181–190 of 520 posts
Interesting that around 40% of the commits to Reddit is from Chinese companies (Tencent 24.8%, Alibaba 6.8, Huawei 5.2, Bytedance 2)
Why is that interesting?
To me Redis has always seemed like a Trojan Horse for developers. The first impression is its this simple key-value database, so easy to use. Oh wait... it's also a cache, nice! Let's cache all the things too! And look... all the cool kids are are using it too, so it must be cool, meanwhile the old Unix mantra of make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by…
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…
> re-selling your product” and not much more That's not what AWS is doing. AWS is selling management services. The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.
Well yeah technically the product is free but the value comes largely from unpaid labor. That needs to change if we want a healthy small business sector around larger open source products. It’s not based in opinion or ideological conviction on my end, but rather watching this frictionous and awkward transformation to BSL-style licenses happen over and over with small-mid-size companies who are building valuable products and want to be as open as possible while running a business.
> The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.
Indeed, and that’s a good thing, because it means a path to a sustainable business model is feasible! However, if you subsidize the product (make it free and open) in order to make it back in management fees, then you need legal rights to it. It could be “you have to use $PROJECTs own management product” but that’s quite narrow thinking. It’s a win-win for everyone else if mega-players like aws can provide their own management but they will have to rev-share with the project owner, on their terms. That’s a battle-tested model that works in all kinds of sectors, with much smaller actors.
There is an easy solution not just for this, but for other potential masses: Just go with MIT license and make money with support
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which is peanuts compared to the 350 million that the VCs invested. You're totally right, but I think the internal financial pressure is higher.
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.
GPL + CLA = bad. If you contribute to GPL Redis and transfer the copyright to your contributions to the Redis company, they can switch to whatever license they want.
SSPL + no CLA = interesting, I would love to see the Redis company open source their hosting stack because they are accepting external contributions.
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.
some kind of GPL + no CLA = good. If you contribute to GPL Redis, the Redis company cannot relicense your work, because they own it as much as you do. GPL + CLA = bad. If you contribute to GPL Redis and transfer the copyright to your contributions to the Redis company, they can switch to whatever license they want. SSPL + no CLA = interesting, I would love to see the Redis company open source their hosting stack beca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole move to new "open-core" licenses started with the most famous (infamous?) AGPL project - MongoDB. The AGPL is not what companies like this want (Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc). They don't want AWS's code: AWS is already providing that. They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.
> They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing. But the switch from AGPL to SSPL didn't do either of those things. AWS still built DocumentDB to compete with Mongodb, and didn't use any SSPL OR AGPL code in the implementation (at least according to their FAQ[1]). And AFAIK AWS isn't paying mongo any royalties. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/faqs/
Well, yeah, its mostly a bad plan, because while it can block competition with your code, it doesn’t block substitution with other code that provides the same function, and if you aren’t one of the big cloud providers, competing in the same function market with bundled services from the big cloud providers, whether or not it is the same underlying code, is the actual problem you face when your monetization is based around “sell a hosted service”.
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…
> without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers. AWS employee Madelyn Olson was a committer on Redis since 2019. Since 2020, she was on the core team of maintainers.
> If you're looking for a primer on what is going on with Redis and why its license change matters, this is the article to read. As someone close to the situation, this is the best summary I've seen.
There is an easy solution not just for this, but for other potential masses: Just go with MIT license and make money with support