Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

Re:Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available by bheadmaster on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @07:15AM (#39915945)

Not really. As mentioned in the article, Redis has a Contributor License Agreement [0] that you have to sign if you contribute to Redis codebase, which basically gives the company behind it ownership behind everyone's contributions:

    You grant to Redis and to the recipients of the software distributed by Redis a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contribution and such derivative works.

Usually, projects don't have such agreements. E.g. Linux, the kernel, would have a hard time re-licensing under different license, because of how many people actually hold the copyright to the code they contributed, and would have to agree beforehand.

[0] https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Re:Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available by Macha on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @07:18AM (#39915972)

The CLA is sort of a red herring in the case of permissively licensed software though. It becomes relevant for the SSPL case, where Redis don't want to be bound by the same rules as others.

Like since Rust is MIT licensed, you could make a closed source fork of Rust. The trademark guidelines would prevent you calling it Rust or anything too close, but you could describe it as Rust(TM) compatible and any of the other legally permitted uses of other people's trademarks.

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