Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The race to replace Redis

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 520 posts

Re: The race to replace Redis

#191

Post by jpc0 »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #127
ajmurmann wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Redis Labs employ paid contributors? Does Amazon donate their contributions back to the community?

According to the linked article, Amazon has contributed 5% of the contributions to Redis, while Redis, the company, has contributed 20%.

I'm not for or against in this case. I'm anti what Redis the company is doing but I don't give a crap otherwise.

Are we really counting contribution based on LoC? Haven't we over the decades decided that isn't valid? Guess every person that makes this claim should once again have their performance based on LoC...

Some simple examples, I'm not saying this is the case though. What if most of Amazon's contributions are high impact contributions where most of Redis orgs are simply maintenance or feature pushes. What if the same is true for a 1% contributor?

By your own statement doesn't Tencent then have a larger claim to redis that Amazon or Redis does?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#192

Post by orthoxerox »

crabmusket wrote: post #146
fractalb wrote: post #116

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.

Am I right in understanding that the relicensing was possible because of the CLA, not just because of the BSD license? Would a permissively licensed project that didn't use a CLA be vulnerable in the same way?

No, since you can include BSD-licensed code in non-free software with just an attribution. The only difference between relicensing Redis from BSD+CLA to SSPL and BSD to SSPL is that the former would've had a more detailed REDISCONTRIBUTIONS.txt.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#193

Post by orthoxerox »

meowface wrote: post #150
lolinder wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that you can slap on a project without a legal team The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams. If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT and be done with it. If you're participating in a large decentraliz…

People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me. You're right that it's probabl…

> Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation.

Redis Labs can start by compensating its external contributors (Tencent, Amazon, Alibaba among them) if they care about fairness this much.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#194

Post by exe34 »

vasco wrote: post #163
mirekrusin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own copyrights you’re not the leech.

If you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some point. Other than that unless you are one of the contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of leeching.

Is buying the same as leaching now? Words really do get diluted to the point of meaningless...

Re: The race to replace Redis

#196

Post by CyanLite2 »

Microsoft's Garnet has the best chance of replacing Redis, the OSS project and the hosting company.

Article doesn't mention it, but supposedly Microsoft uses novel algorithms and multi threading to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in throughput.

Now if they can commercialize it with Azure, it should be a credible alternative to Redis Enterprise hosting.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#197

Post by xenago »

BoorishBears wrote: post #73
gymbeaux wrote: post #67

AWS also forked ElasticSearch into their “OpenSearch” DBaaS. It caused some issues at my last job because OpenSearch limited us to a particular version of the NEST .NET library that was missing some newer functionality. Real bummer and feels like a step in the wrong direction given all we’ve accomplished in tech over the last 20 years.

OpenSearch infuriates me to no end. It lacks so many improvements and advancements since the ancient version it was forked at, but because AWS already has an org's payments details, teams often refuse to look at Elasticsearch. Even basic things like autocompleting queries have been WIP for half a decade now: https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/sample-code/... https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSear…

Opensearch has been great so far, no issues ever since deploying the very initial forked version. Neither of those links seem like dealbreakers, am I missing something? Is the idea that opensearch is not usable in production because of missing autocomplete?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#198

Post by cpach »

west0n wrote: post #24

Neal Gompa opened a discussion on the Fedora development list, noting the license change and the need to remove Redis from Fedora. Gompa also raised the issue on openSUSE's Factory discussion list. After Docker was phased out, various distributions have adopted the compatible Podman as a replacement for Docker. It seems that a similar story is unfolding with Redis.

NB: Docker Engine is open source. (Docker Desktop is not.)

Re: The race to replace Redis

#199

Post by happymellon »

mythz wrote: post #69
objektif wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The licensing change only applies to their future versions which they own all contributions of which AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.

> AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.

Doesn't AWS employ Madelyn Olson? I mean, AWS have paid for Redis development.

Not exactly a leech.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#200

Post by lmm »

crabmusket wrote: post #146
fractalb wrote: post #116

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.

Am I right in understanding that the relicensing was possible because of the CLA, not just because of the BSD license? Would a permissively licensed project that didn't use a CLA be vulnerable in the same way?

A permissively licensed project without a CLA would be similarly vulnerable, because the BSD license allows them to make releases that include your code under a stricter license. To prevent them relicensing you would need both a strong copyleft in the license and no CLA/copyright assignment (like e.g. Linux - which can't even move to GPLv3 even if they wanted to, because it would be simply impossible to get all contributors' permission).
Post reply on HN