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The race to replace Redis

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#411

Post by sakjur »

verdverm wrote: post #243
sakjur wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re happy with paying a few maintainers, a support staff, and some salespeople the cash flow necessary for being a successful endeavor is a whole lot different than if you’ve raised $350 million. Maybe the problem lies more with overreaching and trying to cash out?

For sure, there is a problem in startup culture that looks down upon lifestyle companies. Devtools and developer focused products often get caught up in this. At the same time, founders take money to build their idea into something more than they could do with a small team. An big companies are risk averse, having a small staff or being susceptible to "hit by a bus" failure is often a deal breaker

That’s very true. Business is very much a balancing act in that sense. Sometimes raising money is the reason you succeed, but it can equally well be why you fail (especially if you’d be happy running a smaller company but take on investors that want you to be hungrier).

Re: The race to replace Redis

#412

Post by Timber-6539 »

noirscape wrote: post #236
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not in Debian and their wiki straight up directs you to podman with a nice big scary warning about dockers root issue. https://wiki.debian.org/Docker Docker is dyeing on linux podman will be the only one that remains.

No? Sorry if that's a bit cynical, but Docker is only dying in the opinion of distro maintainers. By this metric, it's been dying for the past 8 years, but everyone is still talking about Docker, not podman. A related problem I've seen from other complaints made elsewhere is that podman does things just slightly different enough than Docker that it's not a true drop-in replacement. We've seen that before; where distr…

Sometimes I get the feeling all the folks touting podman as a drop-in replacement for docker are doing it in bad faith.

Every few years I try to replace my containers managed through docker-compose and it's always a sure miss. Before podman gained official support for the docker-compose spec, there was an unofficial podman-compose project that sort of worked save for a few podman incompatibility bugs here and there.

So I was delighted to try out the "official" docker-compose for podman. Quickly learned that there's no such package, the official podman-compose is just the same docker compose package, you just use it with podman the same way you would with docker. Despite this glaring inconsistency I decided to give podman a try (if you are going to install docker compose on your system might as well just use docker). Noped out when I tried to create a VPN with a podman container and it was failing requiring me to enable a kernel module (TAP or TUN can't remember exact error) to create a vpn.

Anyone who says podman is a drop-in replacement for docker never used docker much for anything more than running hello-world. I would only recommend podman over docker for someone who's new to containers and has never heard of docker before.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#413

Post by chipdart »

radicalbyte wrote: post #254
mariusor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone asked Filippo if he still wants to work on Redis "for them" though? The fact that he stepped down suggests he doesn't.

He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation. Again, it's chump change, these companies drop that kinda money all the time in aquihires..

> He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.

It sounds like a very bad deal for the likes of Amazon et al. The likes of Amazon offer Redis alongside memcache just because cloud adopters might want to use a memory cache service,but there is no value in buying trademarks for it.

I mean, just take a quick look how Amazon offers managed RDBMS, and how the specific DB is just an afterthought behind a compatible interface.

People seem to think that just because some company has cash that they should mindlessly spend it on things that add absolutely no value.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#414

Post by packetlost »

bogwog wrote: post #404
noirscape wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Sorry if that's a bit cynical, but Docker is only dying in the opinion of distro maintainers. By this metric, it's been dying for the past 8 years, but everyone is still talking about Docker, not podman. A related problem I've seen from other complaints made elsewhere is that podman does things just slightly different enough than Docker that it's not a true drop-in replacement. We've seen that before; where distr…

Yeah I don't think Docker is the type of tool the typical engineer cares enough about to go out of their way to learn something new, no matter how much better or simpler it may be. I guess it's like git; even though most devs only have a surface level knowledge, dethroning it would require convincing people to learn a new system, and that's not gonna happen no matter how good it is. Red Hat at least had the muscle to…

idk, I actively dropped docker as soon as I reasonably could. podman is an objectively better tool by nearly every metric and it has an almost exact 1:1 CLI tool, so there's not really a learning curve besides a few configuration differences

Re: The race to replace Redis

#415

Post by chipdart »

radicalbyte wrote: post #341
alex_duf wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I love redis, but Amazon Google and Microsoft all probably have readily available in memory key/value stores at hand. Throw a little money and they can make it redis compatible, so we wouldn't have to re-write any code. Redis is great as an off-the shelf component, but it's not exactly rocket science to re-implement for a big corporation. So redis doesn't really have any leverage in my opinion.

It's all about branding and name recognition: they all profit from Redis via their cloud offerings. They have a strong incentive to support it and to have it as a viable open source project. Similar to other key opensource infrastructure. Then their cloud-specific solutions are the up-sell (and lock-in).

> It's all about branding and name recognition

I don't think so. The only thing they need to let their customers know is that they offer a memory cache service that is compatible with this or that interface. Whether it's Redis, memcache, Garnet, or whatever it might be, it matters nothing at all. All they need to do is ensure clients can consume their service, and that is it.

This whole thing sounds like a desperate cash grab that fails to argue any point on why it's in anyone's best interests to spend small fortunes on nothing at all.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#416

Post by koromak »

I'm actually sympathetic to the cloud provider angle. As of right now, that is the natural trajectory. The majority of high-value customers are going to go through a cloud provider.

Maybe some kind of new license is in order. Open source, but preventing cloud redistribution. I don't know, I can imagine the issues with that as well. You want AWS out, but you probably still want the small up-and-coming CI/CD tool in.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#417

Post by packetlost »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #412
noirscape wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Sorry if that's a bit cynical, but Docker is only dying in the opinion of distro maintainers. By this metric, it's been dying for the past 8 years, but everyone is still talking about Docker, not podman. A related problem I've seen from other complaints made elsewhere is that podman does things just slightly different enough than Docker that it's not a true drop-in replacement. We've seen that before; where distr…

Sometimes I get the feeling all the folks touting podman as a drop-in replacement for docker are doing it in bad faith. Every few years I try to replace my containers managed through docker-compose and it's always a sure miss. Before podman gained official support for the docker-compose spec, there was an unofficial podman-compose project that sort of worked save for a few podman incompatibility bugs here and there.…

> Noped out when I tried to create a VPN with a podman container and it was failing requiring me to enable a kernel module (TAP or TUN can't remember exact error) to create a vpn.

Those are pretty standard kernel modules for enabling userspace networking, which if you were using podman in rootless mode you need (along with another userspace networking package, slirp4netns). "Drop in replacement" does not mean there's not configuration to get it set up, it means it has the same APIs as another system.

I've been using containers for almost 10 years and with almost no fanfare switched to podman 100% like a year ago. Just because you expected to have to do nothing at all doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#418

Post by paulryanrogers »

mort96 wrote: post #393
dindresto wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that true? If I contribute to a MIT-licensed project without a CLA, my contributions can't just be re-licensed to some proprietary license, can it? Wouldn't my contributions remain MIT, even if they re-license all other parts of the project to some proprietary license? Isn't the point of CLAs that you can re-license contributors' contributions?

MIT and BSD are so liberal that anyone can commercialize the work. All they have to do is attribute your parts to you, and not demand a warranty of you.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#420

Post by tracker1 »

objektif wrote: post #395
mythz wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redis Labs was a long time sponsor for the full-time development of Redis then later compensated the creator of Redis for their rights to Redis Technology and branding who was ended up retiring from technology to write Sci-Fi books. By contrast AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back, making them the biggest leacher and the primary motivation for the relicensing to prevent mega corps…

How does one buy rights to an open source technology?

You buy the trademark/name from the original author. I'm the case of GPL or other assigned work licenses, you sell the baseline copyright and they can change it.
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