Redis Changes Its Open Source License -- Again (zdnet.com)

"Redis Labs is dropping its Commons Clause license in favor of its new 'available-source' license: Redis Source Available License (RSAL)," reports ZDNet -- adding "This is not an open-source license." Redis Labs had used Commons Clause on top of the open-source Apache License to protect its rights to modules added to its 3-Clause-BSD-licensed Redis, the popular open-source in-memory data structure store. But, as Manish Gupta, Redis Labs' CMO, explained, "It didn't work. Confusion reigned over whether or not the modules were open source. They're not open-source." So, although it hadn't wanted to create a new license, that's what Redis Labs ended up doing....

The RSAL grants, Gupta said, equivalent rights to permissive open-source licenses for the vast majority of users. With the RSAL, developers can: Use the software; modify the source code; integrate it with an application; and use, distribute, support, or sell their application. But -- and this is big -- the RSAL forbids you from using any application built with these modules in a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine, or a machine learning/artificial intelligence serving engine. In short, all the ways that Redis Labs makes money from Redis. Gupta wants to make it perfectly clear: "We're not calling it open source. It's not."
Earlier this month the Open Source Initiative had reaffirmed its commitment to open source's original definition, adding "There is no trust in a world where anyone can invent their own definition for open source, and without trust there is no community, no collaboration, and no innovation."

And earlier this week on Twitter a Red Hat open-source evangelist said they wondered whether Redis was just "clueless. There are a lot of folks entering #opensource today who are unwilling to do the research and reading, and assume that these are all new problems."

Comments

Re:Bye, Redis

[amp001]

You're right that the headline is wrong, but not entirely in the way you assume. The license for Redis itself (the core database, including failover and clustering/distribution, etc.) isn't changing. It's still BSD licensed. What they changed was the license for the extensions they've written (RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisJSON, RedisML, and RedisBloom). Now, I personally think that's a mistake (and I suspect they'll end up realizing that at some point), but it also doesn't affect how I use Redis today, nor does it affect how the cloud vendors use it in the services they provide.

Re:Missing Information

[phantomfive]

Redis makes one of the most popular NoSQL databases (I believe it's basically just a key-value store, and people use it a lot for holding high-volume reads that don't change very often, like cookies).

Amazon wants to take their database, modify it so it can be used as a hosted AWS service, and not contribute back their code changes.

If that bothers Redis, they should use the AGPL, which specifically prevents that kind of thing. The BSD licenses specifically allow it. Instead, Redis made their own licence, which annoyed RedHat enough to threaten removing Redis from their distro.