Case studies
There are many case studies of organizations receiving legal penalties for running into issues because of license compliance. In this section, we’ll look at some examples of such case studies.
Case study 1 – the Redis licensing change
Redis decided to move from GNU’s Affero General Public License (AGPL) to a new license named “Commons Clause,” which entailed additional restrictions, primarily to counter cloud providers who were profiting from Redis without contributing back.
This licensing change sparked a debate within the community, with some members arguing that the new licensing terms were against the open source ethos. Furthermore, there were concerns about the potential introduction of security vulnerabilities, especially within third-party Redis modules due to the licensing shift, which could lead to lesser community engagement in vetting and improving the code.
