[fractalb]

I feel copyleft licenses look more favourable at this point of time. What’s the value of more free/business friendly licenses if you can’t guarantee that the same license will apply for all the future releases? Looks more like a bait and switch policy.

[paulryanrogers]

The future is never guaranteed. Much less if you have no paid contract with the people building and maintaining the floor underneath your feet.

[fractalb]

AWS, GCP have assurance that they won't need to pay for their Linux infrastructure. What is it if it wasn't for copyleft licenses(GPL)?

[crabmusket]

Am I right in understanding that the relicensing was possible because of the CLA, not just because of the BSD license? Would a permissively licensed project that didn't use a CLA be vulnerable in the same way?

[8organicbits]

A key concern is that BSD isn't viral, so anyone can take BSD Redis and fork it into a commercial offering. If you want to, you can. The Redis trademark prevents anyone but Redis the company from calling their fork "Redis".

A CLA may impact relicencing, it depends on the terms. A simple CLA may only say "I am the owner of the code and I release it under $LICENSE". The current Redis CLA also has a copyright grant, which gives Redis the company greater rights.

[lmm]

A permissively licensed project without a CLA would be similarly vulnerable, because the BSD license allows them to make releases that include your code under a stricter license. To prevent them relicensing you would need both a strong copyleft in the license and no CLA/copyright assignment (like e.g. Linux - which can't even move to GPLv3 even if they wanted to, because it would be simply impossible to get all contributors' permission).

[orthoxerox]

No, since you can include BSD-licensed code in non-free software with just an attribution. The only difference between relicensing Redis from BSD+CLA to SSPL and BSD to SSPL is that the former would've had a more detailed REDISCONTRIBUTIONS.txt.

[fractalb]

GPL mandates that all derived software must carry the same license. No need for CLA, as I understand it.