Essentially, all software is built using open source. According to Synopsys, 96% of all codebases contain open source software.
However, there has been a very disturbing trend lately. The company will build its program using open source, make millions from it, and then – and only then – change licenses, leaving its contributors, customers and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions. I’ve had enough of it.
The latest villain in the IT melodrama is Redis. His program, which bears the same name, is an extremely popular in-memory database. (Unless you’re a developer, you’ve probably never heard of it.) One recent estimate puts Redis at about $2 billion — even without AI playing! Everyone can understand that.
What did it do? To quote Redis: “Starting today, all future versions of Redis will be released with licenses available in the source language. Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and the Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Consequently, Redis will no longer be distributed under the three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).”
For those of you who aren’t open source licensing experts, this means that developers can no longer use Redis’ code. Sure, I can look at it, but I can’t export, borrow or touch it.
Redis pulled the same trick in 2018 with some of its helper code. Now it’s done with the crown jewels of the company.
Redis is not the only company to make such a move. Last year, HashiCorp ditched its flagship program Terraform’s Mozilla Public License (MPL) for the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1. Here, the name of the new license game is to prevent anyone from competing with Terraform.
Would it surprise you to learn that not long after this HashiCorp started shopping around for a buyer? It didn’t surprise me.
Before this latest round of license changes, MongoDB and Elastic made similar moves. Again, you may never have heard of these companies or their programs, but each of them is worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars. And, although you may not know it, if your company uses cloud services behind the scenes, chances are you’re using one or more of their programs,
There is a threefold reason why these companies did this. First, they all, at one point or another, misunderstood “open source” as a business model. It wasn’t then, it isn’t now, and it never will be.
Second, after making that first mistake, they found out the hard way that while they could make millions, other companies, usually hyper-cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), were making just as much, if not more, than theirs. program. They did this by providing their software as a service to businesses.
It’s a matter of scale. People want to use software as a service, not as a one-off product that they have to work on themselves.
Finally, hidden behind the financial curtain, venture capitalists do not want wildly successful companies; they want unicorns. If a company isn’t worth a billion dollars before its initial public offering (IPO), it’s not a winner on their books.
Welcome to life in Silicon Valley,
So what’s the easiest way to do this — other than firing employees to replace them with under-prepared AI bots? Opt out of the open source license. They developed their program with the help of others; they got their customers thanks to providing open source; why let someone else get a piece of the pie?
Software companies are broken. At least two Linux distributions, Fedora and openSUSE, are considering getting rid of Redis. If they do, you can expect their big commercial brothers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), to follow suit.
However, who are really furious about this are the developers. Ultimately, their work disappears into semi-proprietary vaults, never to be touched again.
So, as they have done before and will do again, at least two sets of developers are forking it. First up was Drew DeVault, Founder and CEO of SourceHut, with Redict. He was quickly followed by Madelyn Olson, principal engineer at Amazon ElastiCache, itself an open-source fork of Elastic. However, as Olson noted, this as-yet-unnamed Redis fork not an AWS project. AWS is working on its own response.
They can do this because even though Redis has changed their license going forward, they can’t retire the code they licensed under the previous code. You can still do whatever you want, under the terms of the old license, with earlier versions of the code.
This is a big deal in open-source and high-end IT circles, but it’s also important to anyone who uses software. Remember, I just pointed out how important open source is to software development. Suppose developers get sick of companies taking their donated code and decide they won’t put up with it anymore.
Some companies that switch licenses say they do so to pay developers what they’re worth. I’m all for open source developers making more money. But I can assure you that even the best developers will not be the ones to make real money from these suggestions. Venture capitalists, private equity groups and CEOs will receive serious coins.
This is not what open source is about. Making money, of course. Even Richard M. Stallman, the founder of Free Software, said, “There is nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for work, or seeking to maximize income, as long as they are not used by means that are destructive. [But] Extracting money from program users by limiting their use is destructive.”
At least Stallman and I agree.
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