Live data from Hacker News

The race to replace Redis

lwn.net

301–310 of 520 posts

Re: The race to replace Redis

#301
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. So now Redis Inc is in trouble because they have to replace community work with their own. If community does most of the work, then what's the problem?

The problem is too many people are announcing OSS forks so it’s hard to align development efforts and users are confused. No one’s begging Redis Labs (which didn’t create Redis in the first place and only took over the brand with VC money when it was already popular) or whatever they’re called now to keep the bug fixes rolling. They only account for 20-50% of recent development anyway (50% if you attribute all “unkno…

What you’re describing isn’t a problem. Why does it matter if there are too many forks? Development also doesn’t need to be aligned to begin with.

It’s like complaining that there are too many implementations on GitHub of the same thing.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They dont't want AWS royalties. They wanna be able to command higher margins. Since AWS has lower costs and prices, Redis can't compete with good margins. The royalties are just a way to increase AWS costs, so that they raise their prices and give Redis the ability to keep high prices and margins, while still remaining attractive to customers (which don't have a cheaper choice anymore).

They want to make money with the software they built.

No,they want to make money with software they did not build. The Redis company did not build Redis nor are they the biggest contributor.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#303
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maintenan…

> It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time). I've called AWS's hiring of a single developer a token hire that they then go on to write flowery PR posts about to camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS vendors. For concrete numbers they contributed 165/12111 commits for a total of a 1.36% of the commits. Whilst that qualifies as a valuable c…

> dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs

It’s funny that you would use commits to quantify investment from AWS, but you’d use $ to buy shares in future profits to quantify investment from redis labs. Why not use the same yardstick for both?

Either way, it doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Everyone who put in effort into redis did it knowing the license. There’s nothing wrong in relicensing future commits. There’s nothing wrong with forking. There’s nothing wrong in using whichever fork works better for you.

You’re insisting up and down that AWS and others were leeching because they didn’t own the copyright to redis. I’ve never heard this interpretation of OSS before, but sure maybe you’re right. But we’ll see which fork comes out on top a year from now.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#304

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…

Whether it's gratis or not isn't the issue. Some people used Redis not only because it's free of cost, but also because it's open source. It's not anymore.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#305
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And requires a CLA, see the same link

I think the point BartjeD wants to make is that due to the nature of MIT licensing, they could run away with your contributions anyway, even without a CLA. Furthermore, Redis didn't have a CLA if I remember correctly and the relicensing is solely based on the what the previously used BSD license allows.

Interesting, I thought the point of not wanting CLAs was not giving them the ability to relicense your code under a more restrictive license (i.e. SSPL), not to keep them from running away with it.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#306
It reminds me of the berkely db situation, where they(sleepycat software at the time, but now I think it is owned by oracle) changed the license to try and sell it, and everyone just kept using the last bsd licensed version.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#307

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…

Isn't this the same with Elastic? Or that was a different situation?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#308
post #260

Redis, Redis, again more about Redis .... From you people who know a lot about Redis, help me out here: For my Web site code (for my startup), I needed a key-value store. Soooo, it looks like I could use Redis for that. But instead, wrote a little code using two instances of a Microsoft .NET collection class . Simple code. Plenty fast. Welcome programming exercise using .NET classes. Cheap -- no ongoing charges and n…

Actually you want a ConcurrentDictionary, but that still wouldn’t provide you with a cluster across instances. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/collection...

Nice! Thanks! Looks like a nice .NET class!

It's thread safe so that if my startup is more successful than I'm assuming then I'll be free to do less on how to exploit parallelism from several servers. As it is, the code I wrote serialized access to the key-value store I wrote. Sooo, that could be a performance bottleneck.

I should review network address translation (NAT) and affinity of one user to some one server, instance of Microsoft's IIS (Internet information server), thread of execution, etc.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#309
post #304

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…

Whether it's gratis or not isn't the issue. Some people used Redis not only because it's free of cost, but also because it's open source. It's not anymore.

[deleted]

Re: The race to replace Redis

#310

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"?

In this case that’s true and why I said I don’t think it applies here. Typically it does though.

Open source services are in a weird spot. They spend tonnes of money developing it and big providers are able to cannibalise as soon as something becomes popular at very little cost to themselves.

I think we do need something between fully free and fully closed where cloud providers pay some kind of licensing. It’s a problem worth solving.

Post reply on HN