How are the OSS contributors, who initially provided IP under the premise of it being open source dealt with in these cases? If I were a major contributor to a package like Elastic or Redis and it was moving to a more commercial model, what stops me from suing Redis or Elastic and going after a share in the profits?
I guess the standard approach here is to release a new version with the new licensing model, and take all of the open source contributions and package them into a new commercial product. And anyone, perhaps even a contributor could do this, but the company is best positioned to do so and extract value from a bunch of free work that was contributed under an entirely different premise. Maybe there's room for a new OSS licensing model that prevents this from ever happening.
If you signed a CLA to contribute, you've granted Redis a broad license to do whatever they want with your contribution. If you contributed to a BSD licensed project, then you contributed to a project who's licensing terms says "do whatever you want, just retain the copyright notice, and this license is not an endorsement".
You basically have no grounds for suing, especially since the re-licensing is not retroactive. The exact contributions that you provided as still available in the exact form and license that you contributed them to.
You need to be much more specific about what you want to prevent.
I think you must transfer copyright for the code to the organization - thus they can change it at will. For example in Linux that is impossible as everyone keeps the copyright claim to the code they contribute.
I guess the standard approach here is to release a new version with the new licensing model, and take all of the open source contributions and package them into a new commercial product. And anyone, perhaps even a contributor could do this, but the company is best positioned to do so and extract value from a bunch of free work that was contributed under an entirely different premise. Maybe there's room for a new OSS licensing model that prevents this from ever happening.