People are upset when part of the commons is lost. Open source software available under a license with few restrictions is part of the commons, and any added restriction is a loss.
I think it's important to understand that Redis as a whole is more than just Redis the product. It's also the social and intellectual capital invested into using Redis from the community and includes every StackOverflow answer and anyone whose resume has Redis on it. If Redis didn't exist, teams would have chosen any of the other alternatives: Memcached for caching, Kafka for queueing, etc. Redis positioned itself as the conceptual floor tile of "free thing to use for X" and then decided to move itself somewhere else, and if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted.
This can feel -- to some people, at some times -- like a cynical rug-pull. Developers get intangible but real benefits from creating well-known software, and open source software becomes well-known more easily. Changing the license once you've extracted those benefits means that the effort put into learning to use your software and into writing tutorials, Q&A answers, and conference talks was partly wasted. Attempting to capture part of the pie means reducing the size of the pie: across broader society, value is lost as the positive externalities created by your product shrink.
I do think that in the specific case of the SSPL the argument is more complicated and I tend to side with Redis Labs more than it sounds like in the rest of this reply. I just disagree with the idea that there is always zero problem with relicensing something you have rights to.
The FOSS code still exists, so there's nothing stopping you from continuing to use Redis, or more realistically, a Redis fork that will continue being maintained. The time spent on Redis is only wasted if nobody sets up a fork or if businesses move away from Redis because it costs money now.
It sucks to see an open source project become proprietary through the SPSS, but if the community is as strong as all of those social and intellectual investments make it seem, there will be no problem maintaining an open fork. I imagine the independent open source contributors won't be as willing to contribute to Redis now, so there's a chance to maintain the open source version.
This approach worked for MariaDB, LibreOffice, and a bunch of other projects that went through similar controversies.
>if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted.
I agree with this analysis, but I think the conclusion to draw from it is not that this is an unfair outcome for the poor person standing in that part of the floor, but rather that this is an unfortunate outcome that that person should have considered likely to happen from the outset, and prepared for. (I'm assuming here that no promises to remain FOSS forever were actually made.)
Making a good thing available to people ought not to shift onus onto the good-thing provider to continue providing it forever.
I think it's important to understand that Redis as a whole is more than just Redis the product. It's also the social and intellectual capital invested into using Redis from the community and includes every StackOverflow answer and anyone whose resume has Redis on it. If Redis didn't exist, teams would have chosen any of the other alternatives: Memcached for caching, Kafka for queueing, etc. Redis positioned itself as the conceptual floor tile of "free thing to use for X" and then decided to move itself somewhere else, and if you were standing on the floor in that spot and happened to be impacted by the licensing change then you now found yourself hurtling to the ground, time wasted.
This can feel -- to some people, at some times -- like a cynical rug-pull. Developers get intangible but real benefits from creating well-known software, and open source software becomes well-known more easily. Changing the license once you've extracted those benefits means that the effort put into learning to use your software and into writing tutorials, Q&A answers, and conference talks was partly wasted. Attempting to capture part of the pie means reducing the size of the pie: across broader society, value is lost as the positive externalities created by your product shrink.
I do think that in the specific case of the SSPL the argument is more complicated and I tend to side with Redis Labs more than it sounds like in the rest of this reply. I just disagree with the idea that there is always zero problem with relicensing something you have rights to.