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The Redis thing underscores a key point: _open source is not enough_. We need _community built software_ -- free and open source licenses are just one aspect of that.
If a company requires you to assign copyright (or equivalent re-licensing rights) in an asymmetrical way, they will inevitably eventually decide to take that option once they want to cash in on the goodwill you've built for them (let alone the code).
Indeed, there are four levels of open:
- Open source - under an OSI license
- Open community - may accept contributions
- Open governance - adds contributors to become maintainers
- Open brand - trademark is owned by a nonprofit foundation
I'm not really fond of that list.
Particularly:
* I don't think these are "levels", but rather some (but not all) aspects of openness.
* I don't see how "may accept contributions" relates to "open community" — I mean, they seem unrelated, not just a framing I would put differently
Also: "adds contributors to become maintainers" doesn't make sense to me. Can you explain what that means and how it relates to governance?
And: a nonprofit foundation could own a brand and use and license it in a non-open way (and indeed, this is common — see Mozilla and LibreOffice). Conversely, a for-profit corporation or government entity could own a brand but have some form of open licensing or governance.
ASF Model: contributors become committers. Committers can get elected to PMC, which then gives them a vote in governance over releases and future committers on that project. I.e. a project that includes new contributors in actual governance. "Maintainers" is an overloaded word, for sure.
And yes: nonprofits can be evil just like for-profits; however it tends in some ways to be harder, since they're not exposed to as many "chase the money" ideas as for-profit usually is.