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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

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Re: Redis is open source again

#191

Post by okanat »

mperham wrote: post #157
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 Yeah, this is BS. If you simply use AGPL software, it doesn't "infect" anything. If you *change* the AGPL software, you have to release the changes. It forces the big clouds to open source their Redis improvements.

For the type of software that Redis is intended for, integration over network is a must. Hence "just using it" isn't a viable option. AGPL isn't LGPL, it infects anything that uses it over a network. If Redis was AGPL when it was released, nobody would touch it.

Most of the readers of HN make their living from closed source software. You know well enough that non-hostile open source is just a market entry strategy and the type of copyright-driven maximally selfish capitalist markets just force open source to be not viable for a single company to thrive. Projects like Linux kernel are exceptional infrastructure projects that external companies support not build businesses just to ship.

Re: Redis is open source again

#192

Post by antirez »

reconditerose wrote: post #188
antirez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So, you are practically saying you were using, at Amazon, all the BSD code we provided, provide an important part of the code to us? You see how broken such model was? At least stop defending it. I'm not defending it, I'm trying to fix it. I want Amazon to contribute back. That's what I spend most of my time doing, but I can't just sit in a meeting and tell people we should give away code. It takes time to convince…

Yes, makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

Re: Redis is open source again

#193

Post by simonw »

Lots of cynical takes in this thread - and I get it, there isn't a guarantee they won't relicense again in the future (they have a CLA that would let them) and people feel betrayed by the last license change.

I think we should celebrate this anyway. It's a smart decision, it's what the community wanted to happen and it would be great if other companies with janky licenses could see "Redis relicensed to open source and had a great boost out of it", not 'Redis relicensed to open source and it didn't help them at all".

I'm delighted. Thank you, team Redis.

Re: Redis is open source again

#194

Post by Macha »

rustc wrote: post #144

They still require a CLA [1] so there's nothing stopping them from doing another relicense to a proprietary license tomorrow. The only way this remains open source forever is to accept AGPL-only licensed patches. [1]: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/d65102861f51af48241f607a...

That's sort of fine. As a personal user, someone could fork and maintain redis in that case, which wasn't true in the SSPL era.

Now AGPL+CLA is not a license I'd contribute under, but also Redis is so far down my priorities that it wasn't a project I was going to be issuing PRs for anyway.

Re: Redis is open source again

#195

Post by pcthrowaway »

homebrewer wrote: post #48
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…

The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull, so you should have expected it instead of feeling betrayed. I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.

You do realize the owners of the copyright can relicense it under any terms they want, even if it's a copyleft license like GPL, right?

Re: Redis is open source again

#196

Post by elAhmo »

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…

Likewise. Respect for antirez and all of that he is doing, but his hiring back feels like just trying to lure developers back after ridiculous move by the Redis corporation.

Given there are viable alternatives out there, I see no reason why someone should invest any time in Redis (we are using Valkey as a replacement).

Re: Redis is open source again

#197

Post by tough »

atonse wrote: post #187
tough wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does SQLite try to embrace, extend, and extinguish their competitors?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is from an era where Open Source wasn't the default for infrastructure. I don't know how you can extinguish something that's MIT licensed and has a million copies around the world.

I've read at least several stories from this era like AppGet's https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22

I wouldn't trust Microsoft near my open source code base in 3 centuries

They can extinguish it by just stealing all the code, and using their bigger marketplace advantage to become the defacto standard.

Re: Redis is open source again

#199

Post by Alupis »

tough wrote: post #197
atonse wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is from an era where Open Source wasn't the default for infrastructure. I don't know how you can extinguish something that's MIT licensed and has a million copies around the world.

I've read at least several stories from this era like AppGet's https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 I wouldn't trust Microsoft near my open source code base in 3 centuries They can extinguish it by just stealing all the code, and using their bigger marketplace advantage to become the defacto standard.

I'm fairly impressed Microsoft managed not to name their Redis competitor "Cache", just to pollute the keyspace like they do with so many of their other products.

Re: Redis is open source again

#200

Post by _Wintermute »

antirez wrote: post #112
reconditerose wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment has inspired me to switch to Valkey, thanks.
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