Redis vs. the trillion-dollar cabals
By Matt Asay
Contributor, InfoWorld |
Recently Redis changed its license, and mountains of misinformation have followed, not to mention a fork driven by trillion-dollar cloud company AWS. Among that misinformation is Steven J. Vaughn-Nicols’ earnest but incorrect declaration that the Redis change “means developers can no longer use Redis’ code.”
This is simply not true. For 99.9999999999999% of developers, their rights under the license remain exactly the same as they would under the most permissive of open source licenses. What it does mean is that trillion-dollar cloud companies like AWS can no longer take Redis’s code without contributing back.
AWS, after years of pulling plump profits from Elasticache (its Redis service), panicked and started a fork (Valkey), enlisting others so that it wouldn’t have to shoulder all the cost. The company learned that expensive lesson with its Elasticsearch fork, OpenSearch. Lest you think this is about community winning out over corporations, keep in mind that this “community” is more like a cabal of trillion-dollar tech companies ensuring a steady supply of cheap or free software to which they contribute virtually nothing. The members of the trillionaire club have founders worth more than the market valuations of Redis and all of the so-called open source baddies combined.
