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From where I left

antirez.com

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Re: From where I left

#401

Post by neomantra »

Thank you antirez for all your OSS and social contributions. I love reading both your code and your prose. Welcome back and I look forward to the next chapters.

Something stated periodically, and certainly in these comments, is how the license upset Redis OSS contributors. I understand there are many perspectives on the story, but this is generalized projection to support a viewpoint.

Speaking just for myself as an Redis OSS contributor -- a very very minor one but I've spent hundreds of hours dedicated to Redis dev over the decade -- I wasn't bothered by it with respect to my donated time or IP. Beyond that, my opinion is that license holders have the right to do as the licenses permit, including changing it.

Without a survey, we don't know about the rest of the contributors and do we somehow weight their approval by the extent of their contribution? In the end, these opinions don't matter directly and what matters is the actions individuals and organizations take, which KV store they chose to support with time or money.

Clearly some contributors and their backers didn't like the change and forked Valkey. I have since started collaborating with Valkey. But as antirez pointed out how it would go, it's because of technical grounds, not because of license angst. Valkey was open to rejiggering its Lua integration, something Redis wasn't open to previously; so I took the opportunity to advance that with Valkey.

As Redis becomes useful to me again, e.g. with this Vector API, I would collaborate there too. We can have different tools for different purposes. Either way, it will be interesting to see how these two codebases advance...

Re: From where I left

#402

Post by antirez »

wslh wrote: post #399
antirez wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean that I wrote I have stock options, as before to rejoin. This was an important disclaimer and disclosure to provide transparently the situation.

Re: From where I left

#403

Post by jillyboel »

gavindean90 wrote: post #307
skinner_ wrote: post #275

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.

Ok so just because something is in the past it's become irrelevant? So no promises are ever worth trusting? The creator of redis LITERALLY said "Redis will remain BSD licensed". And it's no longer BSD licensed.

Re: From where I left

#404

Post by poulpy123 »

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…

> 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.

to be fair that's more an issue with linux distrib than with redis

Re: From where I left

#405

Post by SergeAx »

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…

> you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you

Why not just stay on the last version with the license of your original choice?

Re: From where I left

#406

Post by evanelias »

jillyboel wrote: post #403
gavindean90 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok so just because something is in the past it's become irrelevant? So no promises are ever worth trusting? The creator of redis LITERALLY said "Redis will remain BSD licensed". And it's no longer BSD licensed.

Where is there a "promise" in that post? Where is there any wording about it remaining BSD forever?

It's a post from 2018, about a specific license confusion situation that occurred in 2018. Context matters.

Re: From where I left

#407

Post by prmoustache »

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…

> 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code [...] it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license.

The whole point of the MIT/BSD licenses versus licenses like the GPL is to not be limited by that.

> It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust.

It feels like total ignorance from. If such license change bother you, you should only contribute to projects that are licensed under GPL or similar licenses and that don't force contributors to sign a CLA.

I don't like current Redis license, but nobody lost any code and any contributor can still contribute to any fork that started using the last open source version.

Re: From where I left

#408

Post by bandrami »

kunley wrote: post #144
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…

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)?

If you just call SaaS "hosting" does that change your view of things? Because I remember when commercial hosting for free software was actively encouraged.

Re: From where I left

#409

Post by evanelias »

BizarroLand wrote: post #238
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…

They're also stealing the name of the community. I feel like once a software is open sourced the name of that software should also be required to remain open sourced as well, and any closing of the source must come with a requirement of forking the software and changing the name. It's honestly pretty horrible that a group of people can take centuries of man hours away from the community and tell the community to kick…

You clearly feel very strongly about this topic; out of curiosity, are you a Redis contributor? If so, was your contribution done via your day job (paid time) or was it an outside/independent contribution?

> I feel like once a software is open sourced the name of that software should also be required to remain open sourced as well, and any closing of the source must come with a requirement of forking the software and changing the name.

Who should enforce such a requirement, and under what mechanism?

Open source licenses are copyright licenses, whereas product names are trademarks. These are separate legal concepts. Meanwhile "the community" isn't even a legal entity at all. As I understand it, there's nothing to "start litigating" here, and no one to litigate it.

Are you proposing that the OSI should change the OSD such that open source licenses must include mandatory trademark assignment to an independent nonprofit foundation? That's a rather extreme view if so.

Re: From where I left

#410

Post by evanelias »

jillyboel wrote: post #386
jart wrote: post #155

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. 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…

> 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

It sounds like you also have an assumption that the maintainers will spend the effort to maintain your contribution forever, after already spending the initial effort to review and integrate your contribution. This all takes time and money, which has to come from somewhere.

You're asking "Do you not see any value in bug fixes? Do you think software never needs to be updated?" from the contributors' and users' point of view. But the same exact issue exists from the maintainers' point of view.

A lot of people in this thread are commenting as if an open source contribution is a purely altruistic act by the contributor which then solely benefits the maintainers. That's far from the case in reality. Many third party contributors are writing their contributions as part of their day job (meaning they're paid to do it), and the contribution directly benefits themselves and/or their employer by fixing some problem they encountered or adding some feature that they needed.

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