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From where I left

antirez.com

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Re: From where I left

#221

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

jart wrote: post #155
crote wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With open-source software, a license is as much a social contract as it is a legal one. People contribute because they want to be part of a community building something which is beneficial to everyone . Everyone contributes where they can, and in turn takes what they need. Redis Ltd. broke the social contract. They decided that the short-term profitability of the company was more important than the project as a whole…

Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts. It is not a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you gifts. The old versions of Redis are yours for all time. No one can take that away from you. In fact, Redis is still giving you gifts to this day, just with a different wrapping. The new license seems perfectly reasonable, given how much companies lik…

Reciprocality over time building trust is in fact the basis of gift economies. Please read some David Graeber.

Re: From where I left

#222

Post by jcgrillo »

fweimer wrote: post #201
jcgrillo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of what constitutes a "service" seems very murky, and although it's obviously not the intention of all these source-available, BSL style things, in a dark timeline it seems like there's a lot of room for litigious actors to behave very badly. The uncertainty is what makes it scary, I'd also like a lot more clarity.

No one is expected to use any of the code licensed in this way commercially. You enter a contract with the vendor, tell them what you need, and negotiate a price. At that point, it doesn't really matter what the copyright license says.

So the entire license is just a bad faith trap? I could see it being used that way, potentially, but I don't believe that's actually Confluent's, MongoDB's, Elastic's, Hashicorp's, or Redis Labs' intent. In fact they've all explicitly stated the opposite. Are they all lying?

Re: From where I left

#223

Post by hellcow »

weinzierl wrote: post #204
openthc wrote: post #188

Another thing that kinds of sucks about this whole "license rug-pull" kind of business is that other teams (like ours) who are publishing open-source software/tools are now suspects too. Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved? Folk can't take us at face-value (I'd argue demonstrated value) and level (unfounded) accusations at us; because some othe…

"Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved?" You put MIT or GPL in the same bucket here, but really shouldn't because the difference is all that matters. There is no "rug-pull" as you call it. What happened with Redis is what the BSD license allows and what people should expect to happen. The combination of GPL (or AGPL) with a large enough and diver…

Mongo was AGPL until 2018. The AGPL didn’t stop Amazon from abusing the open source social contract, hence why Mongo modified the license.

Re: From where I left

#224

Post by weinzierl »

antirez wrote: post #82
simonw wrote: post #68

For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons: 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust. 2. From a purely selfish point…

"Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc" I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is that such value never gets lost. People are able to fork, and after a fork for the original project to still lead will be require to put something more on the table. Inside Redis it was tried…

"I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is that such value never gets lost."

That is one side of the coin: value never gets lost!

The other side is that the BSD license is very clear what it allows. It's a good thing that there are licenses that allow what Redis did. It is also a good thing that there are other licenses which can help prevent what Redis did.

It is our choice as developers and we should never blame others for exercising the rights we granted them.

Re: From where I left

#225

Post by foresterre »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #90
munificent wrote: post #64

> However, during the “writing years” (I’m still writing, by the way), I often returned to coding, as a way to take breaks from intense writing sessions (writing is the only mental activity I found to be a great deal more taxing than coding) This has been my experience too. With both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters", writing the code was a joy while writing the prose was hard work. Gratifying,…

Dropping by in the comments to say many thanks for both of these books. I have hardcopies of both and "Crafting" remains my all-time favorite programming book. It's delightful, educational, and beautiful.

Where did you get the hardcopy? (I already have the paperback for "Crafting Interpreters", but I prefer to buy hardcopies if available)

As far as I was aware, there are only paperbacks.

Re: From where I left

#226

Post by blibble »

echelon wrote: post #47
bhouston wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you wanted to have influence without a big pay check, why not join Valkey? Redis, the company, in your absence has gotten a reputation as a predatory company that has attacked open source projects in other to further those goals. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/redis... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607

> why not join Valkey? Valkey is making it possible for hyperscalers to continue appropriating open source and charging fat margins to everyone else. In a sense, Valkey is the bad guy here. And just look at all the support Valkey is getting from Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc. They're perpetuating the problem. The same thing happened with Elasticsearch. Unfortunately ICs without decision-making power started lambasting…

as much as I dislike the hyperscalers parasitising open source...

"redis ltd" the company did not originate redis

"redis ltd" was originally "Garantia Data": a company that offered hosted redis as a service

fundamentally they are/were doing the same thing as AWS/Google: taking an existing open source product they did not originate, and selling hosting for it

they may have hired its creator (several years after he wrote it), and since then changed their name to "redis", but they're not any different to GCP/AWS

other than the complaining about others more successful business models

this is very different to e.g. sentry

Re: From where I left

#227

Post by sangnoir »

jart wrote: post #194
collingreen wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you should conflate CONTROL with resentment or distaste or feeling betrayed or feeling misled. They aren't the same.

Even without a CLA, Redis was originally licensed BSD. Releasing code under a BSD license is making a promise that you are OK with people using your code for commercial purposes. If you as a developer express personal feelings of dissatisfaction that someone is doing with your gift what you gave them permission to do, in such a way that could be construed as reneging on your promise, then that would make you dishonor…

> Releasing code under a BSD license is making a promise that you are OK with people using your code for commercial purposes.

That's just a microcosm of the larger issue, isn't it? Contributors : Redis :: Redis : AWS - Redis gave Amazon the permission to host and make money off of Redis, but Redis was evidently salty about the state of affairs. I think contributors have reason to be salty too.

Re: From where I left

#228

Post by weinzierl »

hellcow wrote: post #223
weinzierl wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved?" You put MIT or GPL in the same bucket here, but really shouldn't because the difference is all that matters. There is no "rug-pull" as you call it. What happened with Redis is what the BSD license allows and what people should expect to happen. The combination of GPL (or AGPL) with a large enough and diver…

Mongo was AGPL until 2018. The AGPL didn’t stop Amazon from abusing the open source social contract, hence why Mongo modified the license.

Yep, but developers signed away their rights to MongoDB Inc. That is why I wrote "contributors who keep their rights in their contributions" above.

It is what makes all the difference between MongoDB and Linux, for example. What happened to MongoDB could never happen to Linux.

Re: From where I left

#229

Post by agumonkey »

sangnoir wrote: post #174
jart wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts. It is not a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you gifts. The old versions of Redis are yours for all time. No one can take that away from you. In fact, Redis is still giving you gifts to this day, just with a different wrapping. The new license seems perfectly reasonable, given how much companies lik…

> Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts I think op was talking about contributors, who essentially gifted back. One might take offense if they were exchanging gifts with someone, and they open a pop-up store and sell what was gifted. Also, it's also a tiny bit hypocritical to expect revenue sharing with Amazon without doing the same for contr…

I guess there's a blind spot here.

antirez gave

community gave

most people assume that this create a new thing, a group, which has a shared past and value .. and should continue (i would agree to that personally)

"pure" open source advocacy would claim "nothing is ever to be expected in any future" (i can understand that too but find it a bit sad)

Re: From where I left

#230

Post by titanomachy »

foresterre wrote: post #225
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropping by in the comments to say many thanks for both of these books. I have hardcopies of both and "Crafting" remains my all-time favorite programming book. It's delightful, educational, and beautiful.

Where did you get the hardcopy? (I already have the paperback for "Crafting Interpreters", but I prefer to buy hardcopies if available) As far as I was aware, there are only paperbacks.

I think they meant hardcopy as in “physical copy” not as in “hardcover”
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