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From where I left

antirez.com

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Re: From where I left

#361

Post by smolder »

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…

Put another way, many people have contributed to Bezos' bottom line for free. The restriction is annoying but there should probably be a better way to get a piece of that huge value for everyone who generates it, mostly thanklessly. Some kind of OSS tax proportional to profitability would make some sense, as annoying as that might be to implement or deal with.

Re: From where I left

#362

Post by mschuster91 »

bojanz wrote: post #360
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…

What I dislike about the license change is that by trying to extract an extra dollar from Amazon&Google, the entire community gets hurt in the process. Can I "dnf/apt install redis" on my Fedora or Debian install? I cannot, it's no longer packaged because it's no longer open source. Can I go buy a shared hosting plan and get Redis? Or a small PaaS that sits on top of AWS? I cannot, because we have decided that every…

> For decades we lived in a world where someone could sell you an Apache server and a MySQL instance without having to pay money to Apache or MySQL. We can change that social contract, but like all tariffs, this one will be paid by the end users, not by the companies providing the service.

Yeah, but the Internet community at large took care about funding. MySQL always had the commercial support leg to stand on, and Apache httpd... looking at the contributor list [1], it's a healthy mix of universities, large companies (IBM, HP), ISPs (Vodafone, Cable & Wireless), hosters (Rackspace), small consultancies and individual private contributors.

In contrast, the megacorporations are largely absent from FOSS contributions (the exceptions being Netflix and partially, where it suits them, Google, Microsoft and Apple).

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/contributors/

Re: From where I left

#363

Post by bojanz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #362
bojanz wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I dislike about the license change is that by trying to extract an extra dollar from Amazon&Google, the entire community gets hurt in the process. Can I "dnf/apt install redis" on my Fedora or Debian install? I cannot, it's no longer packaged because it's no longer open source. Can I go buy a shared hosting plan and get Redis? Or a small PaaS that sits on top of AWS? I cannot, because we have decided that every…

> For decades we lived in a world where someone could sell you an Apache server and a MySQL instance without having to pay money to Apache or MySQL. We can change that social contract, but like all tariffs, this one will be paid by the end users, not by the companies providing the service. Yeah, but the Internet community at large took care about funding. MySQL always had the commercial support leg to stand on, and A…

Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai, NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical, Chainguard, Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud, Oracle, Percona, Snap Inc and Verizon[0].

There is enough interest in sponsoring the development of infrastructure software. But if you want to build a "commercial arm", get VC funding[1][2] and earn millions, then it will never be enough. And I can't say it's unreasonable to want to do that, it just ultimately ends up being against the long-term interests of the project as a whole.

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/valkey-welcomes-new-pa...

[1] https://redis.io/press/redis-labs-raises-100-million-series-...

[2] https://redis.io/press/redis-labs-110-million-series-g-led-b...

Re: From where I left

#364

Post by riverdweller »

acmeian wrote: post #317
bornfreddy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft appears to be the only major player that isn't going with Valkey and established some sort of licensing deal with Redis [0]. [0]: https://redis.io/blog/introducing-azure-managed-redis

Microsoft also last year released their own Redis-client-compatible key-value store, Garnet: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

Re: From where I left

#365

Post by debugnik »

orra wrote: post #186
strbean wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to me that the prevailing opinion seems to be "It is only TRUE Open Source if megacorps can modify the software and resell it without sharing their modifications". The hosted vs. distributed loophole is just that, a loophole. If, when the GPL was first published, the world was cloud-hosted and SaaS-ful, the GPL would either have included some provision like the SSPL, or it would have had relatively little i…

> If, when the GPL was first published, the world was cloud-hosted and SaaS-ful, the GPL would either have included some provision like the SSPL, or it would have had relatively little impact on the world. Well, no on the first one. We know exactly what the GPL looks like to protect users against proprietary network hosted software: the GNU Affero General Public License.

But SSPL is already a modification of AGPL, so its terms don't seem to have be sufficient.

The SSPL's network provision also requires SaaS companies to release the source of any other services and APIs they made the original software dependent on; hard to tell if that's still a valid copyright licence or more of a contract.

Contrast them with EUPL, which represents the strongest copyleft the EU commission thinks a licence, as opposed to a contract, could get away with under EU directives (ignoring its compatibility clause). I'm personally wary of AGPL/SSPL not because their terms, but because the viral claises are likely to be a legal fiction where I live.

Re: From where I left

#366

Post by happyraul »

KingMob wrote: post #323
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…

> Why would anyone volunteer their time and effort when it is mainly going to benefit a company which is so openly antagonistic against its volunteers? Thing is, this sentence could equally be applied to the big cloud free riders. Why should anyone, business or volunteer, write software that benefits FAANGs that don't pay their fair share?

I'm no fan of FAANGs, but what is "their fair share"? The entire point of OSS is that they don't have a fair share to pay. It's entirely voluntary.

Re: From where I left

#367

Post by leosarev »

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…

I'm a vendor of some packaged on-premise solution. We are using a Redis as a cache layer inside. Risk of being forced to GPL out our installer is unacceptable for us.

Re: From where I left

#368

Post by mschuster91 »

bojanz wrote: post #363
mschuster91 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For decades we lived in a world where someone could sell you an Apache server and a MySQL instance without having to pay money to Apache or MySQL. We can change that social contract, but like all tariffs, this one will be paid by the end users, not by the companies providing the service. Yeah, but the Internet community at large took care about funding. MySQL always had the commercial support leg to stand on, and A…

Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai, NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical, Chainguard, Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud, Oracle, Percona, Snap Inc and Verizon[0]. There is enough interest in sponsoring the development of infrastructure software. But if you want to build a "commercial arm", get VC funding[1][2] and earn millio…

> Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai, NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical, Chainguard, Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud, Oracle, Percona, Snap Inc and Verizon[0].

Took 'em long enough to realize. I 'member the Heartbleed catastrophe and what pittances OpenSSL got [1]. And as always, there's an XKCD fitting just too damn well [2].

> And I can't say it's unreasonable to want to do that, it just ultimately ends up being against the long-term interests of the project as a whole.

That's the thing... conflicting interests, incentives and most especially expectations. Let's say I'm unhappy with the current state of managing a fleet of hardware servers and VMs, especially after the VMware disaster.

I could bite the bullet and pay VMware. I could go and get OpenStack running. It would be an utter pain to set up and run (because it is funded primarily by universities who don't have the constraint of "administration time effort" because that's what you have aspiring student volunteers for, but instead do have the constraint that it's hard to get hardware so OpenStack has to be flexible enough to support a ton of crap that any enterprise would have sent off to e-waste a decade ago). I could go and get Proxmox up and running, but it's AGPL so corporate legal may chew up my ass. Or I could whip up my own orchestrator, fit to work for my needs, and say I open-source it... and it might even be decent enough others may want to use it as well.

But then, many of these "others" won't be willing to pay for support, but they'll flood the Github issue tracker with all kinds of stuff that I now have to care about (because who wants to present a Github repository with dozens if not hundreds of open issues?), tons of feature wishes and demands (because obviously while I may run Cisco network gear for SDN, someone else may be a Juniper or whatever shop, and wants integration for that), and in the worst case someone gets 0wned because of some vulnerability that I might not even have realized - and I get the shitstorm for it, my name gets dragged through the mud like it was for OpenSSL or log4j.

So, basically I'm left with the choice between either accepting being labeled "lazy" (for not caring about "my project" enough) or to raise enough money to get the product competitive with what the other players are offering, and the only way for that is to go the VC route. And unfortunately, unlike old-school "startup capital", modern VCs want (or rather, because they're following spray-and-pray in their hunt for the 1-out-of-100 unicorn chance, have to aim for) the expectation of insane hyper-growth.

And then, one day, Amazon might go and say "hey, this FOSS thing is pretty cool, we'll add some glue code to integrate with IAM, backups and high availability, a fancy web UI and sell it on towards our customers". And suddenly, people would flock towards Amazon, who'd not be required to contribute back (because I chose either the MIT or GPL license to make adoption by others easier)... but I as well as the investors who enabled the product to grow to the stage where it was usable and popular enough for Amazon to commoditize would not see a single cent of it.

And everyone but Amazon loses out. I may be lucky enough to have gotten a few years worth of salary from VC funding (the reality is, most startup founders prioritize ramen lifestyle), the VC and their investors in turn lose out because why contract with me when they already got a frame contract with AWS, and the developers who worked with me also lose out for the same reason.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7575210

[2] https://xkcd.com/2347/

Re: From where I left

#369

Post by antirez »

leosarev wrote: post #367
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…

I'm a vendor of some packaged on-premise solution. We are using a Redis as a cache layer inside. Risk of being forced to GPL out our installer is unacceptable for us.

In your use case, you could not even use the AGPL, basically? Is that what you mean? Thanks. That would be an interesting point, but it goes over the borders of the SSPL itself. Would be more BSD/MIT vs all the rest.

Re: From where I left

#370

Post by gpderetta »

tzs wrote: post #339
gavindean90 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

Historically collecting damages were not the goal of GPL enforcement. Specific performance, or stop infringement by no longer distributing the software were the remedies. The latter is not always an option for the infringing party, and that's what submits them into compliance.
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