Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

devops.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 90 posts

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#61

Post by sdesol »

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.

> I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid.

Based on what I've seen, a lot of people contribute to VC/commercially backed projects for resume/career growth reasons.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#62

Post by sdesol »

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.

> The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change.

I honestly don't think that was the issue. The issue, unlike Elastic vs Amazon is, this change affects a lot of big players like Google, Amazon, and Oracle.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#64

Post by kstrauser »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #59

Comments generally covering the situation well. The one thing I take as a bit of a potential bitter irony is that if Redis had had the level of support & contributions ValKey has, Redis Labs might have been able to keep doing what they were doing? Seemingly a bunch of companies are happy to start paying for open source, when weeks ago many were passive consumers.

Redis Labs required would-be contributors to sign a CLA to hand over their copyright. If ValKey doesn’t require that, it alone could account for the difference.

I wouldn’t sign a CLA to anyone other than maybe the FSF.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#65

Post by cratermoon »

sdesol wrote: post #61
madeofpalk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid. Based on what I've seen, a lot of people contribute to VC/commercially backed projects for resume/career growth reasons.

It's fair to say that in the early days of the FOSS movement, people were contributing for prestige and recognition. The commercialization into "Open Source" meant that work was appropriated for profit by organizations that weren't interested in either the "free as in beer" or "free as in freedom" aspects. Naturally people followed their mercenary lead and started to work on them for the financial benefits.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#66

Post by devsda »

simonw wrote: post #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…

> Why shouldn't people support the fork?

That's a valid question and to be fair to Redis, we should also ask ourselves what are the incentives for Redis (or any other commercial oss) to continue development of truly free and open-source Redis?

If the answer is opensource ideals, it is not an honest or realistic answer.

If the answer is they can always get paid through hosted offerings and product support, Redis folks are saying that's not a sustainable option because of cloud providers.

Redis users fall into broad categories of individual developers, startups, medium level companies and enterprise scale companies. Individual users are unlikely to pay. Enterprise customers are big enough to have dedicated resources for support. It leaves startups and medium level companies. These users are leaving on-premise and moving to cloud providers and if there's a frictionless hosted solution by the provider itself they are likely to prefer that over paying Redis. There are always exceptions but I don't think this is far from reality.

If the quip is, Redis should offer a better product, they cannot! Not when competing with cloud provider's own offerings. They will be always be at a disadvantage in terms of total cost(for marketplace products) and resources spent for development of the core product itself.

I believe their license changes is about them trying to reduce the impact of cloud offerings.

I don't know if there is a better approach for Redis and the community but as users of their product we are also responsible to provide a sustainable path for development and come up with a solution for this common problem. Otherwise, Redis will not be the only product to take this direction.

PS: There are exceptions like postgres but there aren't enough of them at that scale.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#67

Post by NewJazz »

sdesol wrote: post #62
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.

> The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. I honestly don't think that was the issue. The issue, unlike Elastic vs Amazon is, this change affects a lot of big players like Google, Amazon, and Oracle.

Elastic change affected amazon so much that they forked.

I think the real difference is that Redis Labs never hired the majority of contributors.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#68

Post by _msw_ »

devsda wrote: post #66
simonw wrote: post #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…

> Why shouldn't people support the fork? That's a valid question and to be fair to Redis, we should also ask ourselves what are the incentives for Redis (or any other commercial oss) to continue development of truly free and open-source Redis? If the answer is opensource ideals, it is not an honest or realistic answer. If the answer is they can always get paid through hosted offerings and product support, Redis folks…

> PS: There are exceptions like postgres but there aren't enough of them at that scale.

We need more communities and projects like PostgreSQL. Why can’t Valkey be another one?

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#69

Post by Spivak »

ok_dad wrote: post #48
willsmith72 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 calc…

Yeah, I'm willing to trust the Linux Foundation won't pull a stunt like this but I have zero faith that in 5 years there won't be another announcement that " are no longer allowed to use it without paying."
Post reply on HN