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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.



Was Jenkins a Leeroy Jenkins reference? Seemed to be just continuing the butler theme from Hudson.


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.


A lot of younger folks probably never heard of XFree86 or OpenOffice.org. In a few years Terraform and now Redis might end up just like them.




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