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Didn’t they switch to a license with stronger mechanisms to keep the source available? SSPL, is basically AGPL but have even stronger protection from large corperations to use the code in their data centers without contributing the changes back. This is basically a move to prevent AWS/Google/Microsoft/et al, from leaching on the contributors work without giving anything back.
Or am I reading this wrong?
EDIT: Note, that the Mastodon account is to an AWS employee… so for him, this might be bad, since it no longer allows them to have their own internal fork without contributing back. Now, they will need to use a real for and maintain that them selves without leaching on the redis contributors.
I suggest an alternative title to this post: AWS employee is mad since Redis change license to prevent them from leaching
The restriction doesn’t only apply to large corporations, it applies to everybody. It restricts what you can do with it so it breaks the fundamental freedoms that make up “FOSS”. As an immediate result it will be removed from Fedora and Debian because they don’t consider SSPL/RSAL to be FOSS:
https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/497
it breaks the fundamental freedoms that make up “FOSS”
Why? All the license says is that if you provide it as a service you must release the source code.
It says that you must release all your source code, even the stuff that isn’t covered by the license. From Wikipedia:
anyone who offers the functionality of SSPL-licensed software to third-parties as a service must release the entirety of their source code, including all software, APIs, and other software that would be required for a user to run an instance of the service themselves,
They could just use AGPL. Amazon would need to contribute back, but with no restrictions on who and how can run it. Current licence has a clause that prevents any providing of the software on the network.
Does that prevent my managed Mastodon instance host from providing Redis over the network to my Mastodon, or does that count as them providing Redis to themselves and then providing Mastodon to me?
Weirdly OSI doesn’t classify the SSPL as an open-source license because it doesn’t guarantee “the right to make use of the program for any field of endeavor”, calling it a fauxpen license. I don’t think the FSF has commented on the license, though I would be curious what they say about it.
I imagine they consider it to not give the right to make use of the program for any field of endeavor, because providing the source of the entire stack needed to run the service you provide makes it impossible for users to host their service on stuff like AWS, since it is proprietary.
I think checking the sponsors page for OSI will be informative.
I mean aws can suck it
For the record. The SSPL that Redis switched to while technically not recognized by the OSI really isn’t bad at all.
It’s exactly like the AGPL except even more “powerful”. Under the SSPL if you host redis as a paid service you would have to open source the tooling you use to manage those hosted instances of redis.
I don’t see why anyone but hyper scalers would object. It’s a shame that the OSI didn’t adopt it.
From what I’ve understood SSPL is a ridiculously ambiguous license, it’s extreme copyleft. It’s not just “open source the tooling you use to host the software”, it can also be interpreted to mean “open source all the hardware and firmware you use to host the software”. No one wants to risk going to court for that so corporate wants to use SSPL licensed software.
AGPL is the best license you can go for IMO.
The ambiguity is a valid concern. Hopefully the next version addresses this a bit better. This being said mega corps will call anything they can’t abuse for profit “extreme”. So if they think it’s extreme that just means we are on the right track.
lmao imagine allowing to run your software only on RISC-V boxes basically, pretty based but also a shoot in the foot in terms of acquiring any major funding
To be fair the license is not meant to cause this and has never been enforced like this. The license was written for software tooling.
Huh I interpreted it as “everything involved with deployment” so connecting services, scripts, parts the OS that touch it, and an configurations.
I guess that is the ambiguity you mentioned
Regardless of whether it is too strong or too ambiguous, it is absolutely an open source license regardless of whether the OSI and/or FSF approve of it.
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In what way does SSPL not allow free redistribution for users but does for developers? It requires the source to be made available just like AGPL.
I wonder who all are sponsoring OSI for them to not recognize SSPL.
If you think this is bad, then you should make sure to use copyleft licenses.
EDIT: Just read the details, and it seems that this is just what they did. SSPL is like AGPL with a stronger SAAS is distribution claus. That might not be valid, according to the OpenSource definition, but unless you are planning to modify the code and provide it as SAAS I think this is no a problem.
This is not as bad as they didn’t make the whole thing totally proprietary. But FOSS community definetly would have to seek for alternarives unfortunetly.
Or just keep using the FOSS versions. These license changes by definition can not be retroactive.
Sure, but someone has to maintain them.
Sure, but in the meantime until a new fork emerges as the spiritual carry-on, you can just freeze the latest good version on your docker-compose and carry on.
You may not make the functionality of the Software or a Modified version available to third parties as a service or distribute the Software or a Modified version in a manner that makes the functionality of the Software available to third parties.
🫡
x = “make the functionality of the Software or a Modified version available to third parties as a service”
y = “distribute the Software or a Modified version”
You may not X, or (Y in a manner that X)
Perfectly normal legalese. Just like “included but not limited to…” it sets a condition and adds a more specific version of that condition, which seems redundant but helps during actual litigation.
wtf
Yeah…it’s unfortunate. There’s a good discussion over at hackernews here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562
Looks like it’s a dual licence now.
all is fine, gentlemen - it has been forked
phew
The old code isn’t going anywhere, there are already countless backups and clones. For a fork to actually be meaningful it needs community support and maintainers otherwise it’s basically just a clone.
it was a joke
No, I think you missunderstand… A joke is supposed to be funny.
hey, no need to hurt my feelings
I’ll submit it for your approval next time
It was a joke
well well well, how the turntables
Removed by mod
Read that as reddit
On another note, what other licenses do you lemmings know that impose more restrictions to prevent your software from being used for evil?
Great timing that Microsoft just released a drop-in replacement that’s in order of magnitude faster: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet
Written in C# too, so it’s incredibly easy to extend and write performant functions for.
It needs to be a bit more deployable though but they only just opened the repo, so I’ll wait.
Can it do everything that redis can?
Not everything. There’s a list of currently supported and unsupported apis on the docs. Streams aren’t supported at all, for example.
The repo description says it works with existing Redis clients, so probably.
That’s one of the selling points, yep
I do not understand why would a developer (or development team) change the licensing terms of their software for something stricter, like Redis did. Could someone tell me what the factors are?
I guess it’s things like AWS Elasticahe that made them want to provide their own service without sharing the code with their soon to be competitors.
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Looks like OSS to me.
What a disingenuous take. Just because the OSI doesn’t recognize the SSPL as open source doesn’t mean it’s not open source.
Edit: Everyone seems to believe I’m saying that because the source is available it should be open source. That’s not what I’m saying at all.
It is no longer open source under the definition of Open Source Iniciative, FSF, Wikipedia, RedHat, Cambridge Dictionary, European Union, maybe even Redis themself… Only startups that want gratis marketing seems to disagree.
We had pretty much defined open source for the last 20+ years and one of the requirements is freedom of redistribution at least equal to the developer itself.
For what Redis is doing we already have term source available which makes perfect sense and both are well defined.If you think open means just “you can see the code”, you must prove yourself at this point.
We had pretty much defined open source for the last 20+ years and one of the requirements is freedom of redistribution at least equal to the developer itself.
SSPL requires the source be made available for redistribution just like AGPL.
Source Available < Open Source < Free Software
These terms have specific definitions, where each greater term is more specific than the lesser*.
SSPL is in the “Source Available” tier.
The OSI defines the term “open source,” and the FSF defines the term “free software.” The number one term of open source, greater than the availability of the source code, is the freedom to redistribute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses
* Free Software isn’t exactly a subset of Open Source. There are a few licenses which are considered Free but not Open: the original BSD license, CC0, OpenSSL, WTFPL, XFree86 1.1, and Zope 1.0.
I don’t believe we should let the OSI and FSF be the absolute final say in what people consider to be open source/free software.
The number one term of open source, greater than the availability of the source code, is the freedom to redistribute.
SSPL allows this.
Absolutely. The source of Windows is widely made available to innumerable third parties, yet I’ve never seen anyone claim that it’s open source.
I didn’t think the Windows source is widely available, only the compiled form.
.Net core is open source though.
A lot of large companies have access to the Windows source tree. It’s quite common.
That’s not “source available” because the software is not released through a source code distribution model.
Companies may have access in order to produce better drivers or handle security incidents, but those are back-room deals, not part of Windows’ distribution model.
That’s right.
Irrespective of debates on what the definition of “open source software is” or who gets to define it, it is very clear that the SSPL is not a FOSS – free and open source license – and that’s a shame. Sure, open source still means we can look at the source code, but we do not have the full freedoms to use the code for any purpose. You might retort “but I’m not a aaS provider” so my rights aren’t affected.
But that’s the thing: the erosion of free software rights is never the end, but then beginning of the end. Much like free speech, such rights must be jealously guarded. Need I mention what happens when there’s no one left to speak up?
That some users of Redis never contributed back to the project is beside the point: truly free software is free as in libre: if you want thanks for your work, release it as freemium or some other license. But a FOSS license like BSD-3 has always been thankless and the OSI is correct in calling out the SSPL for not meeting the OSI’s Open Software Definition’s anti-discrimination clause, nor the FSF’s zeroth freedom, amongst four.
Free means free. AGPL is free. But SSPL carves out an exception, making it not free. No amount of sweet talking changes this reality.
SSPL doesn’t carve out an exception, it just has clauses that are difficult for SaaS providers to meet.
By the same argument, wouldn’t GPL and other copyleft licenses be considered non-free as well since you are not free to do whatever you want with the source? For example, incorporating it into a proprietary project, refusing to provide the source to users upon request, or not disclosing attribution, etc. The latter would even go against the terms of permissive licenses.
Clearly defining what free, and by extension FOSS, means is very relevant.
There are two concepts at play here: open-source and free software. An early example of open-source is AT&T Research UNIX, which was made source-available (for a few) to universities for research purposes, who could recompile the code and use the binaries for that purpose. Here, the use of the software is restricted by the license terms.
On the free software side, as a reimplementation if the Unix software utilities – ie all the programs like tar, ps, sh – GNU coreutils is GPL licensed, meaning any use of the compiled binaries is allowed, but there are restrictions on the distribution, of both source and binaries. As it turns out, GPL is both free and open-source (FOSS); there are fewer major examples of free but non-open source, but WinRAR and nVidia drivers on Linux would count.
Specifically, GPL and other copyleft licenses require that if you distribute the binary, you must make the source available under the same terms. If you’ve made no changes, then this is as simple as linking to the public source code repo. If you did add or remove code, you must release those alongside the binaries. If you simply use the binaries internally, you don’t need to release anything at all, and can still use them for any internal purpose.
wouldn’t GPL and other copyleft licenses be considered non-free as well since you are not free to do whatever you want with the source
From the background above, free software has always been understood to mean the freedom to use software, not necessarily distribute it. GPL complies with that definition for using the software, but also enforced a self-perpetuating distribution requirement. Unlike plain ol free software, under GPL, you must redistribute source if you distribute the software for use (aka binaries), and you must make that source also GPL.
Under this explanation, the AGPL wouldnt qualify as an open source license, since you must distribute the source if you provide a modified version as a network service.
I’m not quite sure I follow. The AGPL mirrors the GPL, with an extra proviso that accessing the software via the network constitutes “use” if the binary, not “distribution” of the binary. Under GPL, the mere use of a binary does not require the availability of source.
Example: a student uses a GNU/Linux computer at their university computer lab. She runs the unmodified “tar” command from GNU Coreutils, which is GPL licensed. She is not entitled to a copy of the source from the university, because execution is a “use” of the binary on an already-provisioned machine, not a “distribution” of the binary.
Example: a student is given a software assignment from her professor, along with a .7z file containing old versions of “tar” that contain bugs, all GPL licensed. This is a distribution – as in, a copy – of the binary, so she is entitled to a copy or link to the source from her professor.
The first example helps explain what the AGPL adds, in the context of network use. Consider what happens if the university actually modified the “tar” command installed on their machines. They still would not have to distribute the modified source to the students, because students only execute (“use”) the binaries. But with AGPL, use of modified software obliges source distribution.
Phrased another way, AGPL has every guarantee that GPL does, but adds another obligation for modified use via a network. Unmodified use does not require source distribution, under both GPL and AGPL.
This is the most pretentious thing I have read in a long while. Imagine comparing the holocaust to a copy left software license that mega corps find less profitable.
