In retrospect, Redis Labs is about to learn a lesson that many have learned before.
Community willingness to maintain popular software under the old license means that attempting to make free non-free will result in a fork taking over.
As a prior example look at what happened a few years back when Oracle tried to make Hudson non-free. Now nobody has heard of Hudson, but everybody uses Jenkins. Which name was chosen for the sheer mockery value and reference to the then infamous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4.
There are people who think we need the legal protection of the GPL. But there are others who trust in community pressures to make the right thing happen.
It served as both, but at the time I definitely saw people referring to it as a Leeroy Jenkins reference. With the fact that can also refer to a butler as a bonus. Though I'm sure some saw it the other way.
It's a kind of pun that programmers like. For example when I asked, Larry Wall said that he named Perl, Perl after he had two acronyms. Namely Practical Extraction and Reporting Language and Perfectly Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
That's the decade old philosophical fight about what to consider free software. GPL/GNU vs BSD.
I think both opinions are fine, if you don't want your contributions to end up in a commercial product, you can't contribute to a project with BSD/MIT license. On the other hand most companies prefer to support projects with a permissive license over projects with copyleft (GPL). For many projects (except the big ones like GNU/Linux) copyleft seems to be more of a burden.
Thanks, that's a perfect summary of the problem and the reasons why the BSD license was picked. It's perfectly fine though to disagree and do it differently.
