It's possible to hold both positions at the same time.

In the world of legal consequences it is not.

Or please explain.

Erm I am not sure if I was understood correctly - I meant legal consequences from the perspective of redis guys on one side, and saas guys on the other side..

One simply can't admit that they both were doing a valid thing

Yeah, this is weird. The one restriction is one you probably dont care about because you're not amazon or azure yet some people still freak out like youve taken their toys away.

Truly odd.

It's not that weird. With a FOSS license, I know I can use a program for anything I choose to and the terms will never change. I might launch a startup with a friend tomorrow using a package and complying with its license terms, and a million dollars later we're still legally entitled to use it.

Adding constraints later is a non-fallacious slippery slope. The restrictions Redis added aren't directly onerous to 99.999% of users, but now the world is divided into people who are allowed to use it at will, and people who can only use it in certain ways (or not at all). That's an enormous change from a FOSS license. And if they change it today specifically to lock out Amazon, will they change it again tomorrow to lock out my startup? The thing is, now that they've established precedent, there's no way of knowing what'll happen later.

Again, I know I can use GPL or MIT or BSD software for anything I want as long as I play by the exact same rules as everyone else. There's nothing that says you can use it but I can't. The difference between Free to non-Free is vast, even when I'm not affected (yet).

Your answer is "it's not that weird what if I wanted to launch a startup competing with azure and amazon"?

Well, Id say in that case youve got waaaay bigger problems than a license.

>Adding constraints later is a non-fallacious slippery slope.

No, it's very much a fallacious slippery slope. Constraints are the very essence of licenses and contracts.

Lots of people defend these licenses on exactly those grounds. I, too, find it pretty mystifying that this seems to be a minority perspective here. At least this seems to be the case among the people who speak up when this comes up here. It's hard to know if there is a less noisy majority who feels differently about it.

I think the "silent majority" is just fine with this change. The OSS "extremists" will certainly be the noisiest about this - everyone else will continue on with life as usual, especially if they have an understanding of the concept of business pressures.

That's what I think too, but it's hard to know for certain.

If you just call SaaS "hosting" does that change your view of things? Because I remember when commercial hosting for free software was actively encouraged.