[1] I am assuming this because valkey comes under the Linux Foundation umbrella.
Redis is open source again
251–260 of 815 posts
Re: Redis is open source again
#252I 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.
Re: Redis is open source again
#253Earlier 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…
This notion that open source projects aren't really open source unless they welcome all contributions is one of the dumber ideas in the world.
Re: Redis is open source again
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is likely some partial data of some specific fork or alike.
Re: Redis is open source again
#255Re: Redis is open source again
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
We kept using redis, the license change never affected us. We had no reason to switch.
I imagine there is quite a large, quiet fraction (majority) of users who were the same way. Not to say it’s not an important discussion!
Several major linux distros transparently switched to Valkey and the users are none-the-wiser. On Fedora, for example, doing `sudo dnf install redis` just installs Valkey.
Re: Redis is open source again
#257Re: Redis is open source again
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 an…
This is completely, factually, unequivocally, incorrect.
You can connect to Redis using their first-party, MIT-licensed client library. You can write proprietary software using that library with no requirement whatsoever to release your software under any particular license (although of course you still have to comply with the MIT license's attribution requirements).
If all software connecting to the AGPL'd service runs internally, you're not obligated to share your local changes to that service. This covers the vast majority of use cases. Using WordPress with a Redis cache? This doesn't affect you.
If you host an AGPL'd version of a Redis server and your customers connect to it from their own networks, then the only obligation you have over the tried-and-true GPL is that you have to share changes you've made to your Redis server with users. If you use Redis packages as-is like almost everyone does, this doesn't affect you.
So literally the only people who have to care about Redis being under the AGPL now are those who don't want to pay Redis for a commercial license, who expose their Redis server to customers, and who've made local changes to their Redis server. Everyone else gets to keep using it like they always had.
Re: Redis is open source again
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you open source something, the rich trillion dollar companies just steal it. If you're okay with that, that's cool. But they'll profit off of your work and labor. And the worst part is that at scale, the advantages of the sum total of open source is used to compete with you and put price pressure on your salary and career options. To rephrase that, the hyperscalers are in a position to leverage open source to take…
doesn't the Affero GPL v3 cover this? have seen some projects use it, I think it limits the server run parts of the software etc
Not everyone thinks infectious copyleft / free software is a problem. But it will mean that if you use AGPL3, every part of your stack has to be open. That doesn't work for everyone.
This is why "equitable source" / "fair source" is gaining traction. You can use a license like Apache and add in clauses with MAU/ARR/Hyperscaler limits that allows practically everyone else to use your software.