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The race to replace Redis

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#131
post #70

Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes…

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#132

Do we need to "FIX" opensource? I am being serious here. It seems like people aren't getting it. Open Source is about openess and the ability to modify. Yes, people can lose money to cloud provider hosting but why does an Open Source project need to make a lot of money? I say alot because its not like they can't still make money. They can still consult, they can still offer support or hosting but because theyre not m…

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#133

I feel copyleft licenses look more favourable at this point of time. What’s the value of more free/business friendly licenses if you can’t guarantee that the same license will apply for all the future releases? Looks more like a bait and switch policy.

The future is never guaranteed. Much less if you have no paid contract with the people building and maintaining the floor underneath your feet.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#134

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…

Wasn't AWS a major contributor to Redis? How are they "freeloading"?

I'm pretty sure ElastiCache has been around longer than Redis Labs too, so it's not like AWS undercut them, plus RL got a ton of free market research from it

Re: The race to replace Redis

#135
post #27

From HN a few days ago: https://github.com/microsoft/Garnet A Microsoft Research, open source, performant, almost RESP compatible alternative (according to them)

There is also Valkey, a fork from just before the change backed by AWS, Google, Oracle who are paying a few former core devs https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey And not to forget Redict, also a fork, that is maintained by drew devault https://codeberg.org/redict/redict

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#136
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open core only became a word people said 10 years ago, it's on the rise as a business model from what I can tell. Do you have suggestions for alternative funding/support models? What is open core being replaced by from your perspective?

Open core is being replaced by "selling exceptions" to AGPL/SSPL/BUSL/FSL. See MongoDB, Elastic, Hashicorp, Redis, etc. Personally I prefer the Adam Jacob trademark business model but it's not that proven and it can't be retrofitted.

OP, OpenSearch, OpenTofu all seem to indicate the jury is still out on this one. I still see many smaller projects using open core. Three I started using recently ( llama-index, langfuse, qdrant ) are in this category.

There is certainly a difference between AGPL and BUSL style licenses. One of the new projects I'm using as some of their code with a BUSL style, but still open core primarily

Re: The race to replace Redis

#137
post #70

Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes…

I'm much more sympathetic to a company that starts out with this kind of license than one who changes the license after accepting contributions under a more permissive license, which is basically a bait and switch on those developers. It's even worse when the company previously promised not to do such a thing, as is the case with redis. And this is especially bad because the company that is now called Redis didn't even create the database, they took over an existing project.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#138

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…

> This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.

But the developers licensed the software at no charge. What kind of compensation are they entitled to then?

Sounds like a case of sellers remorse/take-backsies one of the problems that open source was aiming to solve.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#139

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…

AWS was directly funding Redis development, from the article, they are one of the top contributors, they even employed one of the core redis maintainers full time to work on Redis.
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