. think they can do the same with a marketplace offering. But they’re reliant that the particular product is profitable on its own. They’re also reliant on the cloud customer being willing to establish another relationship with another vendor, even when they can automatically deploy and bill through their existing provider.
We’ve seen folks behind OSS projects hop from company to company over time and the project continues to thrive. I haven’t seen a company restrict a license and the project do so… at least that I can think of. I might be wrong.
No. I think part of the value of Redis to date was exactly that it was BSD licensed. When I started using it, I showed many other developers what they could do with it, and those devs took Redis to work, and built products and some bought services/products from Redis. Without the open source product, Redis the company would likely not exist as it does today. Times change, and the right strategy for Redis the company probably looks a lot different than when they started it on the back of Antirez's still awesome software.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-ga...
For what it's worth... Microsoft was quoted in the Redis press release as a cloud provider that has partnered officially with Redis under this new licensing scheme.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-...
Most users never will. That's the fallacy made by MBA types. They dream up some lofty sums "if only everyone paid us money". What they don't realize is that most users will find alternatives.
I understand why they do it. I just don't agree it works long term.
Most Redis users have never paid the company behind it even a single cent. Me included. So, I can appreciate them doing this in order to make some money. Except it won't change my behavior; I'll just use the fork. Just like the vast majority of other Redis users, external Redis contributors, all of the cloud providers currently offering Redis commercially, and by the time this runs it course probably a fair bit of current Redis employees.
Given the large amount of commercial users and cloud providers offering Redis, I don't think it will take long for them to get organized even. They pretty much have to given that they have lots of users paying them for this.
There are some precedents with Terraform, Elasticsearch, Red Hat, and a few other big players now dealing with a lot of their target users and potential customers depending on open source forks. As a business strategy alienating future users like that seems misguided.
When Oracle took ownership of Sun's open source projects (including such things as mysql, hudson, openoffice, etc.), they quickly lost control of most of that. Oracle's attempts to convince the world to use their closed source offerings never amounted to much. Even with Java, they more or less gave in and openjdk is where the action is these days. Except for a few banks, very few people use the Oracle JDK. There's no need, Oracle has long ago stopped pretending there's any advantage to that. All the development happens on OpenJDK. There are half a dozen different companies offering certified builds.
Anecdotically, I consult on Elasticsearch and Opensearch. Most of my recent clients default to Opensearch. It's just the way it is. They all go for the free and open source option.
The point here is that this can only end in one way: the creation of a Redis fork that will be used by the vast majority of current Redis users.