After doing some quick reading on the SSPL, I actually don't hate it though. It seems to be completely open for those who use it themselves, but prevents the cloud providers from capitalizing on hosting your software as a product. Not truly open, but I think this is probably an okay middle ground if you want open source software from a business that's developing and selling products around that software.
This turns out to not be that difficult. Postgres can be a great KVS.
OpenRedis anyone?
But what's the point?
It's not open source, so why bother?
Whether you agree with BSD or GPL, OpenSource means you aren't locked to a vendor. The SSPL means that essentially for Redis, you are
Note: I'm joking, there was also Chromium BSU.
And that's only open source and freely redistributable games - on the commercial side there was also iD, Loki Games, LGP as well as a couple of indies even before Steam for Linux.
My understanding is that you can relicense code for which you own the copywright, but if you have any other contributors, those contributions are still under GPL. So, you'd have to either get their permission to relicense or revert all their changes and subsequent derivatives.
2. Some projects have a CLA, so all contributions have the relevant rights transferred before the patches are accepted.
3. Some projects are “open source, not open contribution”, though this wasn't common until recently, effectively making them match point 1.
4. Some relicensing is done without consideration for other contributors, in the hope that no one with skin in the game will notice (or take action if they do), so it won't bite.
5. Sometimes getting the relevant permission after-the-fact, if a CLA was not in place, isn't difficult.
You hit the bull eye.
These all projects as I could see, have relatively low number of important contributors and narrow circuit, and they are mostly relatively young projects, without large number of inherited old code, so when need to throw out some code, they just need to make internal deal and rewrite all "external" code.
Once, they have all code owned by limited group, could make deal within this group, to re-license whole project with other license.
And yes, you are right, this is near impossible for big projects, because need too much resources to rewrite "external" code.
And in many cases, for big business this mean, for them is easier to just make their own new project from scratch, than to use GPL-licensed code.
I used to host such scripts on my 233mhz pentium 2 that my parents allowed me to have in my bedroom.
Exploit ridden PHPNuke anyone?
Edit: for example, Google: “don’t be evil” lasted as long as Google was run by people who cared about the technology more than profits. It used to be a search engine run by such types. Now it’s an ad engine and competition-extinguisher run by completely different types of people.
In the cloud provider scenario it's clearly the right license, so that it remains opensource
The GPL was meant to be viral, and require contributions if you change it. GPL@ didnt understand that would be a thing.
GPL3 also had the Affero, to deal with parasite companies, like what you seem to represent. If you want to use and follow the license? Cool. Elsewise GTFO.
