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0 points8organicbits1y ago0 comments

This is a good critique. Measuring intent of an organization may be difficult to do methodically and impartially, so it's not currently covered. Personally I was surprised to see Redis change license after Redis Labs promised not to change the license. I think that promise was made with good intent but overwhelming financial pressure that emerged later on swayed them.

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aragilar1y ago

I'm pretty sure most instances of relicensing have had a previous claim that wouldn't happen, so I wouldn't assign too much weighting to that (if anything, it should be a red flag to look into what the IP situation is).

I think there are a bunch of questions you can ask:

* Why is the software open source (if licensing/contractual requirements make it so, that's more likely to keep the status quo vs. corporate claims of "we <heart> open source")?

* Who owns the copyright/IP (and what's their reputation)?

* What would happen if the the license changes (is there an ecosystem that relies on it being open source, or is it a black box)?

* Who cares what the license is (e.g. BerkeleyDB was relicensed, which got old versions frozen in linux distributions, so no-one upgraded to newer versions, and replacements were written)?

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