Situation with Redis etc

Hi, what is your opinion about recent change of Redis licensing?

This looks like some streak:

Qt limited availability of LTS releases

Red Hat is testing how much it can circumvent GPL without breaking it literally

MongoDB went SSPL

Elasticsearch went SSPL

And so on…

At this point I’m starting to think that if there is some CLA to sign or the project is not under LGPL/GPL/AGPL license, the project is just meant to fund more yachts for some venture capitalists by exploiting FLOSS community.

And look at this link:

https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13157

Redis was licensed under BSD so Drew forked it with LGPL license. Pretty good choice IMHO. Companies can still sell services with this license. Propriety software can still use Redis without revealing their code. So, everybody is happy? Nope. People still want BSD license… The very same license which caused this whole mess.

Am I weird? Or the BSD licenses worshipers are insane?

While I still gonna use default community preferred licenses when applicable. I’m starting to think that I should put rest of my future projects under GNU licenses.

LGPL/GPL without CLA is perfect two-way contract. The code made by community is owned by community, and with every contributor this contract becomes stronger and stronger. Any CLA completely kills this balance.

And I used to prefer MIT before, as I’m not lawyer and it is short one…

Posted in: s/self-hosted

🚲 Aelspire

Mar 29 · 7 weeks ago · 👍 tenno-seremel

2 Comments ↓

🐝 Addison [mod] · Mar 30 at 18:56:

I had to look up SSPL. I still think of MongoDB as the meme buzzword database, but it sounds like an unambiguously good idea. I get the sense that GPL was written when most software was client-side, and hasn't kept up with the times.

— https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq

Practically though, having worked at smaller software companies, I am confident that most places don't give a rat's ass about this kind of thing and will just do whatever is convenient; and the Amazon and Microsoft-tier corporations already want to write their own version of everything anyway.

Call me cynical, but people who care about software licensing are a minority of a minority, and I don't think this stuff will have much meaningful impact.

🚲 Aelspire [OP] · Mar 30 at 19:23:

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License.

> Snip snip

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

— https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-license

This is basically impossible to comply with this license because I’m running Linux and don’t have right to re-license Linux code under SSPL as it is required.

So this license just disallow everybody to use this code…