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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

#151

Post by drewdevault »

zvr wrote: post #148
drewdevault wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just passing by with a quick nit to pick: >And I'll s/redis/redict in my docker-compose.yml for small/personal projects, and that'll be the end of it FYI we're publishing to registry.redict.io, so s:redis:registry.redict.io/redict:g https://redict.io/docs/redis-compat/containers/ Not that it detracts from your point in any way :)

THANK YOU, for making images based on scratch, rather than Debian or Alpine. It makes redistribution so much easier from a license compliance perspective. And double thanks for providing an SPDX document for the contents of the image.

No problem :)

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

#152

Post by KronisLV »

swed420 wrote: post #125
KronisLV wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Yep, that's what the innovation tokens are probably a reference to, the talk occasionally gets brought up on the site. Such a cool talk, I agree with most of what's said there, albeit sometimes even certain "boring" technologies might have a bunch of complexity to them.

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

#153

Post by evanelias »

caymanjim wrote: post #139

What's the track record of other projects that have gone too commercial and had their code forked like this? The only other example I can think of offhand is MySQL and MariaDB. I don't know what the market share of either is now. Do people still use MySQL? Does it generate profit for Oracle? I think Redis Ltd. is vastly overestimating the value of their product. Redis is incredibly popular, but the vast majority of u…

MySQL never changed its license. The fork happened due to concerns of ownership and direction, not a license change or "going too commercial".

MySQL is still widely used, including by a large portion of publicly-traded tech companies. That said, most newer startups seem to be choosing Postgres instead.

MariaDB is also somewhat widely used, but not nearly as much as MySQL. And MariaDB's commercial enterprise (which was VC-backed and went public via a SPAC) is not doing well.

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

#154

Post by reconditerose »

crabmusket wrote: post #82

Everyone's discussing the license and the hosting, but I think this is the truly interesting differentiator: > In technical terms, we are focusing on stability and long-term maintenance, and on achieving excellence within our current scope. We believe that Redict is near feature-complete and that it is more valuable to our users if we take a conservative stance to innovation and focus on long-term reliability instead…

Hey, I am one of the maintainers of Valkey, I'll try to answer.

I think there is a few things I would like to see in the mid to short term. We're trying to make a lot of the core datastructures more efficient (both in terms of memory and performance) as well as the main dictionary. Valkey 8.0 (or whatever first major version we have) will have lower overhead per key-value pair. Multithreading performance is nice, but as you mentioned most people don't need it. It gives folks a lot of runway if they need to scale but don't want to use clustering, and can also be a "quick fix" for certain types of P99 or higher latency spikes. Clustering is also really hard to use today, and a lot of the current folks want to fix that. It's a huge community pain point. Observability is another pain point I would like to improve. (Disclosure, I work at AWS as well) We see a lot of customers ask about "why did we see a performance issue", and Redis really doesn't provide a lot of introspection to diagnose those issues.

Another big area, which maybe will work for redict, is we want better integration with other OSS projects, especially CNCF projects like envoy, open-telemetry, K8s. There are a lot of self-developed projects floating around, we're hoping we can pull all of this together to make a more cohesive project for people to use instead of what we see today.

I think another big issue will be clients. I'm concerned Redis will try to inject a poison pill into the clients they own to make it so they can only talk to "official" Redis versions. Ultimately a small community will struggle to maintain a lot of clients, so I think we need a larger (and likely commercial) investment into keeping clients open. We will likely passively support redict with our clients, so they'll get that for free.

We want to do all the cool feature stuff to (timeseries, JSON, bloom, RAG), but I would like to keep the core pretty clean.

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

#155

Post by reconditerose »

8organicbits wrote: post #48

Being copyleft, Redict can merge any contributions to Valkey. However, Valkey cannot merge any of the Redict commits (unless the contributor actively dual licenses them). Being non-open source Redis can merge any contributions made to Valkey but not from Redict. So if you don't want your code to end up in Redis, contribute to Redict. Interestingly, there have only been two commits from a single developer to the Redis…

As someone who has extensively worked on a Redis fork at AWS and worked with the company for 6 years, I wouldn't worry about Redis merging stuff from Valkey. We believe they refused a huge number of PRs because we believe it would have messed with their internal features. (We can't prove this, because they never discussed it publicly). One of the main reasons I started contributing to Redis was to help my team at AWS get out of the business of merging conflicts.

> Interestingly, there have only been two commits from a single developer to the Redis repo in the last two weeks since the license change. A huge decrease.

It's just a guy from Redis. It's not even one of the three former maintainers (Oran, Yossi, or Itamar). The number of open PRs is also dramatically down (it was around 550 when I last looked before the fork, since I've gotten a lot of notifications from old PRs of people refusing the CLA).

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

#156

Post by drewdevault »

evanelias wrote: post #153
caymanjim wrote: post #139

What's the track record of other projects that have gone too commercial and had their code forked like this? The only other example I can think of offhand is MySQL and MariaDB. I don't know what the market share of either is now. Do people still use MySQL? Does it generate profit for Oracle? I think Redis Ltd. is vastly overestimating the value of their product. Redis is incredibly popular, but the vast majority of u…

MySQL never changed its license. The fork happened due to concerns of ownership and direction, not a license change or "going too commercial". MySQL is still widely used, including by a large portion of publicly-traded tech companies. That said, most newer startups seem to be choosing Postgres instead. MariaDB is also somewhat widely used, but not nearly as much as MySQL. And MariaDB's commercial enterprise (which wa…

>MariaDB is also somewhat widely used, but not nearly as much as MySQL.

I believe this is factually false. Consider just one datapoint:

https://repology.org/project/mysql/versions

https://repology.org/project/mariadb/versions

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

#157

Post by fmajid »

danielovichdk wrote: post #109
fmajid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they didn't, although they misleadingly claimed to be the "Home of Redis" for a number of years. Then they hired Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), the author of Redis, and eventually purchased the copyright from him. Very sleazy outfit that fully deserves all the scorn poured on them.

If one sells a copyright to another, how can that be considered sleazy ? Someone made the sell - to make money I presume - and another bought it, to perhaps make more money ? Seems not that out of reach ? I don't understand the bitterness around this debate, it seems most people are frustated that they have to pay for something that was free, but at the same time, they probably made money from what was free. I totall…

The sleaze was in falsely claiming to be the "Home of Redis" at least 2 years before actually becoming so by hiring antirez (I remember seeing their huge billboards on Bryant & 9th in San Francisco, and it rankled).

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

#158

Post by fmajid »

drewdevault wrote: post #135
danielovichdk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one sells a copyright to another, how can that be considered sleazy ? Someone made the sell - to make money I presume - and another bought it, to perhaps make more money ? Seems not that out of reach ? I don't understand the bitterness around this debate, it seems most people are frustated that they have to pay for something that was free, but at the same time, they probably made money from what was free. I totall…

To clarify, they did not purchase the copyright -- they purchased the trademark, and are using it to attempt to capture the practical value of the copyright. The copyright is by far the more valuable of the two, but they do not actually own it. Of the actual valuable object (the copyright, i.e. the codebase), about 80% was written by people outside of the employ of Redis Labs né Redis Ltd.

Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific (see the comments on http://antirez.com/news/121 )

In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences?

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

#159

Post by fmajid »

reconditerose wrote: post #154
crabmusket wrote: post #82

Everyone's discussing the license and the hosting, but I think this is the truly interesting differentiator: > In technical terms, we are focusing on stability and long-term maintenance, and on achieving excellence within our current scope. We believe that Redict is near feature-complete and that it is more valuable to our users if we take a conservative stance to innovation and focus on long-term reliability instead…

Hey, I am one of the maintainers of Valkey, I'll try to answer. I think there is a few things I would like to see in the mid to short term. We're trying to make a lot of the core datastructures more efficient (both in terms of memory and performance) as well as the main dictionary. Valkey 8.0 (or whatever first major version we have) will have lower overhead per key-value pair. Multithreading performance is nice, but…

Thank you for your work on Redis, Madelyn, and I'm sorry for the utterly unjustified abuse that's been thrown your way simply because you work at AWS.

One feature that would be very helpful would be some form of analytics and a memory profiler. At one point I'd written a python library to iterate over a RDB to identify what the top keys consuming most memory were, but Redis has added a lot of complexity and new data types since, so I doubt it still works.

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

#160

Post by fmajid »

zwaps wrote: post #16
drewdevault wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LGPL is a pretty weak copyleft license and was chosen specifically because it is amenable to almost all present-day commercial use-cases for Redis. You don't have to publish your changes to Redict in most situations, commercial or not. Check out the FAQ here: https://redict.io/docs/license/

"Tip: Commercial and non-commercial users of Redict are not required to publish or otherwise “open source” the source code of Redict, including any private modifications they make to the source code" And very next section: "If you compile Redict’s source code into an executable form and distribute this executable form to others you are required to include a copy of the Redict source code and any modifications to it l…

I've had to go over open source package licenses as part of due diligence when my startups were acquired, but LGPL was never an issue, unlike AGPL.
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