But why? Isn't a bunch of companies who depend on a piece of software internally and make money using it having a vested interest in its improvement and it remaining free basically the ideal case for OSS?
OSS falls down when you want to make money on the software itself, or in Redis's case when you want to make money on hosting but you're bad at hosting.
> OSS falls down when you want to make money on the software itself…
Yes, exactly. As a OSS puritan you can’t participate in the economy on equal terms. Instead you’re relegated to one of many “serf” roles, e.g. being employed by some bigtech company to continue working on it.
I suppose that's fair but to me that's just how OSS happens, you're working somewhere and you realize that there's a need not being filled -- and Redis was one of those. You work on it until it serves your needs and then say, "hey I bet other people would find this useful."
To me the giving it away part is the whole ethos, I'm not some FOSS zealot that believes every piece of software should be GPL or whatever. If you want to make a play at making selling software your business then I think proprietary licensing makes the most sense. And I also think it's a dick move to give a piece of software to the community, collect contributions and integrations from people helping a community effort, and then take it back. It's especially a dick move when it's been OSS for 15 years and Redis Labs isn't even the company that made it.
OSS falls down when you want to make money on the software itself, or in Redis's case when you want to make money on hosting but you're bad at hosting.