Redis changes license again

    For the second time in six months, Redis Labs is changing the licensing model for a number of its products. Now the company is moving from Apache 2.0 Commons Clause to Redis Source Available License (RSAL). Let's talk about the reasons for this decision and the features of RSAL. / Pixino / congerdesign / PD




    A bit of history


    This is not the first time Redis Labs has changed the license for its products. In August last year, the company transferred several modules - Redis Graph, ReJSON, etc. - from the GNU AGPL license to Apache 2.0 Commons Clause. Thus, the company banned the sale of original modules by third parties. However, this led to unpleasant consequences.

    Firstly, the new license has caused confusion and misunderstanding. Some users mistakenly decided that working with modules is now regulated only by Apache 2.0 (without Commons Clause). Secondly, the ban on the sale of Redis solutions " hit»On open source software. For example, some of the services were forced to remove the developers of Debian and Fedora. They had to fork the Redis module repositories and merge them into a GoodFORM project .

    The Redis Labs team also faced unforeseen difficulties. License restrictions slowed the growth of the community around products, although the effect was expected to be the exact opposite. All this led to the fact that Redis Labs created their own license, tailored to the needs and characteristics of the company - RSAL.

    What is a new license?


    According to the terms of RSAL , developers can use the modules RediSearch, RedisGraph, RedisJSON, RedisBloom, RedisML and several others in their services, change the source code and implement it in applications. Final decisions can be distributed and sold.

    RSAL limits only the type of end products. An application based on the indicated modules cannot be a database, a tool for caching and indexing, a search engine or software for working with machine learning.

    In all other cases, the developed software can be used and distributed with the mark: This software is subject to the terms of the Redis Source Available License Agreement .

    The purpose of these restrictions is to eliminate the commercialization of modules by competing companies without harming the Redis community. As for the Redis kernel itself, like last time, it remains open and distributed under the BSD license. To support it, the company created a separate team that will manage the development of the kernel, regardless of what happens to the other components.


    / Flickr / Mark Hougaard Jensen / CC BY-SA

    What the community thinks


    Some representatives of the community believe that a repeated change of license may be another mistake. Adobe's Matt Asay disagrees with the statement that large corporations that sell open-source software negatively impact the development of the open source ecosystem. He says such organizations, by contrast, help distribute open source products to the global market.

    Redis' vision is also not shared by Gordon Haff, head of cloud technology at Red Hat. He believes that through licensing, Redis is trying to "sit on two chairs" - to profit from the sale of modules and to be an open source company.

    Red Hat Apache Guru named Rich Bowenthe company's decision is "meaningless." In his opinion, people who come to open source expect to see free solutions and they hardly want to understand any restrictions and conditions. Members of the Open Source Initiative ( OSI ) agree with him . They claim that Redis acts contrary to the definition and principles of open source software.

    There are those who see the point in switching to a new license. For example, the head of BaenCapital notes that corporations that build their products on the basis of open source software are unethical . Therefore, the actions of Redis are quite understandable - with the help of new licenses the company protects its interests and the rights of developers.

    One of the creators of Ansible, Michael DeHaan (Michael DeHaan) also believes that if all the software distributed for free, most projects simply will not survive. Not all companies manage to attract investors, so selling individual components to large organizations is one way to stay on the market.

    Who recently changed the license


    Redis Labs are not the only ones trying different licensing approaches. So, in October 2018, MongoDB switched from GNU AGPL to its own version of GNU 3 - Server-Side Public License (SSPL). The purpose of the license change is the same as that of Redis - to prevent third-party companies from “packaging” and reselling the open DBMS.

    The authors of the Confluent project also abandoned Apache 2.0 in favor of their version - Confluent Community License . The terms of the new license prohibit selling KSQL as a proprietary solution. Although it is still possible to implement SaaS services on this SQL engine.

    There are other examples of companies where part of the solutions are implemented for money. Among them are Elasticsearch, Hadoop, Berkeley DB and dozens of others.

    “There are fewer free projects like the Linux kernel, WordPress or GIMP. Open source developers are building business models in an attempt to find a balance between revenue and free distribution of products without harming the company, ”comments Sergey Belkin, head of development department of the virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud.ru . “But there are still enough in the IT community who oppose changes to the concept of open source.” Therefore, in the near future, completely free software will not disappear from the market, no matter how the licenses for individual products and their components change. ”

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