I would gladly switch to a valkey redis compatibility layer if it supports xstreams.

How does valkey compare with garnet?

https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

I would take the continued fall of the dominoes (Mongo, Elastic, Hashi, Redis...) as a sign that the impact on the businesses who do this is positive or neutral, and it's just the HN bubble that creates the sense that there was an outsized public outcry over the changes that should make other companies wary. These guys aren't following suit blissfully unaware of the backlash against similar moves: as they measure it the backlash was weak enough that the business folks decided it was worth it to follow suit.

In my experience working in the industry, I wouldn't even have noticed that any of these license changes had happened if I weren't on HN. My company uses all of Mongo, Elastic, and Terraform and there hasn't even been a whisper of switching away from any of them.

>I don't really understand the blowback when a project tries to monetize,

Your starting premise of "monetization" being the issue is incorrect ... which then causes the misunderstanding of the blowback.

Instead, the blowback is about changing the license as I outlined before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951361

It annoys the community when Redis starts out with a permissive license that attracts outside contributors including employees from Tencent+Alibaba+Amazon+Bytedance+etc who collectively commit more code than Redis employees [1] ... and then later change the license which destroys the goodwill that attracted the outside contributors in the first place.

[1] code stats since 7.0.0 release: https://lwn.net/Articles/966631/#:~:text=Top%20changeset%20c...

When an open source project achieves success it does so on the backs of not only those who use it, but those who contribute. Sometimes these contributions are not just code but also include constructive feedback, bug reports (some very detailed with repros), documentation, advertisement by way of blog posts about the ways consumers use it, and more. While i fully believe that other players should be expected to contribute monetarily or with code, I also don’t believe that you should fundamentally change the relationship between the project and the consumer because the consumer has built a product on or with your project. They chose to build that product based on the license you provided them. If you didn’t want to license it that way then don’t do so from the beginning and you probably won’t get as many of the aforementioned benefits.

If I choose to open source something it’s because it’s either a passion project or it solves a problem that myself and others struggled to solve. I don’t open source it under the expectation of eventual profit. In fact, i hope by putting it out there it might become better as others improve upon it and we all benefit.

Well if they did not give away it for free in first place AWS could not have taken it. They are only themselves to blame for giving away free samples and then crying when in entirely morally justifiable way someone decides to sell their free product as service. Should have done that themselves.

And second thing is, often the pricing of these monetization turns is just exploitative.

One is a hosting company using software under the terms that it was licensed. The other is the author(s) of software getting a following with very permissive licensing and then changing the deal after the software has been adopted.

The blowback is because of the deal being changed.

Because actually monetizing FOSS is a good thing, but turning it proprietary is a bad thing.

The difference is the blow back comes from the users affected. I have no love for Amazon or Google, but if I'm currently using Redis as part of my product or service, forcing these new terms is threatening my business because I rely on it. My employer specifically tracks all third party software we use and this new license wouldn't fly - we would be forced to find an alternative.

This is mature software, unless you have a bug that isn't getting addressed, I wouldn't use the last commit as evidence for much here.

On other side one has to ask does not doing this work out? Spend lot of money making product and giving it out free. With no proper realistic plan how to make money at sufficient scale with it. Free money runs out what you do next? This or just simply die?

I was wondering that also. Didn't they learn anything from elastic doing the same and backtracking?

Sure, the goal of a company is profit not market share. Plenty of businesses that couldn't make money while expanding make all their money over the years or decades it takes to drive all the customers away.

It greatly reduces the number of people outside of the backing company who are willing to spend their time working on improvements to Redis.

Over time that means the dependency you are using has less improvements than if you lived in a parallel universe where it was still open source.

Not much really, imho Redis is pretty much "done" for what most people use it for. Looking at the commit graphs in the last 24 months the number of commits have not changed drastically either, so you'll be fine.

It might be an issue later when you decide to monetize and go big, but then perhaps a cloud providers solution may be a better option.