Here we go again, Redis edition

Another week, another license change. So let’s talk about it!

First of all, I should make clear that I am an open source pragmatist, and I think that if a company feels like having an open source project is a net drag on its ability to make money, it is a good idea to at the very least consider moving away from a full open source model.

If you have determined that being open source is a net negative on your commercial success, if you continue with the open source strategy you should be fully aware of the trade-offs you are making (this is, to a certain extent at least, the case at Percona, for example). And if you are a venture-funded company, and especially if you are a public company, this option is very likely off the table for you.

There are a couple pieces I’d like to pull out of the Redis announcement.

Redis has been sponsoring the bulk of development alongside a dynamic community of developers eager to contribute.

This is an uncomfortable reality for most open source companies. There is a narrative out there that you will put some effort into community building and then be rewarded by having your engineering effort multiplied by the hordes of fabulous developers. In reality it’s pretty rare for companies to find that they get massive community contributions, and anyway community contributions can be really hard to manage and actually take more effort from the core engineering team than just doing the work internally.

Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.

Not all open source companies create infrastructure solutions that are likely to be ripped off by major cloud providers, but this risk is relatively well-known for core infrastructure. This pretty obviously fails a fairness test, and I think ensuring that the companies profiting from the software are contributing substantially to its survival, whether financially or otherwise, makes sense. I do want to note that there are many, many open source companies not in the infrastructure space who will never experience competition from AWS; those companies can chill out about this risk.

Our new licensing approach strikes the best balance between making Redis source code broadly available, supporting the developer community with minimal limitations, and protecting our ability to continue investing in feature-rich, free-of-charge software and enterprise products. 

In my opinion, the core trick for any open source company is in the word balance. No matter what kind of open source company you have, the core challenge is to get the right balance between your developer/user community and your ability to pay your staff.

The other core challenge is to make sure that the open source project is actually delivering value to the company. As the Redis announcement said:

…delivering multiple software distributions simultaneously – across open-source, source-available, and commercial software optimized for different on-premises and cloud platforms – is at odds with our ability to drive Redis successfully into the future. 

What they’re saying is that maintaining an open source and a commercial distribution is really hard and expensive. So if that project is not pulling it’s weight — and especially if appears to be a net negative — it seems to me that moving away from open source makes sense.

My other thoughts is that consumers of open source projects should understand the financial model behind the project. Is this the kind of project where you have a bunch of companies who employ people directly to contribute to and lead the project? Is it part of a foundation? Is there a single vendor behind the project who depends on a commercial product for revenue? If so, do you they have a clearly articulated vision for who should be paying and who shouldn’t?

By the way, this is the kind of thing we’ll be discussing at Open Source Founders Summit. If you want to argue with others in the open source ecosystem about how to properly balance community plus commercial interests — and you are in a leadership role at an open source company — you should come.