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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

51–60 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#51

Our company made the switch over to Valkey, and we've invested hundreds of engineering hours into it already. I don't see us switching back at this point especially when it's clear Redis could easily pull the bait-and-switch again.

Your company invested hundreds of engineering hours switching from Redis to a clean fork of Redis?

At the very least you have to validate everything that touches redis, which means finding everything that touches redis. Internal tools and docs need to be updated.

And who knows if someone adopted post-fork features?

If this is a production system that supports the core business, hundreds of hours seems pretty reasonable. For a small operation that can afford to YOLO it, sure, it should be pretty easy.

Re: Redis is open source again

#52
post #37

Our company made the switch over to Valkey, and we've invested hundreds of engineering hours into it already. I don't see us switching back at this point especially when it's clear Redis could easily pull the bait-and-switch again.

how does it take hundreds of hours to swap out a back end when you're using a trivial protocol like redis? did you switch out the client or something? maybe the problem is not using pluggable adapters? is your business logic coupled to the particular database client API? oof. I know the cluster clients are different (been there, done that) but hundreds of hours, seriously? or was that just hyperbole?

By switch I mean that all new projects use Valkey instead of Redis, and we've invested hundreds of hours into those new projects. We've also tried stuff with the Valkey Glide client.

Re: Redis is open source again

#53
post #33

I contributed a minor (but imho still neat :p) improvement to Redis under its original license, and personally moved to using redict when the unexpected license change to SSPL was announced - and I was feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase. (Had they switched to AGPL right away, I'd have been perfectly fine with that change from a moral perspective, ftr.) I have a great deal of respect for ant…

Microsoft made one called Garnet, I wouldn't say its a fork though, its basically compatible with Redis and implemented mostly in C#. It supports the RESP wire protocol from Redis for ease of compatibility.

https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

Re: Redis is open source again

#55
post #37

Our company made the switch over to Valkey, and we've invested hundreds of engineering hours into it already. I don't see us switching back at this point especially when it's clear Redis could easily pull the bait-and-switch again.

how does it take hundreds of hours to swap out a back end when you're using a trivial protocol like redis? did you switch out the client or something? maybe the problem is not using pluggable adapters? is your business logic coupled to the particular database client API? oof. I know the cluster clients are different (been there, done that) but hundreds of hours, seriously? or was that just hyperbole?

Hundreds could be 200 which, at 10 hours a day 5 days a week, is like a week and a half for a team of 3. It seems quite possible if you had to do testing/benchmarking, config changes, deploy the system, watch metrics, etc.

Re: Redis is open source again

#56

I'm curious whether the community will trust Redis-the-company again after this, or if they'll choose to stick with Valkey. The other concern is at least some big company legal departments are wary of AGPL software, which makes Valkey, still BSD, more attractive to them. Edit: Regardless, thank you and the rest of the folks inside Redis for pushing to bring this back to OSS!

[deleted]

Re: Redis is open source again

#58

Here's the play: Open source with AGPL, then offer an enterprise license. You get two wins. The OSS community applauds your adoption of an agressive OSS license. Enterprise customers can't use software under AGPL because it risks infecting their IP, so they're forced to buy an enterprise license.

    s/can't/choose not to/
    s/'re forced to//

Re: Redis is open source again

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your company invested hundreds of engineering hours switching from Redis to a clean fork of Redis?

I can easily see this for a midsize company. While it's likely an easy process to drop in valkey, creating the new instances, migrating apps to those new instances, and making sure there's not some hidden regression (even though it's "drop in") all takes time. At a minimum, 1 or 2 hours per app optimistically. My company has hundreds of apps (hurray microservices). That's where "hundreds of hours" seems pretty reason…

[dead]

Re: Redis is open source again

#60
I think the big drop in trust was the change in licensing away from permissive in the first place, but AGPL-today is a much better choice than SSPL-forever.

You probably can't recover from a loss of trust in low single digit years unfortunately, but this is a good first step towards the project rebuilding the OSS community that existed around redis initially.

Thanks for fighting for this. Hopefully this shows more companies stuck on source-available that you can achieve similar goals with OSS licenses.

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