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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

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Re: Redis is open source again

#111

Post by immibis »

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 goal of free software (noting that "open source" is a watered down version of "free software") is for everyone to share their sohrce code. To that end, licenses that require sharing of source code are used. LGPL says, roughly, you must share the source code of this software to anyone you shared the binary to. GPL is more extensive: anyone you shared the binary or the binary of something built on this software to. AGPL is even more aggressive: anyone you shared it to or gave access to it over a network. And SSPL is currently the most aggressive: you have to share the whole thing you built, not just what's linked with this software.

The more aggressive a license you pick, the more likely a corporation won't want to use it. But that's by design. They're allowed to use it, even commercially - they just have to give the source code back. If the software is useful enough, they will. We should make software useful enough for corporations to consider the be benefits of using it to outweigh the cost of having to share their source code. (Also the more source you make them share, the less likely this is. The Linux kernel succeeded at this.

SSPL is controversial and untested (and goes against the business interests of the OSI so will never be box-tick certified compliant) and likely counterproductive if it means you have to share things like Windows. AGPL is the normal "aggressively free" license. GPL is mostly for those who haven't discovered AGPL yet and MIT is for those who don't agree in the goal of source code freedom to begin with.

Re: Redis is open source again

#112

Post by antirez »

reconditerose wrote: post #90
antirez wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The I/O threading was initially implemented by myself, when I was still working on the core before rejoining, and is also available in Redis. So this is actually another case of the benefits ValKey got for being able to clone Redis, receiving money from the hyper-scalers that just want to maximize their revenues... They made certain improvements later, but Redis 8 (see the release notes in my blog post if you are cur…

The Valkey implementation of multi-threading is fundamentally different than what existed in Redis. The history dates back to work done in ElastiCache that was released as "Enhanced IO", https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/amazon-el... . The version released in Redis could only do about 350k RPS because of poor memory locality of operations, the inability to do command processing while handling I/O, an…

1. The fundamental idea was mine. Ideas can be improved, of course, and that's good. That was my point. However, allow me to say that Redis is fundamentally a "software of ideas" than anything else. Technologically it is far from impressive (Redis, ValKey, all the forks).

2. Redis 8 improves the same idea, too, released today.

3. If you claim [in a different comment here] you provided a lot of code to Redis, why you didn't send a pull request for that? So, you are practically saying you were using, at Amazon, all the BSD code we provided, but could not provide an important part of the code to us? You see how broken such model was? At least stop defending it.

4. We can now copy the implementation: the parts are reversed (the irony!), and your code is BSD as our was for 15 years. When we avoid doing things like that, is because we have issues with how certain things were made.

5. I don't understand the motivations of you and other AWS people commenting here today. You work for a company that is creating issues to the OSS ecosystem: this is hard to deny. You cloned (and, yes, the license allowed for it) the code of Redis, and work on it so that hyperscalers can continued to do what they used to do. We bring Redis back to AGPL, and you are here to do the interests of Amazon in the comments. Did you see me commenting your stuff, when you release your things, with comments like "ah! But this is unfair"?

There is to make choices. I understand that it was cool to continue to work at a Redis fork, and part of the incredible thing open source is, is that forks survive in the hands of different teams (but design ideas can be misunderstood and projects may turn into other projects). So if you are happy to hack on ValKey, I hope you'll have the best experience out of it. But there is to make choices on how/when to interact.

Re: Redis is open source again

#113

Post by rdtsc »

That's great news. I never liked the newly sprung up licenses. I understand the background but always felt a burden having to read and understand them, and wonder how they'd hold up in practice. GPL licenses have been around for decades and is something people, including legal teams, know more about.

And when I say "know", I don't mean "like": it could be that this will just make it easier for a particular team to decide that it doesn't want to deal with the AGPL, and they should go find something else, but at least it's clear what it is. As opposed to some BSSXYZWL license that you never heard of, which kind sounds like it's open source but kind of isn't...

Re: Redis is open source again

#114

Post by kiitos »

cyrnel wrote: post #87
kiitos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically nobody is using valkey.

Amazon really encourages valkey in the elasticache dashboard. There's a banner advertising lower prices and it's listed first in the dropdown when you go to create one. Default settings do have power.

Sure, but the impact of new customers and their decisions take a long time before they impact net statistics. All evidence I can find, regardless of domain or context, suggests Redis vs. valkey marketshare is something around a 99%/1% difference.

Re: Redis is open source again

#115

Post by kstrauser »

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.

> Enterprise customers can't use software under AGPL because it risks infecting their IP

This is factually untrue. If you want to link an AGPL blob into your app and ship it to customers, sure. In the vastly more common case where you're using a permissive client library[0] to connect to an AGPL server, there's no risk whatsoever.

At most, you might need to make your local changes to that server available to clients if they connect to it directly, as opposed to hosting a cloud SaaS setup where everything is internal to you. However, that's not the worst thing in the world. "Oh no, we improved a Free server our company depends on, and we have to share those improvements so that the person who gave us the server for free can also benefit from them" is pretty hard for me to sympathize with.

This is vastly more business-friendly than the non-FOSS SSPL.

[0]https://github.com/redis-rb/redis-client/blob/master/LICENSE...

Re: Redis is open source again

#116

Post by anonzzzies »

nilamo wrote: post #22
dismalaf wrote: post #13

AGPL is cancer. Valkey already exists, people already switched, it's already landed in a bunch of distros. I don't see anyone moving back, especially when Valkey has some big corporate support. And for my personal usage, Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

> Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine. Databases could always do what redis did. Redis doesn't bring functionality to the table, it brings speed. If database caching, pub/sub, and streams are good enough for your use case, there was never a reason to pay for an extra instance just to stand up redis.

Extra instance and developer overhead.

Re: Redis is open source again

#117

Post by rdtsc »

dismalaf wrote: post #13

AGPL is cancer. Valkey already exists, people already switched, it's already landed in a bunch of distros. I don't see anyone moving back, especially when Valkey has some big corporate support. And for my personal usage, Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

> AGPL is cancer.

Good, you can think it is cancer and stay away from it. You don't like it, don't use it. It's like those bright colored poisonous frogs from the Amazon. That's better than some newly made up license that's different than anything else, and you have to wonder how it would hold up in practice.

Re: Redis is open source again

#118

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

weinzierl wrote: post #70
c0l0 wrote: 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…

I think we need to get back to state where we take software licenses serious in letter and in spirit. The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.

> The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal

Yes, of course.

> and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.

Er, no, that's an unsubstantiated leap.

Re: Redis is open source again

#119

Post by kstrauser »

immibis wrote: post #111
matesz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goal of free software (noting that "open source" is a watered down version of "free software") is for everyone to share their sohrce code. To that end, licenses that require sharing of source code are used. LGPL says, roughly, you must share the source code of this software to anyone you shared the binary to. GPL is more extensive: anyone you shared the binary or the binary of something built on this software to.…

SSPL isn't recognized as either open source or free software. I don't think it earns being discussed in the same context.

Re: Redis is open source again

#120

Post by [deleted] »

cess11 wrote: post #107
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You do see how that's even worse, right?

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