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Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

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Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#81

Post by nijave »

sdesol wrote: post #34
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…

Here's some additional insights regarding Redis and Valkey https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef If you ignore comments and just look at people raising issues and pull requests, Valkey has more contributors https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i... Full disclosure: This is my tool

I'm wondering how much of this is related to initial setup and rebranding. Iirc OpenTofu had a 2-4 week surge in PRs just getting builds, infrastructure, and rebranding cleaned up so they could build Terraform on new CI under a new name.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#82

Post by nijave »

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.

I'll do small contributions if I wanted to learn about the software and discovered bugs or other small issues.

Commercially backed is a pretty big bucket and includes things like Linux and a lot of Apache Foundation projects (iirc Apache projects need to maintain a sponsoring organization but it doesn't have to be for profit)

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#83

Post by nijave »

objektif wrote: post #50
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.

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

Technically you do that all the time when you buy any sort of product. Ideally you derive value of some sort for your payment.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#84

Post by nijave »

tredre3 wrote: post #42
joshmanders wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My thoughts exactly, same thing with OpenTofu recently

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#85

Post by skybrian »

KronisLV wrote: post #72
skybrian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing was stolen. The license allows commercial forks. Also, nothing of value was lost. The new forks have all the source code.

> Also, nothing of value was lost. The new forks have all the source code. What about the community fragmentation and the eventual rise of incompatibilities as the development will take on slightly different directions? E.g. what happened with MySQL and MariaDB.

It’s a risk. It’s not clear what will happen. Maybe one fork will win, or maybe the competing forks will come up with a common standard (like browsers).

An issue with databases is that unlike browsers, there’s not that much incentive to standardize, since most apps pick one and stick with it, and their users don’t care.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#86

Post by sdesol »

nijave wrote: post #81
sdesol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some additional insights regarding Redis and Valkey https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef If you ignore comments and just look at people raising issues and pull requests, Valkey has more contributors https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i... Full disclosure: This is my tool

I'm wondering how much of this is related to initial setup and rebranding. Iirc OpenTofu had a 2-4 week surge in PRs just getting builds, infrastructure, and rebranding cleaned up so they could build Terraform on new CI under a new name.

I would say a lot right now. If you look at contributors with open or merged pull requests

https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i...

Redis has 14 contributors vs 48 for Valkey. I think it is very unlikely that Valkey is adding a lot of new code right now, so the activity is probably related to the rebranding to Valkey.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#87

Post by jauntywundrkind »

kstrauser wrote: post #64
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.

Right, but that CLA stemmed directly from the decision that they needed to monetize better & change their licenses.

Point remains: there's a more than small irony here that a company wasn't doing well/was struggling with open source, but could perhaps have done great if the help freshly created has been at all available when they were fully open source.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#88

Post by nijave »

sdesol wrote: post #86
nijave wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering how much of this is related to initial setup and rebranding. Iirc OpenTofu had a 2-4 week surge in PRs just getting builds, infrastructure, and rebranding cleaned up so they could build Terraform on new CI under a new name.

I would say a lot right now. If you look at contributors with open or merged pull requests https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i... Redis has 14 contributors vs 48 for Valkey. I think it is very unlikely that Valkey is adding a lot of new code right now, so the activity is probably related to the rebranding to Valkey.

Changelog line items is probably a better measure (assuming the line items are aligned to features and bugfixes and not just a list of PRs) https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/releases

Maybe version number/release cadence is also helpful.

Re: Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

#90

Post by sdesol »

nijave wrote: post #88
sdesol wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say a lot right now. If you look at contributors with open or merged pull requests https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i... Redis has 14 contributors vs 48 for Valkey. I think it is very unlikely that Valkey is adding a lot of new code right now, so the activity is probably related to the rebranding to Valkey.

Changelog line items is probably a better measure (assuming the line items are aligned to features and bugfixes and not just a list of PRs) https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/releases Maybe version number/release cadence is also helpful.

I have a metrics called LCMFC (last contribution minus first contribution) which can give you insights into how long people have been contributing for. In a few months, I'll be able to better segment things.

I had (and will reintroduce in the future) a contributions insights tab that focused on labels, which I think can also help you understand how things are changing without actually digging into the code.

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