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The race to replace Redis

lwn.net

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#491
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KeyDB, the multithreaded fork of Redis, is already way faster as a KV store.

Agreed. This a good engineering effort over at Snap. It does clustering too. https://docs.keydb.dev/docs/cluster-tutorial/ I wished they'd release some of their "Pro" stuff and/or internal-only features.

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#492
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what your point is. I'm saying that it doesn't matter that the community edition is still free of charge, because it's the fact that it's not open source anymore that's the issue. What part of that are you responding to?

I suppose they're getting at why was it important that Redis was open source to you? Under the assumption someone else would be responsible for free updates?

This accusation is not consistent with what you're replying to.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#493

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…

Isn't this the same with Elastic? Or that was a different situation?

Yes, very similar. ElasticSearch changed licensing, so AWS forked it and created OpenSearch.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own copyrights you’re not the leech.

Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.

I think you're right.

Some projects require signing copyright transfer before making commits (legal document claiming that you are a) copyright holder and b) you transfer those rights to them ie CLA [0]) so single entity holds whole copyrights.

They usually have a GHA that checks it when proposing PRs.

It doesn't look like redis has any of this.

So they run RedisLabs purely on trademark + admin rights on GH on redis/redis.

If that's the case then they also cannot legally change licence of code that's already there because they're not sole copyright holders of that code.

ps. as a side note that's why ie. SQLite doesn't allow external contributions at all, even though their code is Public Domain – because they can legally claim full copyright/authorship.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement

Re: The race to replace Redis

#495
post #347

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.

Toy project are both cash and time constrained, but they’re at a scale where managed is cheap enough because they want to get you hooked.

Large scale projects can take advantage of economies of scale and hire ops people. I’ve found cloud support pretty lacklustre compared to having someone to talk to face-to-face who understands the whole stack for your particular application.

Of course conventional corporate wisdom says waste as much as you like on services as long as you keep payroll down, that may be a bigger challenge than any of the technical ones.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#496

Isn't this the reason why AGPL has started to get more popular? Everyone has to play by the very strict rules except the copyright holder, who can do whatever they want, but the community still benefits from the core software being open source. The BSD license in particular seems like a particularly bad way to run a business.

The whole move to new "open-core" licenses started with the most famous (infamous?) AGPL project - MongoDB. The AGPL is not what companies like this want (Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc). They don't want AWS's code: AWS is already providing that. They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.

Great observation!

Re: The race to replace Redis

#497

Isn't this the reason why AGPL has started to get more popular? Everyone has to play by the very strict rules except the copyright holder, who can do whatever they want, but the community still benefits from the core software being open source. The BSD license in particular seems like a particularly bad way to run a business.

SSPL that is now adopted by Redis >7.4.2 is a fork of AGPL and adds one more extra clause that makes it more difficult to run any competing product.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#498
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers. But the developers licensed the software at no charge. What kind of compensation are they entitled to then? Sounds like a case of sellers remorse/take-backsies one of the problems that open source was aiming to solve.

They are not entitled to compensation over their previous work, but you/me/AWS are also not entitled to their _future_ work.

Does this mean they aren't accepting external contributions any more?

If I put in a commit, what is redis going to pay me for executing my code?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#499
post #75

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.

*we reserve the right to ban your circumstance if we think we can make money from it

Re: The race to replace Redis

#500

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…

I think it has become unusable to everyone though?

If redis thinks you're making too much money using redis, they'll relicense it so you have to pay them to do whatever you are doing

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