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The race to replace Redis

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#421

Post by mooreds »

crabmusket wrote: post #178
mooreds wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thesis is that when you don't have the pressure of VC funding (gotta hit the revenue numbers you promise to investors sooner or later), alignment between the business and the OSS community isn't as tough to find.

I'd agree with that. Your message sounded to me like you thought VC funding was desirable for software projects. I wonder why we can't just fund software like a regular business- why look for venture returns?

That works great! I think the best money to get to run a business comes from customers. Bootstrapping is great.

However, just like fewer homes would be owned if you didn't have mortgages, less software companies would exist without VC. It's basically a subsidy from the rich, endowments and pensions, to the rest of us (consumers because we get stuff for free, developers because it increases the demand and thus salaries for us).

I think VC is a net benefit to the world in terms of software delivered and companies built. I think OSS is a net benefit to the world because of the explosion of possible ideas and the leverage it lets developers have as they build on it.

I would love to see these two huge innovations in building software work together well. Haven't seen it yet, hence my original comment.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#422

Post by lolinder »

photonthug wrote: post #152
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…

> The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams So you want to advocate that every future database / infrastructure company needs to burn part of their runway to hire lawyers to do the repetitive work of making sure they can both try to be open and try to continue to exist? Plus we, the users, get to try to decode reams of legalese instead of using a conv…

Please read to the end:

> Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time.

The business model these companies chose was fundamentally broken. It's only fundamentally broken for a specific class of backend tooling.

I believe that future database/infrastructure projects should continue to use the FOSS licenses we all know and love and find a sustainability model that works without compromising the freedoms that make free software free. Postgres, Linux, SQLite, the BSDs, and many other projects in similar spaces have led the way.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#423

Post by ensignavenger »

chii wrote: post #347
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects it is more expensive to buy managed, but you offload work. I would imagine toy projects are more cash constrained, and makes more sense to rent cheap servers and roll your own. On the other hand, larger scale projects would rather pay to offload the work of managing and scaling redis.

In my experience using redis, one of its better attributes is how easy it is to manage and scale. I've never scaled it to say, Facebook levels, but at that scale, I'm not sure managed services make much sense either.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#424

Post by [deleted] »

evanharwin wrote: post #272
radicalbyte wrote: post #233

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.

[deleted]

Re: The race to replace Redis

#425

Post by emmp »

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 worked there for 5 years. It probably didn't feel "random" for him.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#426

Post by ensignavenger »

ufocia wrote: post #361
Macha wrote: 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)

All the Redis users have is a license to use and an expectation. An expectation is a belief that Santa will bring presents, that's all. Where the value is or was is pure sophistry. You don't have a crystal ball, just like everyone else. All this discussion is envious bellyaching from those that are probably leeches themselves. They just want the free gravy train running for themselves.

And the license allows them to fork it. Which is what they are doing. Open Source working exactly as it should. I just want to be sure the facts are understood. Amazon has many faults and there are plenty of reasons to dislike and not use them. But leeching off of Redis Labs is not one of them.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#427

Post by nijave »

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…

Also containerd and cri-o fit in here somewhere, too.

I could be convinced Docker-on-headless-servers has been dying a while but the desktop variants are alive and well

Re: The race to replace Redis

#428

Post by lolinder »

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…

> 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.

Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller managed hosting providers and consultancies.

That is a sustainable funding model for an open source database project. What isn't sustainable is building a business around the idea that only your company will ever profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are shared with the whole community.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#429

Post by rakoo »

rmbyrro wrote: post #232
c0l0 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not AGPL, but L GPL-3.0-only. Neither of these licenses is "hostile". And ftr, in my eyes, a project being created/initiated by ddevault is an asset, certainly not a liability.

You are correct. The issue is that any [X]GPL license has bad reputation in business environments. They see it as a big legal risk that will require constant legal supervision over the technical usage of GPL-licensed code.

Poor little things that do not want to share anything want to work as little as possible. If only we could collectively diminish our commons to make life easier for companies.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#430

Post by AtNightWeCode »

neonsunset wrote: post #402
AtNightWeCode wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be a simple task to add that command and it is widely used. It sounds more like a business decision to not add it. It is not unusual that cloud providers make it difficult to delete data for various reasons.

As it currently stands, it is as difficult to get data onto Azure - you're supposed to manually deploy a container yourself to whichever cloud provider you are using, there is no "Managed Garnet" solution yet (but given hype it will probably arrive at some point). Either way you can see contributions to add more commands here: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/pulls?q=is%3Apr+add+comm... With that said, I'm slightl…

I was of course talking about a managed service. And the problem with deleting data exists in several Azure producs like Cosmos DB, Table storage, App Insights and so on.
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