The problem this license is trying to solve is a reasonable one: that cloud providers package up open source products as their own service and capture the majority of the value without adding much themselves.
This license might not be the best way around it but the issue should be addressed.
Agreed, most of the Revenue from OSS is from hosting it, not developing it. As a result the biggest cloud vendors make most of the profit from OSS that others have developed and spend resources on maintaining.
Not sure what the solution is either, but the major cloud companies are becoming an oligopoly who rake in most of profits in OSS giving them a competitive advantage which they can use to out resource, out market and out compete against alternative Indie OSS efforts.
Whilst the desired effect would be that the Cloud companies would pay Redis Labs a cut of their profits they make on Redis, IMO they're already big enough that they can invest more development hours in developing a superior competing replacement which they can use as a competitive differentiator vs other Redis hosts. But hopefully they'll consider profit sharing instead of developing a proprietary cloud-only fork.
You know this kind of goes right to the heart of the issue. The cloud providers are packaging up open source software into higher level services that have value... just like FB and twitter and everyone else that provides a service that we couldn't have dreamed up 30 years ago. Back in the 80's when I started in this business there were paywalls around every algorithmic implementation of an idea, and before too long there were patents standing on those paywalls defending them. The very idea of open source (to which I was a late convert, so treat me like a reformed smoker here) is the opposite. It unleashed a torrent of innovation _because_ it treated specific algorithmic implementations of ideas as a common resource. To make money you had to come up with something bigger, something more significant to the world than a new key/value store. It's hard to make money off of infrastructure software because the very philosophical foundation of the open source idea is that infrastructure software should be free, so greater ideas can more easily take flight.
> the very philosophical foundation of the open source idea is that infrastructure software should be free, so greater ideas can more easily take flight.
This is true from a "free as in freedom" perspective, but isn't limited to infrastructure software. The idea is that all software should be free (as in freedom) so that greater ideas can more easily take flight.
In reality, once people started understanding some of the open source (as opposed to free software) ideas, infrastructure lost it's value. We all need infrastructure. For example, as great as Redis is, there are many companies who could build it. And if Redis goes proprietary, somebody will take over (and will probably hire antirez away from RedisLabs). The costs are not actually that large and the benefits are too big.
Think about Facebook for a minute. It was not that long ago that no reasonable developer would consider working there. React comes out. Suddenly, everybody and their dog wants to work for Facebook. Let me reiterate: Facebook -- one of the most hated companies in all of high tech. Sure you could sell React, but for what? A handful of cash at best. Actually, if you put a proprietary license on that thing, nobody would touch it with a 10 foot pole. But you bet they'd rewrite it. And share it.
Even the smallish company I do work for is keen to release open source software -- we just haven't built anything compelling yet. If we had the need for some cool infrastructure that nobody has built yet, you bet we'd build it. And share it.
So while we all need infrastructure, we can all build infrastructure. All of us. And we will (good grief -- look at all those insane frameworks :-P). It's cheaper than chips. That's why you can't sell it.
This license might not be the best way around it but the issue should be addressed.