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The race to replace Redis

lwn.net

321–330 of 520 posts

Re: The race to replace Redis

#321
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's we though? The former Garantia data did, but redis users didn't. (And also I'd argue most of redis' value to users was already in place before the VC backed company got involved)

You’re right of course. From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects, if you’re using these things at scale it’s much more economical to buy some servers and hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis. But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.

Yes, it is ludicrous. My company uses hosted databases and "droplets" from DigitalOcean. Their pricing is absolutely absurd. I always wondered how they stay in business, but now I know.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#322

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.

It's not "the community". It's "well funded startups".

People who use open source are very entitled. They'd be very angry also if the license was changed to GPL or AGPL.

I doubt most of this people have meaningful contributions to FOSS.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#323
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the whole free software movement Eh no. What an overly broad generalization to read. Whether it is enough to make a living is another question, but that does not mean one must paint all of the communities the same color.

The fact that after 20 years this has become almost a daily discussion theme speaks for itself.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#324
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…

Nothing wrong with Memcached but at high loads weird issues will crop up with it too and if you don't have an understanding of how slabs work in Memcached (I doubt your average dev does) you are going to have a hard time reasoning with it as well. Eventually someone will say "why didn't you just use redis for caching?".

Re: The race to replace Redis

#326
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

*one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn’t mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis. It’s a community effort and this is just as rude to the community that built it as they are claiming SaaS vendors are being to them by not “giving back”. This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing free software is about as logically sound as expecting compensation from someone when you give t…

> This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing free software is about as logically sound as expecting compensation from someone when you give them a gift.

Ironically this happened because the community was using the BSD license instead of the GPL, when the former allows someone to fork the code under a different license.

If the big cloud providers wanted to stick it to them, they would create their own fork of the code under the GPL and make substantial contributions to it so that one becomes the main one.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#327
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…

You keep making comments about this, as if Redis was build from scratch by the company that is now making it closed source.

They bought an open source project, and now that the original founder has stepped away they're trying to squeeze it for all they can.

The "big corps" that you claim are using it to "pirate software in a legal way" (a) have been contributing to the formerly open source redis project, and (b) are now specifically forking it to keep maintaining it as open source.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they don't have to pay. they offer a Redis-compatible service. whatever it is, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares. (sure, in practice they just forked it. but it was not AGPL-like when the fork happened, so ... c'est la vie)

Re: The race to replace Redis

#329
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You keep making comments about this, as if Redis was build from scratch by the company that is now making it closed source. They bought an open source project, and now that the original founder has stepped away they're trying to squeeze it for all they can. The "big corps" that you claim are using it to "pirate software in a legal way" (a) have been contributing to the formerly open source redis project, and (b) are…

Doesn't matter, they are the rigthfull owners of Redis and the author has freely given ownership to them, and has been paid for.

Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#330
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…

None of what you say is happenening in this case. Unless by "entitled folks" you mean Redis Inc.

The community has been doing the heavy lifting over the years and Redis Inc has been trying to reap the benefits off of that by providing the software as a service. Which the community was fine with. Turns out other companies with deeper pockets for infrastructure can do the same. Now Redis Inc is trying to save their broken by design business model by changing the license. This casts a whole lot of doubt on the future utility and licensing of the Redis project. And this is what the community balks at.

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