AWS not playing fair with open source projects, claims Redis Labs

AWS is all take and no give, says database firm

Open source is the standard way of creating software today, but the rise of cloud has led to a "landgrab" by some of the mega-providers. So says Manish Gupta, chief marketing officer of Redis Labs, the company behind the open source Redis database.

"Open source has become foundational to the technology environment, there's no question about that. What was not anticipated was cloud vendors behaving in an inappropriate manner for the ecosystem," Gupta said.

"What the cloud vendors, particularly AWS, have done is take open source projects and contribute almost nothing, but they have monetised the projects to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Redis alone has given them $100m or $200m of revenue but their contribution back to our technology has been insignificant."

Gupta accused Amazon of another unfair practice too: promoting its own services over those of other vendors hosted on its platform. This has echos of the 'browser wars', in which Microsoft faced multiple fines for bundling Internet Explorer, and the 'search wars' where Google was taken to court by the EU for manipulating search results to favour its own products.

"Google has learned its lessons and Microsoft too. Microsoft is now open source-centric, contributing back, but AWS continues to take a one-sided approach, and they haven't opened up their portfolio or made contributions back," Gupta said, accusing AWS of "denigrating the presence of third parties to make them hard to find".

A few months ago the company created a new license to cover modules created by Redis Labs called Commons Clause. This is a non-open source licence that restricts the monetisation of these modules by other players. Gupta described this as an option of last resort.

"We have looked at every single open source license because the last thing we want to do is proliferate licenses and add another scheme, which is why we added a second layer on top of Apache 2 and created a brand new license," he said. "The only thing Common Clause did was say 'if you want to monetise it then you must get a separate licence'. if you don't intend to monetise it, then you are free to use the open-source licence as is."

In October, a few months after the release of Commons Clause, MongoDB released a similar license called Server Side Public License (SSPL) which requires third parties to contribute changes if they are to resell the database. The main differnce being that MongoDB is working towards having it approved by the open source institute (OSI).

Gupta said that other open source firms including Neo4j and DGraph have also voiced concerns about cloud vendors' behaviour, but have not yet put their words into action. He expressed the hope that the open source industry will drive change without requiring legislators to become involved, and claimed Redis Labs is open to other approaches.

"We're open to harmonising and unifying and taking an approach that would be easier for the ecosystem. We're not married to the Commons Clause approach, that was simply a bet we made, but some actions will have to be taken by the broader ecosystem. And if there is a unification of approaches that lead to the same goal we're open to that."

The end goal is to persuade the cloud platforms to play fair, he said.

"If you are going to monetise an open source project you should behave like a good citizen and contribute back to the community. Second, If you truly want to monetise it then you need to recognise the community or leading contributor or company behind it, as opposed to very clearly violating the licensing or trademark rules. And third, make the marketplace more neutral. Make competing services more available and let the best product or technology win."

Computing emailed AWS for a response to Gupta's allegations but has so far received no reply.