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Redis is open source again

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Re: Redis is open source again

#241

Post by Alupis »

dharmab wrote: post #220
Alupis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a habit of "fake" open source. Particularly on Github. By "fake", I mean Microsoft largely treats their Open Source codebases like they are closed-source, in-house proprietary codebases that they happen to let members of the public look at. They'll accept a PR once in a while, but mostly it appears Issues and PR's are used as a free alternative to UserVoice. Every decision is made behind closed doors (p…

I make an open source, MIT licensed piece of software. I don't accept unsolicited contributions, but I document that people are free to fork the code and provide instructions on how to develop, test and build on your machine. Am I "fake open source"?

In my opinion, the spirit of open source goes beyond just tossing code over a wall for people to look at. In my opinion, it means accepting engagement from your users, their inputs and their contributions when/where warranted.

In my opinion, for something to be truly open source, I should be able to fix a bug I ran into, or implement a feature from the backlog and contribute it back upstream. If upstream is just going to ignore my contribution, pretend it doesn't exist, or reject it just because - then that codebase is just pretending to be open source.

That's not to say you are required to accept all contributions - I'm saying you should be open to contributions that A) save you time B) enhance the codebase or C) fix confirmed bugs.

In Microsoft's case - I don't see a lot of that going on. I see lots of Issues (bug reports), some PR's, but mostly opaque decision making, and complete silence on things the Corporate side of Microsoft doesn't want to comment on yet. Which is the beef - it's a corporate project run like it's proprietary but you can go look at the code. Again, better than nothing, but it's not really what I consider true open source.

Re: Redis is open source again

#242

Post by joshstrange »

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 guess it will depend on your definition of "extinguish" and a few other things but:

gestures wildly at the MIT-licenced VSCode codebase

Yes, they are not rug pulling the VSCode source but by locking down the marketplace (and never giving a truly open source VSCode, what developers think of as "VSCode") they are in the processes of locking out forks.

Re: Redis is open source again

#243

Post by antirez »

_Wintermute wrote: post #200
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…

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

You have all the rights. Usually I do my best to avoid confrontations of that kind, and to respect the work of others. But I see certain communication patterns that are, for me, too much, and I needed to tell it. I think go on HN, and comment in an aggressive way the work of competitors, during announcements days, is something fundamentally wrong.

Re: Redis is open source again

#244

Post by avinassh »

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/ .

this lwn article supports the argument that many cloud providers contributed back to Redis: https://lwn.net/Articles/966631

> It is also hard to reconcile the claims that cloud providers do not contribute with the actual commits to the Redis repository. A quick examination of the commits since the 7.0.0 release using gitdm shows 967 commits over that time period:

    Top changeset contributions by employer
    (Unknown)         331     34.2%
    Tencent           240     24.8%
    Redis             189     19.5%
    Alibaba            65     6.7%
    Huawei             50     5.2%
    Amazon.com         50     5.2%
    Bytedance          19     2.0%
    NetEase            13     1.3%
> Binbin Zhu, of Tencent, is responsible for nearly 25% of the commits to the project. Some of the contributors without a readily identifiable employer surely are Redis employees, but it's clear that the company has not been working alone.

Re: Redis is open source again

#245

Post by taway1525 »

simonw wrote: post #165

From this post on the Redis blog https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ it looks like they've made a bunch of new features available under the new AGPL license too: > Integrating Redis Stack technologies, including JSON, Time Series, probabilistic data types, Redis Query Engine and more into core Redis 8 under AGPL Redis Query Engine is new-to-me (I stopped following Redis closely after the license change) - it looks like an…

[flagged]

Re: Redis is open source again

#246

Post by preisschild »

umajho wrote: post #218

MinIO also switched to AGPLv3 a while back, and they stated that “the AGPL license requires that all software connecting with MinIO be 100% open source for you/your users not to be in violation of the license.”[^1] Since Redis and MinIO are somewhat similar, (Both can be used to store and retrieve data. Redis uses a custom protocol, and MinIO uses an S3-compatible API.) Should I assume that this statement also applie…

> Should I assume that this statement also applies to Redis?

I dont think it applies to clients using the API at all. It just specifies that the modified source should be offered to clients connecting over the API, but not that the client itself has to be open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...

Re: Redis is open source again

#247

Post by citizenpaul »

lolinder wrote: post #225
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…

Yeah, we just did this whole ride with Elastic [0]: company changes the license out from under the community, community revolts, company gives up and changes it back. Both companies even pulled the same "it worked" excuse ("while it was painful, it worked", "this achieved our goal"). Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later and both companies have sh…

This seems to be accelerating. I guess the era of lighting investment money on fire and pretending that the flames equal success is coming to an end.

Unless of course you are an AI startup.

Re: Redis is open source again

#248

Post by lolinder »

antirez wrote: post #207
simonw wrote: post #193

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 an…

Thank you, Simon. I believe that cases like Elastic and Redis returning back to an open source license is like writing on the rock: "open source won", at least in the system software space. Companies get created, prosper and fail over time, but this message is here to stay with us for a long time, and shapes the society of tomorrow. It's a win of the software community itself.

It's a win for the community over and against the corporations that are Redis and Elastic. They're not the good guys for giving in to the pressure. They tried to ride FOSS to prominence and then extract wealth on the backs of the community and found that the community mattered more than they did.

So sure, let's celebrate, but celebrate the community, not those who tried to pull the rug out from under them.

Re: Redis is open source again

#249

Post by [deleted] »

neonsunset wrote: post #137
Alupis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a habit of "fake" open source. Particularly on Github. By "fake", I mean Microsoft largely treats their Open Source codebases like they are closed-source, in-house proprietary codebases that they happen to let members of the public look at. They'll accept a PR once in a while, but mostly it appears Issues and PR's are used as a free alternative to UserVoice. Every decision is made behind closed doors (p…

Garnet has a discord server and has been actively accepting community PRs, so I don’t know what kind of nonsense you are on about. What is it with .NET that compels you to lie? Also FOSS and open contribution are different things, as sibling comment notes.

[deleted]

Re: Redis is open source again

#250

Post by joshstrange »

ziddoap wrote: post #162
kiitos wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> My claim that statistically zero (cloud provider) customers are using valkey should, I sincerely hope, be self-evident. I have no idea what the actual stats are. But no, I don't find your "statistically 0%" to be self-evident, especially in light of the other comments and links in this thread, and what I've heard elsewhere. I was hoping, since you presented it so confidently, that you had something more than "trust…

Their stats are "I asked an LLM", no, that's not joke, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860256
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