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The race to replace Redis

lwn.net

271–280 of 520 posts

Re: The race to replace Redis

#271

All this outcry about license switch coming from "community" feels funny. After all, if there is the "community" then they can take the last open-source version and keep developing it themselves, right? But most "communities" are about "take, take, take", not "work, work, work". They often upset only because someone declared they aren't going to work for free any more.

That doesn't seem like a very reasonable takeaway from an article which describes almost too many people announcing that they will take the last open-source version and keep developing it themselves for everyone else to use.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that Redis has an agreement of sorts with Salvatore Sanfilippo / Antirez, the creator of Redis.

Amazon / Google / Microsoft made a massive mistake by not hiring Antirez, it's chump change for them to throw him $1-2M a year at him so he can work on Redis for them full time.

This makes me think - is it actually bad for Amazon/Google/Microsoft, that they now have to pay a licensing fee to Redis?

I feel like there’s an argument that these kind of licensing terms are almost beneficial to ‘big cloud’ because the cost/effort of all of these arrangements might dissuade smaller companies from trying to compete in the hosting and managed-services business.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#273
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep still the biggest leachers. Token hires and flowery PR campaigns doesn't entitle them to most of the profits of other vendors products or absolve them of their predatory behavior. But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.

AWS, along with Google and others have created a fork already. It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time). Denigrating their work for no reason other than to “win” an internet argument.

We’ll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also never created redis). Both contributed to its maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We’ll see which fork wins out.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#274
post #220

All this outcry about license switch coming from "community" feels funny. After all, if there is the "community" then they can take the last open-source version and keep developing it themselves, right? But most "communities" are about "take, take, take", not "work, work, work". They often upset only because someone declared they aren't going to work for free any more.

Yeah, it is incredible how the whole free software movement turned into a bunch of entitled folks that want to be paid for their work, while refusing to put down any penny for the folks that make their tooling possible in first place. At the same time big corps use it as carte blanche to basically pirate software in a legal way, while following the letter of the licence. Going back to the open core/demo versions (aka…

> Going back to the open core/demo versions

aka, just sell software, rather than make it open source.

What is being balked at is the idea that you can use open-source as a foot-in-the-door marketing and growth hack, which you then reap after some level of popularity/network effect is reached. Some call it bait and switch.

Blaming big corps for "leeching" is just self-serving. They are doing exactly what the license allows them to do - a license for which was chosen at the start to allow for it! If you expected to be paid to make this software, don't opensource it.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#275
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Define "fix". It’s early. Everyone is confused. If I could define it, I would have provided a defintion. At this stage, it’s about acquiring requirements and looking at prior art. And being humble about the solution space. No? If you don’t think there’s any problem today, then argue that point. > By definition you cannot have an open source licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht". By definition by what…

> It’s early. Everyone is confused. No, it is not, it is decades in, in a well-understood area. Some VC-backed firms (and the VC’s backing them, who see this as critical beyond the immediate firms) want to trade on the idea and popularity of open source without its substance because open source as has has been known for decades is not a viable foundation for the kind of business model that they would like, but has at…

Dislike of VCs as much as the next guy, but is this a representative picture? Many companies I’ve seen have been genuinely interesting, like SurrealDB, CockroachDB and Hashicorp. Are you saying it’s all a long bait and switch game?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#276
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that big OSS database projects have teams of paid developers working on them and they want to make their money back. You can do this by offering paid support or a hosted offering. Having someone like Amazon take your product and build their own hosted version really cuts into that revenue. Now, Redis was AFAIK pretty much just written by antirez and maybe it could have stayed that way, but even excepti…

The best open source software is developed by unpaid people. Even the ones with companies around them, the best work is done in the first phase when everyone is still unpaid. The "cuts into their revenues" part usually mostly affects their ability to keep developing the non open source parts anyway, their SaaS dashboard, their billing, etc. Take redis, you could never change it again and it's fine. There's no need to…

Until the discovery of a log4j-equivalent, then suddenly it's not fine.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#277
post #180

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…

I think it's rather features were added to Redis out of the experience and craft, not just to "lure future users into a pit", I doubt antirez would have that in mind.

But I think you described right the social behaviors of certain/common types of users.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they paid. And they can use the code they paid for. But it doesn't give them right to leech of any future code written by someone else IN THE FUTURE.

And considering Redis Inc hasn't contributed the majority of the code, they won't be able to leech off other people's code because why on earth would anyone contribute to this trainwreck! It's lose/lose!

Not for redis the company if they follow mongodb’s trajectory

Re: The race to replace Redis

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that Redis has an agreement of sorts with Salvatore Sanfilippo / Antirez, the creator of Redis.

Amazon / Google / Microsoft made a massive mistake by not hiring Antirez, it's chump change for them to throw him $1-2M a year at him so he can work on Redis for them full time.

Microsoft has its own redis alternative: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

Re: The race to replace Redis

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not entitled to compensation over their previous work, but you/me/AWS are also not entitled to their _future_ work.

But when you see that currently Redis is mainly developed by Chinese companies or AWS all of this is rather ironic.

5% of contributions is not “mainly” from AWS
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