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Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

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Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#121

Why would any startup ever get idealistic again and release their product under open license when big boys can just fork it and destroy their business? I think the dual AGPL/commerical licensing will be the choice of anyone with still some idealism left.

There are lots of loosely related forms of idealism, and plenty of projects will continue to be released under mainstream FOSS licenses because the ideals of the project don't include "make money for our investors" but do include "make this cool thing widely available because we think people will like it".

For the vast majority of open source projects, being used by (and, importantly, receiving contributions from!) the "big boys" is a Good Thing and something to be aspired to.

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone wants to call their stuff open source but have strings attached. The term 'Open Source' is well-defined and includes licenses like the one redict picked (LGPL 3.0). It is incorrect to try and lump this in with source-available licenses that are IMO anathema to Open Source.

The OSI doesn’t represent everyone. It’s simply a fact that MIT for instance allows things like Redict and this discussion to take place, as well as other things. It is maximally permissive.

They don't, but they were established for a singular reason, to shepherd the term "open source". A term that was chosen on terms of having little previous use. They did not succeed with the trademark application because the term was deemed too descriptive, not from a lack of trying. So we should probably respect their term if we want to use it. There are plenty of other terms you can choose instead, such as "permissively licensed software" which also has a de facto established meaning.

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valkey has the support of various Redis developers who moved over, keeps the same license as the original Redis did, and stayed on GitHub to keep the workflow that Redis developers and contributors are used to, so I expect it'll end up winning out. GitHub is proprietary and not ideal, but when trying to get developers on board after a fork, using GitHub and using the same license as the original avoids spending innov…

> innovation tokens / weirdness budget I find it amusing that you called it "weirdness budget", but then again that pretty accurately describes the feeling I get when I see someone using a fairly niche DB instead of something like PostgreSQL, or something like NixOS instead of a regular Ubuntu LTS or RHEL-like. Not that it's a bad thing, there's plenty of specific use cases out there for sure.

Exactly. Spend your weirdness budget wisely, for the things that are really important to differ on. It's fine to spend it, but spend it where you're getting substantial value in exchange for it.

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#124

Why would any startup ever get idealistic again and release their product under open license when big boys can just fork it and destroy their business? I think the dual AGPL/commerical licensing will be the choice of anyone with still some idealism left.

I don't know why people think AGPL changes anything here. The very first of this wave of moves to non-FOSS licenses, and the creation of the SSPL license we are discussing here, was Mongo moving away from the AGPL.

What these companies want is licenses which prevent AWS and other cloud providers from competing with them on their specific technology, regardless of how much those same companies are contributing to the technology. Redis is the most extreme example here - by all accounts I've read, Amazon was a major contributor, not just throwing bug fixes here or there. But that doesn't help Redis Labs, they want money, not code. And the AGPL would have done less than nothing to help stop Amazon from running their own Redis service: Amazon was already doing everything (or at least most things) that the AGPL would have required of them.

SSPL is just a figleaf. No one sane redistributes third party SSPL code without having a contract with the company, it's essentially proprietary in all but name. But it allows the company to maintain this air of open source legitimacy.

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valkey has the support of various Redis developers who moved over, keeps the same license as the original Redis did, and stayed on GitHub to keep the workflow that Redis developers and contributors are used to, so I expect it'll end up winning out. GitHub is proprietary and not ideal, but when trying to get developers on board after a fork, using GitHub and using the same license as the original avoids spending innov…

> innovation tokens / weirdness budget I find it amusing that you called it "weirdness budget", but then again that pretty accurately describes the feeling I get when I see someone using a fairly niche DB instead of something like PostgreSQL, or something like NixOS instead of a regular Ubuntu LTS or RHEL-like. Not that it's a bad thing, there's plenty of specific use cases out there for sure.

Reminds me of this from a comment yesterday

https://boringtechnology.club/

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#127
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source seems to be doing fine without the clarity. Even fields that have nothing to do with software are adopting the mindset. The movement only gains in steam

Most popular OSS projects use Apache and MIT in my experience, precisely because GPLs are problematic for commercial usage and contributions from employed people.

Don't know why this is downvoted, I have endlessly heard corp lawyers say this to my face while I worked there.

I have had a "popular" open source library I contributed significantly to campaigned by Microsoft to change the license to MIT, and the founder and creator decided to relicense without getting any sign offs because they felt that nobody would get mad enough to sue them.

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#128
This is all fine and good, but the big question for me personally is when we can expect to see cloud providers (DigitalOcean and AWS are the ones I'm using) provide hosted versions of Redict OR Valkey with some sort of upgrade path from Redis. I'm a good full-stack developer and a mediocre server administrator, so self-managing hosting is usually not something I'd prefer to do.

Re: Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available

#130

I think what are seeing here is the true power of an open license. There are now two forks with different approaches and two dedicated and competent teams and we will see not only who wins, but if any or both win (for some definition of win).

To me that's the big one, that even you an individual has the ultimate option to define "win" however you want.

Not only are you not subject to the conflict of interest between users and sellers in a commercial product, you aren't even subject to the popularity contest tyranny of the majority in a non-commercial product.

If someone takes the last open version of something and forks it and never does anything further to it and no one else ever uses it, but it does what they want, they win.

They win at life no matter what anyone thinks about that fork.

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