Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money.
Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license.
That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license.
Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right.
The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community:
- start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change
vs
- start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL
[1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392
