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Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

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Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#3
The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. Usually you want rebrands to be loud and well known and license changes to be silent and ignored until it's too late and people have adopted the new license. In this case, they loudly announced that they're making an unpopular change and it gave everyone the will to switch.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#6
post #2

Good. I hope Redis Labs dies a slow death for stealing the project from the community.

There's something wrong at Redislabs, it took them over a year to get RESP3 rolled out into their hosted service, you'd expect a rollout of that to be a bit quicker when they're the owner of Redis.

It affected us when upgrading Sidekiq to version 7, which dropped support for older Redis, and their Envoy proxy setup didn't support HELLO and RESP3: https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/issues/5594

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#7
One of the challenges Redis labs here have is that there's very little reason for their userbase to stay loyal to them.

antirez retired from Redis development a few years ago.

From https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors it looks like activity since he left has been mostly from people who didn't overlap with him much.

Redis Labs have not shown themselves to be outstanding stewards of the project as far as I can tell. Why shouldn't people support the fork?

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#8
post #3

The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. Usually you want rebrands to be loud and well known and license changes to be silent and ignored until it's too late and people have adopted the new license. In this case, they loudly announced that they're making an unpopular change and it gave everyone the will to switch.

I’m amazed that they thought that they could do this and get away with it. Redis is almost a foundational tool for modern caching architectures. Every company I’ve ever worked at used redis like candy to cache stuff that wasn’t important enough for the reliable but expensive and slow data stores. Additionally, the main features 99% of people want and need have been in redis for a decade. Even a fork that only fixed security bugs will have done better than Redis Labs after this debacle. It’s like if the author of nano, the text editor, would try this license change. I suspect this will be much like the {open/libre}office changeover. Maybe soon ‘apt get redis’ and others will be aliased to Valkey.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#9

Is there any reason I don’t just stick with redis 7.2.4 instead of trusting redict/valkey to not inject some backdoor trash? I can avoid the corporate pivot and the random fork at the same time.

One is maintained and the other isn't. If you don't care about that you could definitely stick with the old version.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#10

Is there any reason I don’t just stick with redis 7.2.4 instead of trusting redict/valkey to not inject some backdoor trash? I can avoid the corporate pivot and the random fork at the same time.

This new narrative makes it as if backdoors started existing the moment xz happened. As if that wasn't always a threat, and that xz more than anything did prove that free software is a lot more resilient than to suffer similar attacks that have happened and will continue to happen without public acknowlegement or as much publicity in unfree software/SaaS.
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