Redis Changes Its Open Source License -- Again

'Redis Labs is dropping its Commons Clause license in favor of its new 'available-source' license: Redis Source Available License (RSAL),' reports ZDNet -- adding 'This is not an open-source license.'
Redis Labs had used Commons Clause on top of the open-source Apache License to protect its rights to modules added to its 3-Clause-BSD-licensed Redis, the popular open-source in-memory data structure store. But, as Manish Gupta, Redis Labs' CMO, explained, 'It didn't work. Confusion reigned over whether or not the modules were open source. They're not open-source.' So, although it hadn't wanted to create a new license, that's what Redis Labs ended up doing....
The RSAL grants, Gupta said, equivalent rights to permissive open-source licenses for the vast majority of users. With the RSAL, developers can: Use the software; modify the source code; integrate it with an application; and use, distribute, support, or sell their application. But -- and this is big -- the RSAL forbids you from using any application built with these modules in a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine, or a machine learning/artificial intelligence serving engine. In short, all the ways that Redis Labs makes money from Redis. Gupta wants to make it perfectly clear: 'We're not calling it open source. It's not.'

Earlier this month the Open Source Initiative had reaffirmed its commitment to open source's original definition, adding 'There is no trust in a world where anyone can invent their own definition for open source, and without trust there is no community, no collaboration, and no innovation.'

And earlier this week on Twitter a Red Hat open-source evangelist said they wondered whether Redis was just 'clueless. There are a lot of folks entering #opensource today who are unwilling to do the research and reading, and assume that these are all new problems.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.