For a brief time, it looked as if the open source bait and switch was a success. What could the community do but shake their collective fists? For some time, even I thought the open source turncoats might get away with it. Everywhere you looked, there were forum posts, op-eds, and think pieces sparking fears of a time of reckoning for open source altogether. However, as it was in the beginning, the open source movement today is still supported by and reliant upon the knowledge, will, and expertise of its communities. And the communities are fighting back.
Forks in the road for Redis, HashiCorp, and Elastic
Until recently, it looked as if the open source community had no real recourse against these open source turncoats. But then, this March, after Redis switched from an open source BSD license to source-available licenses, the Linux Foundation announced they would be creating their own fully open source fork of Redis, called Valkey.
The announcement quickly garnered ardent, widespread support from not only rank-and-file open source advocates, but also some less expected sources, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle. (My company, Percona, is also part of the contributor group.) Thus far, Redis has effectively dug in its heels, but it’s safe to say, that with so much popular and powerful support being thrown behind the Valkey fork, the company is undoubtedly feeling some pressure.