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From where I left

antirez.com

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Re: From where I left

#301

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bsnnkv wrote: post #53

I really appreciated the section about OSI licenses as someone who this year stopped using them entirely for new work. (Snippets from the article below) > I wrote open source software for almost my whole life. Yet, as I’m an atheist and still I’m happy when I see other people believing in God, if this helps them to survive life’s hardships, I also don’t believe that open source is the only way to write software. > Mo…

See, I read that and immediately was reminded that I don't exactly love the OSI being the one true definer of Open Source... but somehow the only people who ever argue that immediately try to use it as an excuse to pretend their stuff is open for marketing reasons while avoiding actually giving users the same rights. Besides, it's not that "openness and licensing are only what the OSI tells us they are"; it's that the OSI and FSF and DFSG all agree.

Re: From where I left

#302

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

strbean wrote: post #248
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument about "evil megacorp" is problematic because you can't really isolate those from the small and wonderful startups. Specifically I've been directly involved in MongoDB ecosystem with FerretDB and there are so many small indie providers worldwide would love to offer MongoDB Atlas alternative to their customers, but can't because of SSPL license. I know, for many it is hard to make piece with it - Open Sou…

Small indie providers should absolutely be able to sell their MongoDB / Redis / XYZ as a service, but they should absolutely also be required by the license to contribute back their modifications to the software. Like I said, I understand the complaints about the line-drawing issues with these licenses. I don't understand the viewpoint that the current state of OSS, where hosting != distribution, is acceptable.

So just use AGPL. It covers hosting, it requires providing modifications, it's actually Open Source without caveats.

Re: From where I left

#303

Post by stephenr »

jchw wrote: post #295
stephenr wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH oracle have been better stewards of MySQL since they bought Sun than Redis the company has been of Redis for the last five or so years.

I personally have wondered if Oracle's behavior with MySQL is partly motivated by the fact that if they try to rug-pull it will most likely just push all of the cloud providers over to MariaDB anyways, which has been doing just fine, and I think is already supported by Amazon RDS anyways. Ultimately I am totally fine with a fork-heavy ecosystem, the only thing I would erase if I could is the normalization of signing…

MariaDB is one of the biggest ironies to me: it was started because people claimed Oracle was going to do Oracle things with it, and somehow make it not open any more.

What actually happened is:

- Oracle has just made MySQL better, and continues to release new tooling (e.g. mysql router) for it under the same license (gpl2).

- MariaDB releases the bare minimum database engine under the GPL, and uses closed licenses for the tooling which is, to quote them: "an essential element to any production database environment".

Re: From where I left

#304

Post by motorest »

bornfreddy wrote: post #198
bitexploder wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud providers offer productized versions of Redis, so their interest in Valkey should be obvious :)

Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community rallied behind Big Tech instead of a small startup though. Just saying.

> Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community rallied behind Big Tech instead of a small startup though. Just saying.

The community rallied behind the project that ensures the software they care about remains free and open and available to all without the risk of being blind-sided.

Re: From where I left

#305

Post by ralusek »

Truly psychotic community response.

History of this pattern:

- There is an open source project, someone wants to work on it full time.

- They set up a SaaS version of their project.

- Other SaaS interlopers eventually come about, but typically none of them can keep up with the main project's SaaS offering as they're at cutting edge and usually most competent and familiar with the project

- Then, a player like Amazon comes in and simply competes on the infrastructure front in a way that the original SaaS offering can't compete with, nor can anybody else.

At this point, the original project isn't able to exist as a business. If your reaction to this is "that's fine, the community can take over from here." Then that is literally the exact option on the table today. From the very moment that Redis Labs was made non-viable by AWS under their original license, the fork was right there for the open source community to take over. It's exactly the same as if the company had gone under. Go nuts with it.

But then when it comes to the license they come up with: it is literally the most obvious and reasonable thing I could possibly think of. Do whatever you want with this software, just don't release the project directly as SaaS.

It is so crazy to me! Nobody's labor was stolen. Every contributor to every patch of the project's work is preserved under the license under which they contributed. Go make Rediss. Go make Reredis. Or just keep contributing to Redis, knowing we can all keep using it, we just can't go make Reredis Labs. I think I'll survive.

Re: From where I left

#306

Post by Osiris »

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…

I look at bun in the JS ecosystem like this. They are open source for now but also backed by VCs. They will have to make money at some point.

I have no interest in engaging with that product just to have a new pricing model thrown my way and disrupt everything.

Re: From where I left

#307

Post by gavindean90 »

skinner_ wrote: post #275
thayne wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in this case, antirez literally promised[1] they wouldn't change the license of the core away from BSD, and then Redis Labs did just that, and now antirez is speaking favorably of that decision. [1]: https://antirez.com/news/120

Wow, I wasn't aware. @jart, do you have any harsh comments on the actual reneging of an actual promise? @antirez, do you have any kind of comments?

That post was from literally thousands of days ago and seems to be in relation to some confusion at that time.

Honestly to me you can see the tensions that led to the license change in that post. It’s largely consistent with what antirez has said in the post and in this thread.

Re: From where I left

#308

Post by enugu »

simonw wrote: post #151
bsnnkv wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally I've re-read this a few times and I'm still not sure what "harmful to open source" means in this sentence, could you expand on this a bit when you have time? (readings I considered: this will dissuade people from using OSI licenses, this will dissuade people from trying to monetize open source components, this will dissuade people from…

I see the open source movement as being about developers sharing their work in order to raise all ships and dramatically accelerate the rate at which participants in that community can build cool software. A lot of that benefit comes from not having to worry about licenses: pick platform components with known open source licenses, build cool things with them. I think the rise in not-quite-open-source licenses (especi…

One of the motivations of copyleft licenses like GPL which are a part of open source, was the freedom for users to see and modify code. The fact that the user works with the software in a browser rather than inside a native app is a technicality which shouldn't mean that the principle becomes invalid.

Of course, this makes it harder for developers to monetize their work. But, instead of framing the discussion in terms of these conflicting interests and finding a balance, the term 'open source' becomes a debate target (even though the OSI definition includes AGPL which is also radioactive if one wants to monetize the work.)

So we have three parties 1) Users 2) App Developers who write commercial closed source code for the user facing app 3) Dependency Developers who write code used by App Developers.

(There is a simplification here as 2 can be a startup writing selling a closed source dependency used by other developers)

Just as App developers would like to monetize via user payments, some licenses allow the same option for Dependency developers while simultaneously allowing source code to be available and modified.

The basic idea behind such a license is 'free of cost and inspectable/modifiable code for almost all users, but commercial for large companies making a significant revenue from the software'.

There needs to be some work done, to make the license predictable - which users it requires to pay, and the price involved.

Re: From where I left

#309

Post by Spivak »

antirez wrote: post #109
fishtoaster wrote: post #80

I'm really interested in this bit: "the fracture with the community is not about licensing, or at least it’s not mainly about licensing" I wish he'd elaborated a bit more on what he thought it was about. My understanding is that it's 100% about the license. That's certainly why I'll reach for valkey instead of redis next time I need it. That's also what I've heard from everyone else in a similar position. What else w…

For somebody, like you and many others, it was very important to retain an OSI license. But I feel that in general given that the new license is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what they can do with the code, and that the cloud situation was quite self evident, I believe that with better communication, and immediate developments/merges in the core, to counter balance the license switch, many people w…

> is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what they can do with the code

I think the thing that hurts a lot of folks is the one thing they wanted to do with Redis is use a managed version of it in AWS. And now they can't. We're trying to figure out our migration path right now and it's almost surely going to be Valkey.

Large vendors were never going to pay up and so it's all loss for everyone involved. I have to do work, every project that works with Redis has to do work to support Valkey now, the eventual divergence will force people to pick a side which will probably also be Valkey for everything other than the client libraries Redis Labs personally develops. It's a mess.

Open core proprietary add-one for new fancy AI features could have avoided the split and gotten you in the door with big cloud vendors willing to sell your add-on in the marketplace with revenue sharing. They did it with Bedrock and Anthropic is making bank off it.

Re: From where I left

#310

Post by devsda »

agumonkey wrote: post #229
sangnoir wrote: post #174

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 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)

I wonder how the oss community will react if the sequence of events were a little different.

1. Redis Inc creates a fork of Redis and names it say RedisNext or anything else(xyz) without a reference to Redis name at all.

2. Announces that, xyz is a fully compatible next gen version of Redis with enterprise features but it is only available under SSPL license.

3. Also announces that original Redis software is feature complete and will be under maintenance with only critical bug fixes.

This will be them playing by the same rules as any other third-party.

Will the community still manage to find fault with Redis Inc?

Will it feel entitled to continued updates or the Redis brand demanding a project handover to a different "group"?

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