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From where I left

antirez.com

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Re: From where I left

#381

Post by thanksgiving »

alecco wrote: post #349
berkes wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Note his "build a business on it" angle. It's not an open source problem. Greedy techbros want free support forever from the community while contributing almost nothing back. Same for large corporations. They see this as "rug pulling". I think developers need to do a lot more of that for things to change.

OP wrote

> The license language is almost the same as the AGPL, with changes regarding the SAAS stuff. So, not OSI approved? Yes, but I have issues calling the SSPL a closed license.

What is it that changed from AGPL in SSPL that was absolutely needed? Why can't we have an AGPL 1.1 or 2.0 if it is a breaking change? I am not saying anyirez is wrong. I would like to learn why this was necessary, if at all.

Re: From where I left

#382

Post by mattmanser »

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…

One of my clients is using OpenSearch instead of Elastic.

Big mistake. It's already behind elastic search, and worse too. It has bugs, weird behaviour and updates are already slowing.

On top of that, elastic have cunningly changed parts of their offerings to mean OpenSearch users can't use the elastic examples. For example they completely changed their .Net Core library so all new documentation in elastic is totally useless for OpenSearch.

They've added a way in the dashboard to run SQL for quick queries, etc. The OpenSearch version of that is buggy as hell, and for all intents and purposes useless because if you get the SQL wrong it just shows a blank screen instead of the error.

I'd be very aware of those problems, which appeared pretty rapidly, when going to these big corporation supported branches.

You are asking for trouble and are totally dependant on the company keeping that branch going who have little incentive to maintain or improve it now you're locked into their PaaS.

Re: From where I left

#383

Post by andrewshadura »

benatkin wrote: post #235
jonny_eh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and remains truly open-source, unlike Redis.

Redis from Redis Labs, available under a choice of its own license or the SSPL, is pretty close to truly open-source , IMO closer to it than the BUSL, which is another source-available license. It is pretty similar to the AGPLv3, and they even credibly applied to get it OSI-approved. https://blog.tidelift.com/what-i-learned-from-the-server-sid... https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11291/how-to-... What it…

It's not truly open source if the most basic freedom, freedom to use code for any purpose, is not fulfilled.

Re: From where I left

#384

Post by andrewshadura »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #324
jonny_eh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and remains truly open-source, unlike Redis.

I hate that people feel the need to so strongly attach the generic term open source to Open Source InitiativeⓇ OSI Certified™ license's marketing (anti Stallman) propaganda as the one and only true open source. Redis' license is open in all the ways that matter.

OSI has nothing to do with being anti-Stallman. (I think the most anti-Stallman person is, unfortunately, Stallman himself, having done so much to destroy his own reputation.)

Even Stallman would agree that nothing can be open source if the freedom 0, freedom to use software for any purpose, is not provided. SSPL does not grant this freedom.

Re: From where I left

#385

Post by jillyboel »

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…

> However now I see that there is the case for giving the community something in exchange to the license change: a lot of good things in the core, a very good attitude towards the community, and so forth.

You can do this without fucking over past contributors. Just... Don't change the license. Then still do all that other stuff. They're not contradictory.

Re: From where I left

#386

Post by jillyboel »

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…

It absolutely is though. Do you not see any value in bug fixes? Do you think software never needs to be updated? We all know security updates are crucial, and pretending you can just run the old version forever is insane. If I contributed to redis in the past I did so under the assumption that I was contributing to a product that I could actually keep using. But instead they took all those contributions and gave the contributors a huge middle finger by denying them security updates and fixes.

And sure, you can say "just do the bug fixes yourself". But if I knew that was going to be the case, I'd never have bothered to contribute.

Re: From where I left

#387

Post by Towaway69 »

smolder wrote: post #361
antirez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This idea is similar to what some countries do around music: artist register with an government identity that collects copyright fees from venues that play music - live or otherwise (bars, clubs, theatres included).

The government identity then distributes those monies to the artists according to playlists collected from said venues.

It works for big acts, for small acts the overhead tends to consume the payouts.

Re: From where I left

#388

Post by Towaway69 »

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…

How do they manage the payout to the individual contributors?

If I fix a typo, do I get a payout at the end of year for my work?

IMO that’s what it comes down to, that contributors that work for these companies have they contributions reimbursed through their salary. Other contributors might not earn that salary.

Re: From where I left

#389

Post by liveoneggs »

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…

The BSD license doesn't allow changing it to another license any more or less than GPL.

Re: From where I left

#390

Post by hnfong »

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 didn't say contracts being rejected by the courts.

I said the FSF had a legal theory that "GPL is a license, not a contract", which was rejected by the courts.

Some reading: https://www.technollama.co.uk/us-court-declares-gpl-is-a-con...

Further cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24478769

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