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The race to replace Redis

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#371

Post by ufocia »

wmf wrote: post #75
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to have mixed feelings about this kind of thing. A (very) long time ago the Apache developers could have gone down this route. > You can only run Apache under very specific circumstances! Or memcached: > You are only allowed to run a memcached server if you're only caching your own website! We see how nonsensical this is

More like you can run Apache except in specific circumstances. People will put up with a lot if there's no alternative.

The alternative is to write it yourself or commission it, so let's be honest, it is about the cost. When you don't know what something is about, it's about money

Re: The race to replace Redis

#372

Post by aragilar »

klabb3 wrote: post #275
dragonwriter wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

In some cases I wouldn't be surprised, in others sure maybe the founders did believe in open source at some point (there are definitely individuals who claim to have never changed their opinion, but their writings would suggest otherwise), but either they've left (voluntarily or not) or simply they gave away control to others who are only in it to make money.

As always, Chesterton's fence applies: all of the 10 points of the OSD were widely debated at the time (as was its predecessor, the Debian Free Software Guidelines), so it's worth explaining why the issues raised then no longer apply.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#373

Post by ufocia »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #354
stephenr wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, I mean, they've already changed licensing for parts of the project twice in 6 years. I have zero faith that they won't pull a Vader and change the terms of the agreement again. > continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!) I'd guess that > 99% of any "improvements" Redis the company make, will affect As has been pointed out numerous times,…

>As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis (and HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the tech community in general: if an OSS project you rely on transfers control from it's founder(s) to a company, you probably need to consider continuing with a fork from the last open version, because apparently "(try to) monetise popular open source" is the newest way to win the douchebag villain awar…

Contributing to a foundation may be a trap too. If you assign your copyrights to a foundation, in many jurisdictions you no longer have control of the code you wrote. That means they could license the code in a way that you wouldn't do.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#374

Post by ufocia »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #332
brody_hamer wrote: post #48

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…

Yeah. As usual whenever something like this happens, there’s an endless supply of blatantly misleading FUD by open source license purists. Let’s not pretend that Redis has become unusable by….all but a few organisations selling hosted Redis solutions. The people who are “rushing” to replace Redis are probably doing so in a way that isn’t on their boss’s radar, and it’ll stay that way because their bosses would probab…

They're not purists. They are zealots.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#375

Post by struant »

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…

There is no requirement to make money to have a successful open source project.

That being said. Monetizing open source is fine so long as people are up front about from the beginning. People are upset because switching the license is effectively changing the rules in the middle of the game.

It is like going out to a restaurant and in the middle of your meal they change policy from having free refills to charging per cup. Either policy is fine, but changing policies is a scumbag move. A lot of people would have never sat down to eat there if the extra drinks weren't going to be free. Especially if free drinks was the sole reason a lot of them were going there.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#376

Post by stephenr »

pjmlp wrote: post #329
stephenr wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.

Nor with increasingly unnecessary and niche features aimed at "enterprise" customers, it seems.

One could probably even argue that buying the rights to the name of a popular permissively licensed project is a terrible way to pay said bills.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#378

Post by tayo42 »

jzb wrote: post #367
lukaszwojtow wrote: post #206

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.

Author of the article here. There may be some scenarios where there's a company just tossing code over the wall under a FOSS license and people complain when it stops. This scenario is not that. The company now known as Redis did not invent Redis, it started as a company trying to make money hosting other peoples' work. After it finally hired the creator of Redis, it specifically promised not to do what it has just d…

What did that guy and tencent contribute to so much of recently?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#380

Post by plufz »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #334
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 for…

Yep. Precisely. Licenses are working as expected. People that spin this as “stealing” are simply showing their own lack of understanding.

I think everybody here understand that you legally can fork bsd code under a new license. I think you and them differ in what you think is morally correct to do for an open source maintainer in the specific context of the redis project.

(I don’t know enough to be in either camp.)

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