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Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

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Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#41

Post by andix »

wmf wrote: post #37
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that an open source project you contribute to can become non-free from under you at any point. This pattern is becoming more and more common now.

There are ways to prevent that which in retrospect we should have paid more attention to. For example, (L)GPL with no CLA cannot be changed later.

That's the decade old philosophical fight about what to consider free software. GPL/GNU vs BSD.

I think both opinions are fine, if you don't want your contributions to end up in a commercial product, you can't contribute to a project with BSD/MIT license. On the other hand most companies prefer to support projects with a permissive license over projects with copyleft (GPL). For many projects (except the big ones like GNU/Linux) copyleft seems to be more of a burden.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#42

Post by tredre3 »

joshmanders wrote: post #27
Thaxll wrote: post #4

"Rapidly", so most people don't even know the story about Redis changes and I would say 99.99 never heard about Valkey.

Redis (64.7k stars): Excluding merges, 8 authors have pushed 8 commits to unstable and 10 commits to all branches. On unstable, 173 files have changed and there have been 2,002 additions and 3,194 deletions. Valkey (12k stars): Excluding merges, 41 authors have pushed 147 commits to unstable and 181 commits to all branches. On unstable, 473 files have changed and there have been 10,635 additions and 9,663 deletions.…

Those numbers mean nothing because obviously a fork in its inception will have a burst of activity. Half of those changes are probably just renaming redis => valkey, too.

Let's check the numbers in 6 months or a year for a truly meaningful figure about the health of each project.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#43

Post by willsmith72 »

ok_dad wrote: post #8
xmprt wrote: 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 s…

I'm curious about the impact of the licence change on the average company.

Were you self-hosting redis in all your companies, or how were you using it?

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#44

Post by btilly »

wmf wrote: post #37
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that an open source project you contribute to can become non-free from under you at any point. This pattern is becoming more and more common now.

There are ways to prevent that which in retrospect we should have paid more attention to. For example, (L)GPL with no CLA cannot be changed later.

In retrospect, Redis Labs is about to learn a lesson that many have learned before.

Community willingness to maintain popular software under the old license means that attempting to make free non-free will result in a fork taking over.

As a prior example look at what happened a few years back when Oracle tried to make Hudson non-free. Now nobody has heard of Hudson, but everybody uses Jenkins. Which name was chosen for the sheer mockery value and reference to the then infamous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4.

There are people who think we need the legal protection of the GPL. But there are others who trust in community pressures to make the right thing happen.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#45

Post by andix »

Thaxll wrote: post #4

"Rapidly", so most people don't even know the story about Redis changes and I would say 99.99 never heard about Valkey.

Once the big cloud providers start to charge extra for Redis over Valkey in a few months everybody will know.

Valkey just released their first stable version 3 days ago. So it might take another week or two until it's popular ;)

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#46

Post by andix »

btilly wrote: post #44
wmf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to prevent that which in retrospect we should have paid more attention to. For example, (L)GPL with no CLA cannot be changed later.

In retrospect, Redis Labs is about to learn a lesson that many have learned before. Community willingness to maintain popular software under the old license means that attempting to make free non-free will result in a fork taking over. As a prior example look at what happened a few years back when Oracle tried to make Hudson non-free. Now nobody has heard of Hudson, but everybody uses Jenkins. Which name was chosen f…

A lot of younger folks probably never heard of XFree86 or OpenOffice.org. In a few years Terraform and now Redis might end up just like them.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#47

Post by madeofpalk »

andix wrote: post #33
shepardrtc wrote: post #23

Saw a presentation by them at this week's Open Source Summit. Seems like a lot of the major contributors to Redis have moved over to this project. And it seems like AWS is a major supporter of it. I suspect their Elasticache Redis will soon be Elasticache Valkey.

I would personally never contribute to a project with non-free license without getting paid. It's basically working for a company without pay.

I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid. Saying this as a developer who is paid for exactly that, not it any inside knowledge that points to ulterior motives, but just the idea of giving a company free labour is unsettling.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#48

Post by ok_dad »

willsmith72 wrote: post #43
ok_dad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I'm curious about the impact of the licence change on the average company. Were you self-hosting redis in all your companies, or how were you using it?

I think that the uproar about license changes are less about actual license impact and more about the impact to the community and social framework that Redis has fostered as a project previously. People are switching because at this point they think they can’t trust Redis Labs not to do more dumb stuff later. Combine that with my previous assertion that redis is very important software at most companies, and the calculus leans in favor of using the fork because any further major license changes might necessitate it anyways, and it’s easier to do now than under the gun. It’s important to not do stuff that loses trust when you’re a company founded on a community.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#49

Post by Macha »

btilly wrote: post #44
wmf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to prevent that which in retrospect we should have paid more attention to. For example, (L)GPL with no CLA cannot be changed later.

In retrospect, Redis Labs is about to learn a lesson that many have learned before. Community willingness to maintain popular software under the old license means that attempting to make free non-free will result in a fork taking over. As a prior example look at what happened a few years back when Oracle tried to make Hudson non-free. Now nobody has heard of Hudson, but everybody uses Jenkins. Which name was chosen f…

Was Jenkins a Leeroy Jenkins reference? Seemed to be just continuing the butler theme from Hudson.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#50

Post by objektif »

madeofpalk wrote: post #47
andix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would personally never contribute to a project with non-free license without getting paid. It's basically working for a company without pay.

I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid. Saying this as a developer who is paid for exactly that, not it any inside knowledge that points to ulterior motives, but just the idea of giving a company free labour is unsettling.

It is almost same as transferring your hard earned money to the founders of the company. Of course it is unsettling.
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