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From where I left

antirez.com

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Re: From where I left

#331

Post by tzs »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #302
strbean wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AGPL covers users interacting with the software remotely through a computer network which is not the same as covering hosting. There's often overlap but if it really is hosting that a project doesn't want to allow then they need something other than AGPL.

Re: From where I left

#332

Post by bonzini »

ksec wrote: post #31

Welcome Back. Antirez! ( Surprised This blog post is submitted just 2 min after it was posted ) I am wondering if Valkey has moved so far off from Redis the codebase couldn't be merged again? I am reading the top contributor to ValKey are now from Tencent Cloud, Google, Amazon and Ericsson. Could someone help with me with SSPL, is it essentially AGPL v3 except instead of releasing the source code only you have to rel…

You have to release the whole system under the SSPL. So there could be a reading where you can't use Linux, you can't use systemd, you can't use glibc, etc.

Re: From where I left

#333

Post by saghm »

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…

It sounds like your opinion is that the communication around the relicensing was the issue rather the relicensing itself, but from the standpoint of the people who decided there was enough of an issue to switch away from Redis, is that the case? As an outsider to the Redis community both before and after the schism, I don't know that you're wrong, but I have to imagine that if I were someone concerned enough to consider forking (or switching to a fork), I wouldn't be happy with someone involved in the project making a blanket statement about whether my motivations were actually about the licensing or not. Ironically, this seems like it's exactly the type of communication that could exacerbate concerns around licensing.

Re: From where I left

#334

Post by berkes »

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…

> It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms.

I'm not familiar with what's happening in this Redis licence change.

But if it was Open Source at version N, and you built your business (or stack, etc) on top of that, N will remain forever available to you as FLOSS, not?

Is the problem maybe that ppl expect future updates, maintenance to remain Open Source? Something that, AFAIK, no Open Source licence guarantees? So, misaligned expectations?

> That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis, there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects.

It's not new. MySQL, Redhat and many others have done this for ages in the floss community.

Re: From where I left

#335

Post by saghm »

ribadeo wrote: post #328
ribadeo wrote: post #327

This piece, while providing context, makes me question basically everything about Redis, despite it's lovely API. Antirez extolling the virtue of the current LLM wave of hype coupled with his bizarre apologism for Redis Labs behavior is less strange than "why is this guy not 1)personally extremely wealthy 2)having reserved some key powers and control from Redis Labs from day1 such that he could have steered this, aka…

"Hapless" is the word that comes to mind. I mean, if the OSS you write gets commercialized and you aren't the one commercializing it...

To play devil's advocate, even though I'll probably never write anything remotely close to as popular as Redis, if by some cosmic accident I accidentally make something open source with enough popularity that it could be made into a business, I wouldn't have any desire to be the one to do it because I have zero interest in owning or running a business in the first place. I don't think it's really that bizarre or hard to imagine that someone like making things that people find useful but not want to have to spend the immense time and emotional energy into being in charge of turning it into something that makes a profit. Some people are genuinely not motivated by money beyond enough to be comfortable, and I firmly believe that's not a bad thing!

Re: From where I left

#336

Post by xvector »

sanderjd wrote: post #260
kunley wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really hard to believe that no one defends antirez&co as protecting themselves from greedy overpriced SaaS businesses who were parasiting others hard work. What about them saases breaking a social contract of giving reasonable prices adequate to the effort put into a product (or a wrapper around the product)?

Lots of people defend these licenses on exactly those grounds. I, too, find it pretty mystifying that this seems to be a minority perspective here. At least this seems to be the case among the people who speak up when this comes up here. It's hard to know if there is a less noisy majority who feels differently about it.

I think the "silent majority" is just fine with this change. The OSS "extremists" will certainly be the noisiest about this - everyone else will continue on with life as usual, especially if they have an understanding of the concept of business pressures.

Re: From where I left

#337

Post by antirez »

saghm wrote: post #333
antirez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like your opinion is that the communication around the relicensing was the issue rather the relicensing itself, but from the standpoint of the people who decided there was enough of an issue to switch away from Redis, is that the case? As an outsider to the Redis community both before and after the schism, I don't know that you're wrong, but I have to imagine that if I were someone concerned enough to consi…

One thing is the normal user concerns, that are granted, and I understand and respect them. Another thing is forking, that in the specific case of ValKey was an effort whose impulse was provided by companies having an economic damage because of the license switch. So I think those are two orthogonal questions.

Re: From where I left

#338

Post by vinay_ys »

When someone puts a significant and useful software under an open license (like BSD) and nurtures a vibrant open-source community around it, sure, everyone else can definitely take it and use it for free. But nobody serious will use it just because it is free. They will consider other intangible but critical aspects like risks to themselves w.r.t future viability of the project, ability to get custom work done to it or around it, keeping up with hardware and software ecosystem trends etc. These things have second order implications – how healthy the broader developer ecosystem is, is there a broad base of core committers we can hire, how easy it is to upstream our changes, who else is using it at similar scale, criticality, cost efficiency; is commercial support available (sometimes 3rd party commercial business support ecosystem is essential due to regulatory/compliance reasons), do hardware vendors actively participate in the open-source community and ensure it runs well on their hardware etc.

Apart from free users, even the contributors have very similar considerations for their participation.

But the starting point is the license – it has to be a clear and unambiguous open-source license that is widely well-understood – especially w.r.t the blast-radius or infection radius of the license. Does it infect the library code that is linked/loaded into it? Does it infect the independent binary/processes that scaffold around it (say, control-plane, orchestrator, proxy etc)? What are the obligations if it does? If we have to get lawyers involved to answer these questions because it is a custom license that is vaguely written or it has never been challenged in a court or the license holder is of unknown reputation, these are huge red flags.

Another equally important consideration is the motivations of the stewards of the project. While this isn't explicitly stated, one cannot be naive about it. Contributors and users will have to consider a gamut of scenarios – best/base/worst scenarios and make their judgement. With smaller steward organizations, there are one kind of risks while with larger organizations open-sourcing there are other kinds of risks. If they are competitors in some way that's another challenge. If there is no natural alignment of use-cases functionally or non-functionally, that's another issue etc.

With recent changes in Redis, all these things have become less clear and straightforward.

Re: From where I left

#339

Post by tzs »

gavindean90 wrote: post #288
hnfong wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, the main issue of the GPL family of licenses is that they are rather poorly drafted. The GNU project has great evangelists but ideological-minded people make bad lawyers. Their licenses are long winded and hard to interpret, and often make assumptions about unsettled bits of copyright law. Their legal theories (eg. "GPL is not a contract") have been rejected by courts. In short, if you're a company wanting to…

Can you link some info on the portion about contracts having been rejected by the courts? I’m having trouble finding specifics on that myself.

I'm not sure it even matters.

If it gets to court you've got a plaintiff either claiming that defendant violated copyright or the defendant failed to follow the terms of GPL.

In both cases the defendant will respond that they followed the terms of GPL.

In both cases the court has to determine what the license means and then whether or not defendant followed the terms of the GPL. To do that the court has to decide what those terms actually mean.

For that I don't think it matters if GPL is considered to be a "contract" or "license" because as far as I have been able to tell the rules of interpretation are the same no matter how you characterize the document.

Maybe it could make a difference in the remedies that are available if plaintiff wins. If it is seen as not being a contract then it might be that the only remedies would be those under copyright law. Those would generally be an injunction ordering defendant to stop infringing and monetary damages. Actual monetary damages would be near zero so plaintiff would probably ask for statutory damages.

If it is seen as being a contract then potentially the remedy could include an order that the defendant release their source code. If the GPL infringement was distributing binaries without making source available this would probably be the remedy plaintiff wants.

Ordering the defendant to obey the terms of the contract is called "specific performance" and I believe is usually disfavored by courts if monetary damages are sufficient but since infringing GPL generally doesn't cause any monetary losses to the copyright owner and the whole point of the contract was to make source available I'd expect a decent chance plaintiff could get specific performance.

Note that this means that it is actually better for GPL to be seen as a contract.

Re: From where I left

#340

Post by Sloowms »

_acco wrote: post #214
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…

AFAIK, the reason for these changes is basically "prevent AWS from eating our business". Is that right? If so, are these trends harmful to open source? Are we not choosing between: 1. A world where all revenue in OSS infrastructure ultimately flows to a few big platform companies. 2. A world where these carve-outs are commonplace. Meta's carve-out with Llama is so interesting because it practically calls the big comp…

I think it comes down to the initial choice to make something open source. At that point you're well aware that big companies might use your code and profit more than you ever will. If you don't want that, don't open source and they will never use your code.

It's having your cake and eating it when you get popular by being open source and then add restrictions when you have success.

I think there should be a change to licenses where the trademark is tied to the license. You can go proprietary but you can't take back the name.

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