Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, but they are a dead end
I agree with the overall reasoning of Paul, and we are having the same conversations inside Redis Labs. For instance the reason why Redis remained BSD licensed is that, while it&#x27;s odd that cloud providers are exploiting open source system software in this way, yet to look just at that does not capture the whole story. Open source software changed <i>our world</i> completely, so the real balance must factor in also what happened to IT because open source exists. Even what now is a problem for OSS producers, the cloud providers, is 
in some way a product of the fact that software was democratised in this way by the OSS movement (and note that without the cloud to productize OSS is harder). Personally even the fact I write software is because I installed Linux 23 years ago or alike. So the point is to also have something that is interesting enough and that can be released in a commercial license and is complementary to the original project. Because the part that needs to be commercial, must go totally commercial (it&#x27;s a long story but AGPL for sure, and probably also other attempts including SSPL and Common Clause are not just confusing, they may not be enough). However what this requires is a very good balance between what&#x27;s open and what not. In the case of Redis this is a bit a natural process because I&#x27;m very unwelcoming to a lot of things that users want because I feel they are not a fit. Proof is that for instance, two of my popular open source projects, that are linenoise and dump1090, are currently both mostly distributed via forks made by other people. So Redis Labs can just jump in and do a number of very useful things like graph database, CRDTs, on-disk support and so forth without any conflict of interests. Let&#x27;s see what happens. Right now the trend is to distribute the non-open parts with source code available and with very few limitations for end users: if this works is great, and it looks like is the only way because it is very unlikely that users will have the need of something as a service if they do not use it already in some form.<p>DISCLAIMER: This comment was written incrementally and modified several times adding things that came to mind while writing.<p>About BSD,MIT,... vs CopyLeft. We can say what we want, but if we just stick to facts, MIT-alike licenses provide more freedom for the final user. If one would like to dig more I think that the canonical example would be the Linux kernel and asking questions about, what if it would be BSD licensed.