Redis is open source again • Hacker News Board

Re: Redis is open source again

#91

Post by immibis » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

Flagged for misleading headline. SSPL is open source. It's just not the open source you want.

It meets all the criteria and the only difference from AGPL is how much source code you have to release and when - which is also the difference between GPL and AGPL. It has problems, but being closed source isn't one of them.

The OSI will never certify it, of course, because that would go against the business interests of the OSI members. The OSI is a consortium of companies who receive free labour from permissively licensed projects and to a lesser extent GPL projects, and it would like that to continue, which it cannot in practice under SSPL. The OSI article linked in a reply does not make a single point against the open-sourceness of the SSPL, and essentially just says they don't like it, and that some companies won't be able to comply, which is true of every free software license.

The FSF, Debian, etc haven't decided one way or another because it's not a very widespread license and they can just use valkey instead of wasting the effort.

Re: Redis is open source again

#92

Post by umbra07 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

matesz wrote: post #62

mmaunder wrote: post #49

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.

Wait, AGPL is a good license for enterprise, they don’t need to buy unless they want to modify source without releasing, am I wrong about this? Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good

the alternative is/was BSD.

enterprise hates AGPL. AGPL is generally not a serious alternative to BSD/MIT in corpoland, because something something (A)GPL-poisoning.

whether it's true or not doesn't matter. what matters is whether big tech considers AGPL infectious - which they do.

Re: Redis is open source again

#93

Post by aweiher » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #82

echoangle wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there usage stats available? How do you know this?

My guess is most people are using Redis via cloud providers. Did any cloud providers switch away from Redis?

ValKey is cheaper in AWS than Reddis

Re: Redis is open source again

#94

Post by nchmy » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #72

Very interesting that this is happening at the same time that NATS is going proprietary. Obviously Redis is way more well known, but as someone who has built a bunch on NATS over the last few years, this makes Redis an interesting choice to migrate to again.

apparently synadia is working with the linux foundation now to find a better way forward, and will release a joint statement soon. (CEO mentioned in their slack)

Re: Redis is open source again

#95

Post by nailer » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

If you care about open source, and would like Llama 3 to also be open source (instead of the current license which, like Redis' SSPL, isn't, depite Meta saying it is), you might want to add your vote to:

https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/issues/156

Re: Redis is open source again

#96

Post by doctoboggan » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

mmaunder wrote: post #49

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.

I think you are thinking of GPL. Many companies are happy to use AGPL licensed software in their stack.

Re: Redis is open source again

#97

Post by reconditerose » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

kiitos wrote: post #77

md3911027514 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would PaaS providers switch back to offering Redis? They've clearly all already invested a lot in Valkey (AWS, GCP, Heroku).

AWS and GCP offer valkey-based versions of products that are typically based on Redis, but those versions are currently, generally, preview-grade, and statistically zero customers are using them. They still offer the original, Redis-based versions of those products, which, statistically, 100% of their customers are using.

Do you have data to back up your claims? I see a lot of customer claims for Valkey here, https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/customers/. Neither of the AWS or GCP offerings are in preview.

Re: Redis is open source again

#98

Post by rmsaksida » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

kiitos wrote: post #68

placatedmayhem wrote: post #3

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!

Statistically nobody is using valkey.

I've been using Valkey simply because after I updated to the latest Fedora version, it dropped redis and pointed me to Valkey instead. I assume as more distros do this and more people update their systems, the Valkey user base will grow. But perhaps with the AGPL redis that will no longer be the case.

Re: Redis is open source again

#99

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #51

benwilber0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Redis is open source again

#100

Post by antirez » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

reconditerose wrote: post #65

eknkc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fork of the latest oss release right? I thought some completely new implementations were introduced.

It's not just a fork, there have been two releases on Valkey that improved performance and memory efficiency. There is a lie that Redis likes to spread that only their own employees were working on the core engine at the time of the fork, but most of the engineers on Valkey came directly from having worked on Redis OSS. A recent example is we modernized the hash table a bit: https://valkey.io/blog/new-hash-table/ .

Nobody wants to deny that Redis got from contribution from external developers. But it is fundamentally true that for like 8 years almost every substantial contribution was created by people working for Redis, and that later we got something that was still a small part compared to the total.

There are the commit histories, the GitHub contribution graphs. Everything is public. The current code base was written for the majority by a few single folks, for another small amount of the sum of all random people in the community, for a smaller part by people that now work at ValKey.