Redis is the odd one out here[1]: Garantia Data, later known as Redis Labs, now known as Redis, did not create Redis, nor did it maintain Redis for most of its rise to popularity (2009–2015) nor did it employ Redis’s creator and then-maintainer 'antirez at that time. (He objected; they hired him; some years later he left; then he returned. He is apparently OK with how things ended up.) What the company did do is develop OSS Redis addons, then pull the rug on them while saying that Redis proper would “always remain BSD”[2], then prove that that was a lie too[3]. As well as do various other shady (if legal) stuff with the trademarks[4] and credits[5] too.
Things are a bit more complicated. Actually Redis the company (Redis Labs, and previously Garantia Data) offered since the start to hire me, but I was at VMWare, later at Pivotal, and just didn't care, wanted to stay actually "super partes" because of idealism. But actually Pivotal and Redis Labs shared the same VC, It made a lot more sense to move to Redis Labs, and work there under the same level of independence, so this happened. However, once I moved to Redis Labs a lot of good things happened, and made Redis maturing much faster: we had a core team all working at the core, I was no longer alone when there were serious bugs, improvements to make, and so forth. During those years many good things happened, including Streams, ACLs, memory reduction stuff, modules, and in general things that made Redis more solid. In order to be maintained, an open source software needs money, at scale, so we tried hard in the past to avoid going away from BSD. But eventually in the new hyperscalers situation it was impossible to avoid it, I guess. I was no longer with the company, I believe the bad call was going SSPL, it was a license very similar to AGPL but not accepted by the community. Now we are back to AGPL, and I believe that in the current situation, this is a good call. Nobody ever stopped to: 1. Provide the source on Github and continue the development. 2. Release it under a source available license (not OSI approved but practically very similar to AGPL). 3. Find a different way to do it... and indeed Redis returned AGPL after a few months I was back because maybe I helped a bit, but inside the company since the start there was a big slice that didn't accept the change. So Redis is still open source software and maintained. I can't see a parallel here.
I guess we need a new type of Open Source license. One that is very permissive except if you are a company with a much larger revenue than the company funding the open source project, then you have to pay.
While I loath the moves to closed source you also can't fault them the hyperscalers just outcompete them with their own software.
Various projects have invented licenses like that. Those licenses aren't free, so the FOSS crowd won't like them. Rather than inventing a new one, you're probably better grabbing whatever the other not-free-but-close-enough projects are doing. Legal teams don't like bespoke licenses very much which hurts adoption.
An alternative I've seen is "the code is proprietary for 1 year after it was written, after that it's MIT/GPL/etc.", which keeps the code entirely free(ish) but still prevents many businesses from getting rich off your product and leaving you in the dust.
You could also go for AGPL, which is to companies like Google like garlic is to vampires. That would hurt any open core style business you might want to build out of your project though, unless you don't accept external contributions.
IANAL, but the Polyform Project (https://polyformproject.org/) apparently are, and they drafted a suite of licenses for these purposes.
Also, I'm not sure how anathema AGPL is. It's true I rarely see AGPL projects being hosted by big clouds, but AGPL is also just less popular as a license. I know AWS hosts AGPL Grafana, but iirc, they had to work out some deal with upstream.
That would be interesting to figure out. Say you are single guy in some cheaper cost of living region. And then some SV startup got say million in funding. Surely that startup should give at least couple thousand to your sole proprietorship if they use your stuff? Now how you figure out these thresholds get complex.
Server Side Public License? Since it demands any company offering the project as a paid product/service to also open source the related infrastructure, the bigger companies end up creating a maintained fork with a more permissive license. See ElasticSearch -> OpenSearch, Redis -> Valkey
Inflicting pain is most likely worth it in the long run. Those internal projects now have to fight for budget and visibility and some won't make it past 2-5 years.
I would say what we need is more of a push for software to become GPLed or AGPLed, so that it (mostly) can't be closed up in a 'betrayal' of the FOSS community around a project.
2. You're forgetting bureaucracy and general big company overhead. Hyperscalers have tried to kill a lot of smaller external stuff and frequently they end up their own chat apps, instead.
> For anyone evaluating infrastructure dependencies right now: the license matters, but the funding model matters more. Single-vendor open source projects backed by VC are essentially on a countdown timer. Either they find a sustainable model that doesn't require closing the source, or they eventually pull the rug.
I struggle to even find example of VC-backed OSS that didn't go "ok closing down time". Only ones I remember (like Gitlab) started with open core model, not fully OSS
I think the landscape has changed with those hyperscalers outcompeting open-source projects with alternative profit avenues for the money available in the market.
From my experience, Ceph works well, but requires a lot more hardware and dedicated cluster monitoring versus something like more simple like Minio; in my eyes, they have a somewhat different target audience. I can throw Minio into some customer environments as a convenient add-on, which I don't think I could do with Ceph.
Hopefully one of the open-source alternatives to Minio will step in and fill that "lighter" object storage gap.
This is the newer generations re-discovering why various flavours of Shareware and trial demos existed since the 1980's, even though sharing code under various licenses is almost as old as computing.
Well, anyone using the product of an open source project is free to fork it and then take on the maintenance. Or organize multiple users to handle the maintenance.
What is especially annoying is the aistor/minio business model, either get the „free“ version or pay about 100k… How about accepting some small dollars and keeping the core concept?
However this seems to be the business type of enshitification. Instead of slapping everything with ads, you either pay ridiculous dollars or move on.
> Elastic, Redis, Terraform, now MinIO.
Redis is the odd one out here[1]: Garantia Data, later known as Redis Labs, now known as Redis, did not create Redis, nor did it maintain Redis for most of its rise to popularity (2009–2015) nor did it employ Redis’s creator and then-maintainer 'antirez at that time. (He objected; they hired him; some years later he left; then he returned. He is apparently OK with how things ended up.) What the company did do is develop OSS Redis addons, then pull the rug on them while saying that Redis proper would “always remain BSD”[2], then prove that that was a lie too[3]. As well as do various other shady (if legal) stuff with the trademarks[4] and credits[5] too.
[1] https://www.gomomento.com/blog/rip-redis-how-garantia-data-p...
[2] https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/966133/
[4] https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419
[5] https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/issues/544
Things are a bit more complicated. Actually Redis the company (Redis Labs, and previously Garantia Data) offered since the start to hire me, but I was at VMWare, later at Pivotal, and just didn't care, wanted to stay actually "super partes" because of idealism. But actually Pivotal and Redis Labs shared the same VC, It made a lot more sense to move to Redis Labs, and work there under the same level of independence, so this happened. However, once I moved to Redis Labs a lot of good things happened, and made Redis maturing much faster: we had a core team all working at the core, I was no longer alone when there were serious bugs, improvements to make, and so forth. During those years many good things happened, including Streams, ACLs, memory reduction stuff, modules, and in general things that made Redis more solid. In order to be maintained, an open source software needs money, at scale, so we tried hard in the past to avoid going away from BSD. But eventually in the new hyperscalers situation it was impossible to avoid it, I guess. I was no longer with the company, I believe the bad call was going SSPL, it was a license very similar to AGPL but not accepted by the community. Now we are back to AGPL, and I believe that in the current situation, this is a good call. Nobody ever stopped to: 1. Provide the source on Github and continue the development. 2. Release it under a source available license (not OSI approved but practically very similar to AGPL). 3. Find a different way to do it... and indeed Redis returned AGPL after a few months I was back because maybe I helped a bit, but inside the company since the start there was a big slice that didn't accept the change. So Redis is still open source software and maintained. I can't see a parallel here.
I guess we need a new type of Open Source license. One that is very permissive except if you are a company with a much larger revenue than the company funding the open source project, then you have to pay.
While I loath the moves to closed source you also can't fault them the hyperscalers just outcompete them with their own software.
Various projects have invented licenses like that. Those licenses aren't free, so the FOSS crowd won't like them. Rather than inventing a new one, you're probably better grabbing whatever the other not-free-but-close-enough projects are doing. Legal teams don't like bespoke licenses very much which hurts adoption.
An alternative I've seen is "the code is proprietary for 1 year after it was written, after that it's MIT/GPL/etc.", which keeps the code entirely free(ish) but still prevents many businesses from getting rich off your product and leaving you in the dust.
You could also go for AGPL, which is to companies like Google like garlic is to vampires. That would hurt any open core style business you might want to build out of your project though, unless you don't accept external contributions.
IANAL, but the Polyform Project (https://polyformproject.org/) apparently are, and they drafted a suite of licenses for these purposes.
Also, I'm not sure how anathema AGPL is. It's true I rarely see AGPL projects being hosted by big clouds, but AGPL is also just less popular as a license. I know AWS hosts AGPL Grafana, but iirc, they had to work out some deal with upstream.
That would be interesting to figure out. Say you are single guy in some cheaper cost of living region. And then some SV startup got say million in funding. Surely that startup should give at least couple thousand to your sole proprietorship if they use your stuff? Now how you figure out these thresholds get complex.
Server Side Public License? Since it demands any company offering the project as a paid product/service to also open source the related infrastructure, the bigger companies end up creating a maintained fork with a more permissive license. See ElasticSearch -> OpenSearch, Redis -> Valkey
Inflicting pain is most likely worth it in the long run. Those internal projects now have to fight for budget and visibility and some won't make it past 2-5 years.
I would say what we need is more of a push for software to become GPLed or AGPLed, so that it (mostly) can't be closed up in a 'betrayal' of the FOSS community around a project.
The hyperscalers will just rewrite your stuff from scratch if its popular enough, especially now with AI coding.
1. Completely giving up is worse.
2. You're forgetting bureaucracy and general big company overhead. Hyperscalers have tried to kill a lot of smaller external stuff and frequently they end up their own chat apps, instead.
you won't get VC funding with this license which is the whole point of even starting a business in the wider area
> For anyone evaluating infrastructure dependencies right now: the license matters, but the funding model matters more. Single-vendor open source projects backed by VC are essentially on a countdown timer. Either they find a sustainable model that doesn't require closing the source, or they eventually pull the rug.
I struggle to even find example of VC-backed OSS that didn't go "ok closing down time". Only ones I remember (like Gitlab) started with open core model, not fully OSS
The thing to do is note who the founders were, and start recognizing repeat offenders. Like, who trusts Docker or Hashicorp people anymore?
I think the landscape has changed with those hyperscalers outcompeting open-source projects with alternative profit avenues for the money available in the market.
From my experience, Ceph works well, but requires a lot more hardware and dedicated cluster monitoring versus something like more simple like Minio; in my eyes, they have a somewhat different target audience. I can throw Minio into some customer environments as a convenient add-on, which I don't think I could do with Ceph.
Hopefully one of the open-source alternatives to Minio will step in and fill that "lighter" object storage gap.
This is the newer generations re-discovering why various flavours of Shareware and trial demos existed since the 1980's, even though sharing code under various licenses is almost as old as computing.
Well, anyone using the product of an open source project is free to fork it and then take on the maintenance. Or organize multiple users to handle the maintenance.
I don't expect free shit forever.
What is especially annoying is the aistor/minio business model, either get the „free“ version or pay about 100k… How about accepting some small dollars and keeping the core concept? However this seems to be the business type of enshitification. Instead of slapping everything with ads, you either pay ridiculous dollars or move on.
ai