Or “weak” licenses are used by people that don’t care about the things that the license allows for. Or better yet, actively want that degree of permissiveness.
All this license hubbub is often just people not actually thinking thriving which license they want to use. “MIT sounds like a pretty good university”.
This has nothing to do with the license in question per se, and the GPL wouldn't help at all. It has to do with who owns the copyright. The copyright owner can re-license going forward to whatever they want, whenever they want. If you're really concerned about a license change then you need to be wary of projects with sole-ownership, either via CLA or not accepting contributions (it's the project of one person/company that they're putting out as open source for whatever reason, and very much not a community project).
I actually think the descriptive language commonly used here is a little distorting in that regard. A copyright owner does not, and cannot, "take something closed source", it's more that they're forking the project under a new license (which granted is a specific kind of fork only they can do, everyone else has to fork under the same license). Every single bit of code up until that moment remains under the open source license, so if there is interest customers or whomever else can take that and continue the same open source project going forward, and even surpass the original holder's new proprietary effort. As a practical matter that's rare because there has to be serious interest, but it does happen. OpenZFS for example is a wonderful project that has long since eclipsed the Oracle fork of Sun's code.
In turn I also think it is often a little more complex then (from the opinion):
>"switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions"
Let's be serious: rarely are these projects getting more then a token percentage of code from contributors, let alone anything else (though Redis definitely is). It's frequently 90%+ a single-company effort, and indeed this is nearly a truism. Because if the company is only a small component of the effort vs the community it is extremely likely any attempt to do a proprietary fork will fail and the open one comprising the majority of effort will dominate, and by definition there is major interest. This doesn't make it non-irritating, but it's still a net positive, a lot of useful code was contributed open and is a much easier springboard. And it's a much MUCH better situation then the even more common proprietary-all-along-software changing terms which happens all the friggin' time, like going subscription-only. If nothing else you get a much better off ramp.
Companies forking from open source to proprietary with their projects can suck, for sure. But I think in the last year it has started to also get a little overhyped. I'd still rather have years of open source first. And again, everyone can always evaluate who owns the copyrights. Diversity is important for longevity ANYWAY too. Like, if all the effort is happening by a few devs or a single company, what happens if they get hit by a bus? Go bankrupt? Simply get old and tired of it? At some point the community has to step up, or not.
The GPL does not allow derivative works to be relicensed under a more permissive license. If redis were GPL'd then the developer/owner would not have been able to fork the project and do anything moving forward. The project would be stuck as a GPL project because that is the point of the GPL. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html . Maybe I am mistaken? If there is some version of licensing that exists that does not allow the developer of the software to fork the software with a new license, then what I'm saying is that is what should be used.
With all respect you are, indeed, completely mistaken. The license is absolutely and 100% irrelevant, wouldn't matter if it was AGPLv3 or full proprietary or BSD or anything else. Like all copyright licenses, the GPL is a creature of copyright law. Copyright governs derivative works by other people. But the owner of the copyright can derive whatever they want from their own IP. A copyright holder choosing to license their IP under the GPL in no way precludes them from switching to licensing under something else, or indeed to licensing under any number of other licenses (including proprietary) at the exact same time ("dual licensing" is indeed one of the various attempted open source business models) to different people.
Again, they can't do so retroactively, so if they begin by offering software under open source license A and later switch to License B, all the code under A up until the moment of switching to B continues to be licensed under A. So someone can take that as a starting point for a different fork under open source license A, or another one that is compatible. But they won't have a right to any new code done under B if it's incompatible.
