> The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers.
This is far from true in the case of Redis. Salvatore worked for VMware from 2010-2013 and Pivotal from 2013-2015. It was funded by these "large companies" that you speak of.
Redis was not funded by those companies. Salvatore was sponsored to work on his own project they had a business need for. All copyright and trademarks belonged and still belong to Salvatore, according to redis.io
To my understanding, this was a sponsorship, ie a support contract to debug and improve an open source product VMware and Pivotal (same people, different name) were using and depending upon for their products.
AWS, on the other hand... With Elasticsearch and Redis... ;-)
This is far from true in the case of Redis. Salvatore worked for VMware from 2010-2013 and Pivotal from 2013-2015. It was funded by these "large companies" that you speak of.