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From where I left

antirez.com

391–400 of 472 posts

Re: From where I left

#391
post #339

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…

TBH I don't know why the FSF had been pushing for this 'not a contract' narrative for so long either.

Maybe bad lawyering. Or some aversion to anything that looks like an EULA or that kind of radical-ideological shit.

PS: I found this link when digging in my archives:

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

That the GPL is a contract hardly came as any surprise to people familiar with the law. Lawyers and judges view any collection of terms as a contract, and tear-open licenses are the norm these days. But the FSF had its own reasons to say it’s a license, reasons that might be more important to the philosophy of Free Software than the court. Contracts require consent between two parties who join in the contract, if they are to be enforced. The GPL (and many other licenses that come with products) doesn’t have a signature page, so there is no explicit consent. If there is consent at all, it’s the implied consent that has become standard for “tear-open” licenses. Your acceptance of the license is indicated by some action, in this case integrating the code into your product. The default under copyright law is all rights reserved, which means “you can’t do anything with this” with some minor exceptions that are called “fair use”. Thus, if you integrate the software into your product, distribute it, or perform some other action that is restricted by copyright, you must have accepted the license because your alternative would be all rights reserved. Thus, the FSF asserts that the GPL is a license because they feel consent isn’t really necessary, they don’t want to argue about consent in court, and they believe that they can do all of the enforcement they need using a complaint of copyright infringement. Also, tear-open licenses were a much more foggy issue in law when the GPL came about. And then there’s the philosophical matter:

Re: From where I left

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: From where I left

#393
post #363

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 much did AWS and those contribute until they got locked out of using Redis? That's what's interesting. That they now have to sponsor an alternative isn't exactly surprising.

Re: From where I left

#394
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sort of. "Locked in" is a strong word, considering Redis will run on AWS just fine, either by buying their product or spinning up a couple EC2s and `docker run redis` (which is allowed under the license since you aren't reselling it). Yes, harder than clicking a button in the AWS console, but it's not like you're stuck completely.

I understand it more for OpenSearch, because scaling that is annoying, but Redis has built in cluster mode stuff that works fine without having Amazon's magic control plane.

(we're also using OpenSearch hosted by AWS but not for anything complicated, so haven't encountered what you have. seems like Elastic 7.10, frozen in time, which is fine for us. they forked the old version of the .NET library for people to continue using, but I guess you need to use the archived docs.)

Re: From where I left

#395
With all due respect, would it be more transparent for antirez to disclose whether he holds equity in Redis Labs and, if so, how much? While I understand he signed documents transferring ownership to Redis Labs, it seems ethical, especially in light of recent controversies, to clarify his position. Transparency on whether he benefits from Redis Labs’ decisions, or even a statement acknowledging that he cannot or will not discuss this would help address potential conflicts of interest and maintain trust within the open-source community.

Re: From where I left

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just lying?

Why? The original opensource lineage is valkey, it just changed the name. Redis is where the oss history forks and turns proprietary.

That's like saying Xfree86 is a fork of X.org, MySQL is a fork of MariaDB, or OpenOffice is a fork of LibreOffice. "Forking" is an event that happens in time, so project A cannot be a fork of project B if A existed before B.

Re: From where I left

#397

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.

Yep. It is exactly the same as with Oracle - you can use it IF you buy the license... but this also has requirements of playing the Vendor game and as provider you really use freedom to really take care of your customers

Re: From where I left

#398
post #395

With all due respect, would it be more transparent for antirez to disclose whether he holds equity in Redis Labs and, if so, how much? While I understand he signed documents transferring ownership to Redis Labs, it seems ethical, especially in light of recent controversies, to clarify his position. Transparency on whether he benefits from Redis Labs’ decisions, or even a statement acknowledging that he cannot or will…

It is literally written inside the post.

Re: From where I left

#399
post #395

With all due respect, would it be more transparent for antirez to disclose whether he holds equity in Redis Labs and, if so, how much? While I understand he signed documents transferring ownership to Redis Labs, it seems ethical, especially in light of recent controversies, to clarify his position. Transparency on whether he benefits from Redis Labs’ decisions, or even a statement acknowledging that he cannot or will…

It is literally written inside the post.

Thanks for the reply, I assume then the "no interest" is "no equity". Again, with all due respect to you, not trolling.

Re: From where I left

#400
post #155
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 is not a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you gifts.

I'm not sure that the developers contributing code from outside the company see it that way. An easy way to tell if contributors see a license change as a rug pull is if the forks that happen after the rug pull get traction.

> The new license seems perfectly reasonable, given how much companies like Amazon have exploited the gift economy to the point where it threatens these startups survival.

Most of the time, though, open source limits growth - and doesn't threaten the original author's startup. This is a really important distinction because there is a trade-off in choosing open source as a marketing strategy - you do potentially face competition from other contributors, users and parasites that will moderate growth.

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