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The race to replace Redis

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#461

Post by jacurtis »

alex_duf wrote: post #300
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.

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.

AWS has been pushing MemoryDB, which is redis compatible storage, works with the redis clis and supports Redis features.

I suspect in the long run, Amazon will eventually "pay" the licensing fee for customers that demand "Redis". But they will push everyone else towards their in-house fork of Redis that they brand MemoryDB or whatever. You will pay more for the Redis licensed version and AWS will steer you away from it, but it will be there if you are adamant.

This is already happening with Aurora, which has Postgres and Mysql compatible versions. If your company is big enough for special pricing, then you know they want you on Aurora. The pricing discounts for Aurora are insane (50%+) compared to what you might get on a traditional Postgres of equivalent size (20%). They will probably do this with MemoryDB and Redis eventually. Redis is available if you really need it. But this other thing that they maintain is discountable to half the cost of the other one and it becomes a pretty obvious choice.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#462

Post by bloppe »

wvh wrote: post #442
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. Why not support the projects a company uses in ways that go beyond the traditional ways of hiring employees in the form of physical bodies that defy traffic jams to spend large parts of their day in a physical building? There are some larger companies that employ open-source or third-party developers of course, but it seems to me that if your product is built around a technology or framework, it would make sens…

This is actually pretty common. My company did exactly that with an Apache project founder. I know of several others. They still work on their own project, but have to shift priorities.

Sounds like that's basically what happened here, too, except not with Google. I'm not sure why.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#463

Post by drewdevault »

crabmusket wrote: post #348
kqr wrote: post #162

I liked Andrew Kelleys perspective on this: let's treat Redict as a rename of the Redis project, and the project now called "Redis" a weird commercial fork of Redict. https://andrewkelley.me/post/redis-renamed-to-redict.html

> Redict is a Finished Product I am keenly looking on to see if the people involved in Redict see it the same way. As a user of Redis, I would like to switch to one of these open-source forks, and to be honest one which is "done" and focused on maintenance, bug fixes etc. rather than new features sounds more attractive.

Yes, we agreed amongst ourselves (Redict) that the right approach was to focus on long-term maintenance and reliability.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#464

Post by dehrmann »

thayne wrote: post #154
ajmurmann wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's also how DB companies try to monetize. So a hyperscaler offering this directly really undermines your entire business. In the past you could offer a Enterprise version with support, but with the move to the cloud that market is shrinking and Amazon is eating the new market themselves

Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, se…

What you're sort of proposing is cloud SaaSaaS. AWS would build out hooks for providers to manage the DBs they sell so they look like part of AWS. The main problem is AWS already has most of the services most of their customers want, so there isn't a big market opportunity.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#465

Post by evanelias »

sneak wrote: post #319
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #170

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…

> *one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn’t mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis.

This is a false equivalency. No one is defining "creator" as "wrote all of the thing". When describing a project/product as a whole, there's a clear, massive difference between "creator" and "contributor".

Let's say you get a small patch merged into the Linux kernel, would you then call yourself "one of the creators of Linux"? The vast majority of people would not find this remotely acceptable!

How about proprietary software and employment arrangements. Let's say a Microsoft intern gets a few lines of code merged into SQL Server. Would you call them "one of the creators of SQL Server"?

Extending this logic to other words, would you say a company with N employees actually has N founders? No, because these words mean different things.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#466

Post by drewdevault »

joshmanders wrote: post #443
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.

The problem is Drew is being really hostile towards the actual maintainers and core contributors of Redis who are looking to move on towards an actual open source fork. He changed the license, moved the code, chosen the name and the direction all on his own without consulting anyone in the community. His history had made me like that he forked it, but his actions and behavior towards the maintainers of Redis and abso…

Hey, this is really not how it went down and I'm kind of upset that it's being read this way.

The premise of Redict is to create a fork which is driven by a grassroots community rather than a commercial interest, and which is safe from this kind of rug-pull in the future and to press back against this broader trend of rug pulls by commercial vendors of free software. I invited collaborators from the start at every level, going out of my way not to instill Redict as a hostile takeover but as a community-led effort to create a future for Redis which is protected by copyleft. I talked with the people behind Valkey from the start of Redict and extended them a role in shaping everything from the direction and governance and infrastructure and tooling from day one, provided that we could find common ground on the license. Hell, @madolson, the primary force behind Valkey, signed up for a Codeberg account so that she could be made an admin on the Redict repository before placeholderkv even existed. She was removed only when it became clear that she was committed to her own fork and it didn't seem prudent to us to give admin rights to someone who wasn't contributing.

Redict was not refusing to collaborate or meet in the middle. The raison d'etre of Redict was to be a copyleft home for the Redis codebase, and if we could have found agreement on that then every other detail was always clearly indicated as subject to consensus and we proactively reached out to build that consensus, but were refused by madolson and the commercial interests that wanted to be in charge of their own fork rather than participate in a grassroots project.

Even the consensus they wanted on the license choice was, in the end, the consensus of the four commercial vendors. We tried to find a way of participating in this consensus-making process, but it wasn't made for us. Calls we made in public to use a copyleft license were met with resounding support on GitHub, to no avail.

Don't mistake four commercial vendors and the Linux Foundation for a community. I wish them the best of luck, and acknowledge that a corporate-led home for Redis is probably what some people are looking for. That said, I'm not okay with this narrative that Redict was not cooperating with the community, because it's just factually wrong and hurtful to boot.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#467

Post by rad_gruchalski »

evanelias wrote: post #437
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to argue that a use permitted by the original license is „predatory”.

That's fair in isolation, but one can justifiably argue that a repeated pattern of behavior is clearly predatory. Specifically: have the major cloud providers ever created a successful FOSS database, cache, or fulltext search index project from the ground up ? By this I mean, a FOSS project with its own protocol, own community from scratch, not a fork or a re-implementation or based on another FOSS project, nor a lat…

> That's fair in isolation, but one can justifiably argue that a repeated pattern of behavior is clearly predatory.

Yes, but there’s another explanation. Repeating the same mistake countless times and expecting a different outcome is naivety.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#468

Post by exe34 »

ufocia wrote: post #355
exe34 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project still belongs to society as a whole! You can fork it too! You just can't profit off their future work.

It does not belong to the society (whatever that's supposed to mean). It is not in the public domain as far as we know.

It was bsd licensed. The code that you received before is still covered by the bsd license. You can pretty much do anything you want with that code except misrepresent yourself as the author.

Public domain isn't the only form of free software. You can literally use it in exactly the same way as you did before. Nothing has been taken away from you.

Does this address your concern?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#469

Post by exe34 »

gkbrk wrote: post #226
exe34 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is buying the same as leaching now? Words really do get diluted to the point of meaningless...

It is if the thing they bought had contributions from many other people but pretty much all of them got nothing for it.

I'm sure their lawyers will be looking into it, you probably don't need to be concerned!

Re: The race to replace Redis

#470

Post by fmajid »

mort96 wrote: post #390
YoshiRulz wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be confusing .NET (formerly .NET Core) with .NET Framework. Which is forgivable, because MS is terrible at naming things. The former stack is a joy to work with since some QoL changes a few years ago—as long as you don't need both a GUI framework and Linux support, in which case you're pretty screwed. (Our app is still on .NET Framework for that reason.) I don't know if you were referring to the total instal…

No such confusion is going on. Most Linux people won't touch the Microsoft .NET stack with a 20 foot pole, whether it's called .NET Core or .NET Framework.

Or Apple's Swift for that matter. Or Oracle's MySQL or Java. Or more recently Redis.

It has nothing to do with the technical merits of the technology, but with suspicions of the intentions of the company behind it and a desire not to create a dependency on them.

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