So, dear Redis community, today I’m stepping back as the Redis maintainer. My new position will be, on one side, an “ideas” person at Redis Labs, in order to provide inputs for new Redis possibilities: I’ll continue to be part of the Redis Labs advisory board.
That was less than two months ago. Can this be a coincidence? Or did he know that a bunch of new money was in the offing and didn't like the direction things were about to go?
I don't know, but there are several different assumptions we could make - another being 'oh someone else took over and immediately sought a bunch of money'. The truth is probably a blend of everything we could dream up.
The fact that cloud providers are built on repackaging open source solutions and that the authors have no equity is one of my biggest disappointments in the modern tech world.
My feelings are made worse by the fact that we seem to be building more walled gardens, forgetting the original intent and ethos of the web.
It's wealth for the few on the backs of free labor provided by our best luminaries.
And then they don't give us the keys. We have to pay rent.
Ugh, I hate it so much.
We need stronger copyleft. And we need to stop contributing our time and resources to open source that isn't equitable to the authors.
Antirez very consciously and specifically chose the BSD license for Redis with the exact expectation that companies will be more likely to contribute back to upstream if they are adopting and improving it without a legal stranglehold requiring them to do so.
Maybe he has equity, maybe not. I hope he does. But a company profiting off of Redis without contributing back is a very conscious choice by the author and not at all the fault of weak copyright enforcement.
He worked for Redis Labs for many years. I'm sure they have a good understanding.
To be honest, your comment reads as if you think building a company such as Redis Labs is easy. Even with a tool like Redis freely available, it's hard and risky.
I understand the sentiment better with eg Amazon taking some open source, putting a sticker on it, and using their market dominance to extract free money from it. But that's not what Redis Labs is at all.
A lot of people didn't want Richard Stallman to be right (either him specifically, or the GNU ethos he espoused). But damnit, he told me so.
I really love the BSD concept, but on a dark night when I'm feeling morose, I wonder if the way my thoughts on public policy are skewed, in the same way that we say that people who vote for taxes on themselves suffer from a delusion of being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires'.
I want the option to build myself a business out of Open Software, even though it looks now like I may only do that once in my lifetime. But so do a lot of people who are much, much more selfish than I am.
I don't understand this argument. Hosting providers are providing... hosting. I don't see how the tools they host on their platform (eg redis) is relevant.
If they didn't offer automatically provisioned tools users would still use those tools, they'd have to set them up manually or using their own automation.
You're basing this whole rant on an assumption that he doesn't, that is not supported by any fact. The dude worked for Redis Labs for years, and was listed on the executive page of their website alongside the founders, and he now retired and assigned control over the project to the company. Does he strike you as a person who would agree to that without getting his share?
Arent there OSS license types that disallow commercial forks and/or service businesses? I'm assuming if someone chose a license that allows for commercial activity, they want it to happen.
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
The GPL and AGPL require reciprocity but do not disallow commercial forks. Other licenses out there may disallow commerical forks, but they are not Open Source licenses.
Right, and that may have consequences for whether a particular distro packages you or whether the OSI shines on you, but those are just part of the trade-off; a license like this is still a perfectly valid choice for a given endeavour.
AGPL was created for exactly this reason. It covers all SaaS, and requires all such services to open source all their software that directly touches any AGPL code (eg, as a library).
He likely has some as he was there for a number of years -- 5 I believe. But he didn't start the company. So I would guess much less than 5%, if not less than 1%.
Comments
I hope antirez has equity in it
https://redislabs.com/blog/thank-you-salvatore-sanfilippo/
I’m not sure if he does. That post is interesting - I didn’t know he was stepping away.
Not totally away:
http://antirez.com/news/133
That was less than two months ago. Can this be a coincidence? Or did he know that a bunch of new money was in the offing and didn't like the direction things were about to go?
I don't know, but there are several different assumptions we could make - another being 'oh someone else took over and immediately sought a bunch of money'. The truth is probably a blend of everything we could dream up.
If he doesn't, then I'm disgusted.
The fact that cloud providers are built on repackaging open source solutions and that the authors have no equity is one of my biggest disappointments in the modern tech world.
My feelings are made worse by the fact that we seem to be building more walled gardens, forgetting the original intent and ethos of the web.
It's wealth for the few on the backs of free labor provided by our best luminaries.
And then they don't give us the keys. We have to pay rent.
Ugh, I hate it so much.
We need stronger copyleft. And we need to stop contributing our time and resources to open source that isn't equitable to the authors.
Antirez very consciously and specifically chose the BSD license for Redis with the exact expectation that companies will be more likely to contribute back to upstream if they are adopting and improving it without a legal stranglehold requiring them to do so.
Maybe he has equity, maybe not. I hope he does. But a company profiting off of Redis without contributing back is a very conscious choice by the author and not at all the fault of weak copyright enforcement.
He worked for Redis Labs for many years. I'm sure they have a good understanding.
To be honest, your comment reads as if you think building a company such as Redis Labs is easy. Even with a tool like Redis freely available, it's hard and risky.
I understand the sentiment better with eg Amazon taking some open source, putting a sticker on it, and using their market dominance to extract free money from it. But that's not what Redis Labs is at all.
A lot of people didn't want Richard Stallman to be right (either him specifically, or the GNU ethos he espoused). But damnit, he told me so.
I really love the BSD concept, but on a dark night when I'm feeling morose, I wonder if the way my thoughts on public policy are skewed, in the same way that we say that people who vote for taxes on themselves suffer from a delusion of being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires'.
I want the option to build myself a business out of Open Software, even though it looks now like I may only do that once in my lifetime. But so do a lot of people who are much, much more selfish than I am.
I don't understand this argument. Hosting providers are providing... hosting. I don't see how the tools they host on their platform (eg redis) is relevant.
If they didn't offer automatically provisioned tools users would still use those tools, they'd have to set them up manually or using their own automation.
You're basing this whole rant on an assumption that he doesn't, that is not supported by any fact. The dude worked for Redis Labs for years, and was listed on the executive page of their website alongside the founders, and he now retired and assigned control over the project to the company. Does he strike you as a person who would agree to that without getting his share?
Arent there OSS license types that disallow commercial forks and/or service businesses? I'm assuming if someone chose a license that allows for commercial activity, they want it to happen.
No, there are not. Disallowing commercial use is a field-of-use restriction and thus violates the Open Source Definition.
https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor
The GPL and AGPL require reciprocity but do not disallow commercial forks. Other licenses out there may disallow commerical forks, but they are not Open Source licenses.
Yes there are. MariaDB has built a license that prevents strip-mining of open source code and prevents Cloud providers from offering it as-a-service.
CockRoachDB followed suit and implemented the same.
Those aren't open source.
Right, and that may have consequences for whether a particular distro packages you or whether the OSI shines on you, but those are just part of the trade-off; a license like this is still a perfectly valid choice for a given endeavour.
AGPL was created for exactly this reason. It covers all SaaS, and requires all such services to open source all their software that directly touches any AGPL code (eg, as a library).
This is what GPL covers I believe? I want to be sure, but a lot of OSS license explainer sites I see aren’t super clear.
This is the point of open source.
He likely has some as he was there for a number of years -- 5 I believe. But he didn't start the company. So I would guess much less than 5%, if not less than 1%.
Well, 1% of a $billion is $10 million. I think I could get by on that.
I am thinking he stands to benefit, else he would comment in this thread.
Maybe I am wrong to jump to this conclusion, though.