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The race to replace Redis

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51–60 of 520 posts

Re: The race to replace Redis

#51

Somehow no one has mentioned KeyDB so: https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB [EDIT] whoops, didn't read the article, went immediately to comments for recommendations since that's what HN is good at IMO.

It's mentioned in the first paragraph of the article, and "KeyDB" is featured 14 more times throughout the rest of it.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#52

I’m usually pretty ambivalent when a company decides to move to a license like BUSL. Sure it’s not “free” - but practically it only affects the likes of AWS from freeloading while making extraordinary profits. Especially true when a given company started the project. I understand why some hold strong feelings on the principles of OSS. My perspective is we’ll have fewer nice things if we allow the likes of AWS to cann…

I agree with your points min general but want to share my experience and maybe some counterpoint.

Being a customer of the redis labs' hosted solution, we noticed several issues:

- RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's

- RLs solution is not even close to elasticache in its ability to scale

- when issues occur the organization internally moves incredibly slowly so simple issues can turn into prolonged outages

Moving to this licensing model will make it possible for them to better invest in these things. That said, given the quality of their offering and lack of investment in the actual redis platform, why would anyone continue to use redis after the license change? The cloud providers can fork off their own version and never look back!

I think they're shooting themselves in the foot here.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#53

Engineers have to eat too. Nothing wrong with charging for support. I love passion projects as much as anyone, but there is a reason they are hobbies, and people need to keep a day job. Eventually it does get tiring to do support for free. Edit: Ok. I was talking OSS generally. I guess Redis is being bad actor if they are taking OSS work and running away with it to get the money, and not compensating the contributors…

I'd love to be corrected here, but my understanding is that the enterprise support and pro features model can be a pretty good business.

Big deployments generally need really good support and help to overcome scaling challenges. Who better than the library maintainers to offer that, and your customers have deep pockets.

Then on top of that, you run a business which basically creates proprietary Pro and Enterprise versions of a product which has tooling to operate the project at scale or in high uptime environments.

Then you offer your own cloud versions of the product as well (which I think Redis has been doing).

But in none of these cases are you creating a disincentive for anybody to use/adopt your product. You're simply creating value around the pain points.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#54

It wasn’t clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, which will continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!) So we as developers don’t have to scramble to replace redis in our SAAS apps and web based software. This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the re…

Well, except for the fact that "redis" the organization didn't create redis and isn't even the main developer of redis. The origin of Redis the company is literally as a hosting provider for the open source redis that they didn't create.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#55

Isn't this the reason why AGPL has started to get more popular? Everyone has to play by the very strict rules except the copyright holder, who can do whatever they want, but the community still benefits from the core software being open source. The BSD license in particular seems like a particularly bad way to run a business.

Absolutely! And the haters of that license either do not understand it or have their user-hostile intentions.

Or plan to make money with other people's love and free-time.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#56

I’m usually pretty ambivalent when a company decides to move to a license like BUSL. Sure it’s not “free” - but practically it only affects the likes of AWS from freeloading while making extraordinary profits. Especially true when a given company started the project. I understand why some hold strong feelings on the principles of OSS. My perspective is we’ll have fewer nice things if we allow the likes of AWS to cann…

Seems similar to what Elastic did few years ago [1]. I kinda understand their motivation. It's not theirs originally, but they had antirez working on it for 5 years as their employee. They are making some contributions [2], I wish GH had a way to see such an insight by company affiliation. On the other hand, AWS and likes can easily fork pre-license-change version and spin it into its own product. However, I am fairly certain that AWS Elasticache is already such a thing – their own fork that diverged enough from the upstream and they are not eager to share.

So I view it as every major cloud provider with redis offering has its own fork. Except that Redis Labs also owns the original name. But it can go on as a stand alone project, like MariDB was spawn off after MySQL acquisition by Oracle.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657

[2] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors?from=2019...

Re: The race to replace Redis

#57
post #28
post #2

I'd be more interested in the race to build a business model that works with open source and venture funding, myself. A grand unified theory of software goods funding, if you will.

Maybe we instead need a model where FOSS is not about profits for anybody, and is just a passion of love, from a large community of amateurs doing it for the technology and fun. Projects could still be funded by community users, but "venture funding"? That's how projects turn to shit.

I agree, but what I think is curious about the whole situation is that you can also see it strictly as a market failure.

It's a very pure example where parties in competition each that have a use for some kind of software can shortsightedly develop their own versions of it in-house, but that duplicates a lot of effort. They'd be better off getting together with their competitors and collaborating on a shared version that suits their needs, avoiding duplicating effort and all benefiting from each others' contributions. They could do this by direct collaboration or by funding an independent organization that fulfills their needs.

Sure, this can go badly if there's a large difference in scale between the different parties and some can muscle others around. But it and similar models do work out at the scale of the Linux Foundation, Khronos, down to Mastodon, GitLab, Blender, Krita, Forgejo, even arguanly projects like Bitcoin Core.

There isn't the structures to facilitate this kind of regime shift. But there should be.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#58
post #2

I'd be more interested in the race to build a business model that works with open source and venture funding, myself. A grand unified theory of software goods funding, if you will.

I wonder if software really deserves its own economics. If you haven't read Hal Varian's Information Rules , I highly recommend it. Check the publication date, then read it anyway, then reflect on the publication date when you're done. I found it very worthwhile.

Yes, this is a great read. After that many years it still influences me. However it is not that kind of book you read before going to bed. It requires intense studies to take something out of it.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#59
post #54

It wasn’t clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, which will continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!) So we as developers don’t have to scramble to replace redis in our SAAS apps and web based software. This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the re…

Well, except for the fact that "redis" the organization didn't create redis and isn't even the main developer of redis. The origin of Redis the company is literally as a hosting provider for the open source redis that they didn't create.

This is what I am confused about so what right do they have to enforce AWS from selling Redis when they do not own it?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#60
post #26
post #2

I'd be more interested in the race to build a business model that works with open source and venture funding, myself. A grand unified theory of software goods funding, if you will.

You go homeless so Bezos can make his yacht a foot longer. I find it amazing how much money is being spent to ensure open source code doesn't end up in the hands of users and how many people are blaming the ones trying to increase user freedom.

Good to read that on HN. A fair share of HN Readers and supporters belong to that crowd ...
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