Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money.
Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license.
That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license.
Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right.
The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community:
- start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change
vs
- start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL
[1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392
Well, the competition landscape was a lot different 15 yrs ago.
In the same way, GPL went from version 2 to 3, in response to the landscape
I think it's unwise to not respond to environment changes.
True, but killing your company and make your code proprietary is most likely the wrong response.
However, I think everyone understands that it's a problem to make a living from small but important part of an bigger infrastructure, but this is the wrong way.
The Linux Foundation will throw money at Valkey, Amazon will still sell the service and Redi's will lose (because it's just one company and not opensource).
[1] https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
And I'm not even talking about external contributors whose work is re-licensed under a proprietary license.
That's something completely different you are right ;)
>>Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Valkey Community
>>Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...
We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.