Redict 7.3.0, a copyleft fork of Redis, is now available • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by fmajid » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #28

kryptiskt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redis Labs didn't start Redis, they didn't contribute most of the code. They just own the trademark. They have about as much right to extract money from AWS and Google for Redis as I have, all they are doing is that they are hijacking an open source project to make themselves rich. They're not a victim of the cloud providers, they are a leech trying to make a score while fucking over all the other contributors to Red…

Hmm, so anyone can just start a company with the name of an open source project and try to monetise it? Like someone could start e.g. "Rust Labs" and sell a commercial version of Rust? I don't know much about the genesis of Redis or Redis Labs, who key people and dates are, etc. I guess this obfuscation is part of the problem.

There's some context in the comments to:

http://antirez.com/news/121

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

#162

Post by tsimionescu » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC

nurple wrote: post #150

tsimionescu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mongo didn't move away from the AGPL to keep SaaS providers from capturing value from the project, they did it so that they could capture more for themselves.

Well, I don't think they expected this change to increase the market, so they wanted to capture value from other providers to themselves. But even that was not guaranteed to happen, the only thing they can guarantee with this move is that others will capture less value.

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

#163

Post by evanelias » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

drewdevault wrote: post #156

evanelias wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your belief is incorrect. The links you have provided do not provide any data on actual use of these databases in the industry.

I've been working in the MySQL/MariaDB ecosystem for 21 years and am the creator/maintainer of a MySQL and MariaDB specific schema management utility used by hundreds of companies and with over 1.6 million downloads to date. I can tell you conclusively, MySQL usage in the industry significantly exceeds MariaDB's.

While I personally enjoy both systems and do hope MariaDB adoption increases, this doesn't change the facts on the ground. And unfortunately MRDB is a penny stock, Azure is dropping their managed MariaDB offering, Vitess has dropped MariaDB support entirely, AWS Aurora is compatible with MySQL and not MariaDB, Percona Server is based on MySQL and not MariaDB, and so forth.

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

#164

Post by drewdevault » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

fmajid wrote: post #158

drewdevault wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 licens…

>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

Well, trademarks are a form of IP. But in any case the copyright was never antirez's to transfer to anyone. In the absence of a CLA with a copyright assignment, every contributor retains the copyright to their contributions, and licenses them to everyone else (Redis Ltd included) under the terms of the BSD license. Legally speaking, Redis Ltd's SSPL code is, in effect, a fork of the Redis BSD code, in the same way that Redict is.

>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?

Thanks for the congratulations!

As for Valkey, so far they've put a lot of time and energy getting the various corporate stakeholders on board with their fork and getting some marketing out (which is no small feat, to be sure, I shudder to imagine the number of lawyers involved), but they still have a lot of boots-on-the-ground work to do getting their fork up and running so it may be a while before our projects are interacting directly. From the limited communication we've had with them, it seems likely that we'll be able to collaborate insofar as reducing incompatibilities is concerned, maybe co-maintenance on the protocol specification, but not much more. Redict does plan on pulling useful patches from Valkey once they get the code going, though it's unfortunately not possible for them to pull from us unless they're on board with switching to a copyleft license -- and we encourage them to do so :)

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

#165

Post by drewdevault » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:17 PM UTC

evanelias wrote: post #163

drewdevault wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Your belief is incorrect. The links you have provided do not provide any data on actual use of these databases in the industry . I've been working in the MySQL/MariaDB ecosystem for 21 years and am the creator/maintainer of a MySQL and MariaDB specific schema management utility used by hundreds of companies and with over 1.6 million downloads to date. I can tell you conclusively, MySQL usage in the industry significa…

I'll defer to your on the ground expertise as to the relative popularity of each, but I will point out that we're both working with anecdata here. I might also suggest that MySQL is losing a lot of ground to Postgres and I don't expect that trend to reverse in any case.

In any case it's not very relevant to this thread because you're quite right in pointing out that MySQL uses a free software license (GPL).

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

#166

Post by drewdevault » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

We're excited to see valkey innovate in these areas! We wish you the best of luck and wish that we could have merged our forks, but alas.

>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

I'm not sure that this is true, at least not the commercial part. Redis clients are pretty simple (compared to Redis itself, at least). Redict is leading an effort to encourage community forks of the official Redis clients, as well as sending patches downstream to third-party clients. We set as an explicit goal to fork the ecosystem as well; we've started this work with hiredict and don't intend to stop.

I think there was some mention at some point about our two forks working together on maintenance of the protocol specification independently of Redis Ltd, which would be a good way to ensure that the clients remain broadly compatible with both of our forks.

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

#167

Post by evanelias » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

drewdevault wrote: post #165

evanelias wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your belief is incorrect. The links you have provided do not provide any data on actual use of these databases in the industry . I've been working in the MySQL/MariaDB ecosystem for 21 years and am the creator/maintainer of a MySQL and MariaDB specific schema management utility used by hundreds of companies and with over 1.6 million downloads to date. I can tell you conclusively, MySQL usage in the industry significa…

I'll defer to your on the ground expertise as to the relative popularity of each, but I will point out that we're both working with anecdata here. I might also suggest that MySQL is losing a lot of ground to Postgres and I don't expect that trend to reverse in any case. In any case it's not very relevant to this thread because you're quite right in pointing out that MySQL uses a free software license (GPL).

Yes, I mentioned the losing ground to Postgres aspect in my original comment. But that affects both MySQL and MariaDB, and still does not cause MariaDB to somehow be more popular than MySQL.

As for both working with anecdata, I mean sure, but what else is there? I'm citing my own business's direct experience with MySQL users and customers significantly outnumbering MariaDB users and customers, and seeing clear signs of that trend also being true at several much larger businesses (AWS, Azure, Percona, PlanetScale).

I suspect your view may be skewed by Linux distros / package managers having replaced MySQL with MariaDB many years ago. But even that is starting to change, see https://lwn.net/Articles/960630/ for example.

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

#168

Post by reconditerose » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:41 PM UTC

drewdevault wrote: post #166

reconditerose wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're excited to see valkey innovate in these areas! We wish you the best of luck and wish that we could have merged our forks, but alas. >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 I'm not sure that this is true, at least not the commercial part. Redis clients are pretty simple (compared to Redis it…

> I'm not sure that this is true, at least not the commercial part. Redis clients are pretty simple (compared to Redis itself, at least).

I'll get on my soap box then. The redis client ecosystem is fractured and awful, and it's mostly Cluster's fault. Getting cluster right is really hard, and most clients do it inconsistently and get something wrong, if they tried at all (hiredict doesn't for example).

> I think there was some mention at some point about our two forks working together on maintenance of the protocol specification independently of Redis Ltd, which would be a good way to ensure that the clients remain broadly compatible with both of our forks.

Yeah, I'm still fully aligned with this.

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

#169

Post by drewdevault » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

reconditerose wrote: post #168

drewdevault wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're excited to see valkey innovate in these areas! We wish you the best of luck and wish that we could have merged our forks, but alas. >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 I'm not sure that this is true, at least not the commercial part. Redis clients are pretty simple (compared to Redis it…

> I'm not sure that this is true, at least not the commercial part. Redis clients are pretty simple (compared to Redis itself, at least). I'll get on my soap box then. The redis client ecosystem is fractured and awful, and it's mostly Cluster's fault. Getting cluster right is really hard, and most clients do it inconsistently and get something wrong, if they tried at all (hiredict doesn't for example). > I think ther…

>I'll get on my soap box then. The redis client ecosystem is fractured and awful, and it's mostly Cluster's fault. Getting cluster right is really hard, and most clients do it inconsistently and get something wrong, if they tried at all (hiredict doesn't for example).

Fair point, I think it's prudent to recognize this as a weakness in the ecosystem. But I would also say that applies generally of cluster, sentinel, etc, in all respects. I know this is a focus area for valkey for that reason.

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

#170

Post by tormeh » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 7:51 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #31

tormeh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most commercial projects can safely use any of the Redis forks, whether Redis itself, Redict or Valkey. For Redict, you have to provide the source code of Redict - and Redict only! - in the case that you distribute it to customers. Redis has harsher terms, but only if you provide Redis-as-a-service. If you aren't a cloud provider and you don't modify the code of your chosen Redis variant, this is all a big nothingbur…

> If you aren't a cloud provider and you don't modify the code of your chosen Redis variant, Or get hosted redis services from someone other than Redis Labs. That isn't fearmongering about the SSPL, it is literally the point of the SSPL.

Sure, but that's left for the hosted service providers to figure out. No one can sue you for using AWSs offering.