Is Being VC Backed Startup Really Compatible with Open Source Business Models?

Too Long; Didn't Read

After closing their <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/redis-labs-raises-a-60m-series-e-round/" target="_blank">latest funding round</a>, <a href="https://redislabs.com/" target="_blank">Redis Labs</a> (circa $146 millions raised to date) announced new licence changes (again) to their Redis Modules. Before that we had high profile startups <a href="https://www.confluent.io/" target="_blank">Confluent</a> (behind Apache Kafka with circa $205m raised to date) and <a href="https://www.mongodb.com/" target="_blank">MongoDB Inc </a>(now a public company) change their licences. These licence changes are according to their executives necessary to protect against what they perceive as unfair practices from big cloud vendors (<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/" target="_blank">Amazon Web Services</a> often cited as biggest culprit) — who do not make significant contributions (or none at all!) to open source projects and yet fork projects to create competing hosted services. The following are some of the quotes from Redis Labs and Confluent executives that echo the sentiment of unfairness towards the big cloud vendors.