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Redis is open source again

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Re: Redis is open source again

#261

Post by jraph »

sneak wrote: post #168

This is disappointing. The AGPL is a nonfree (and nonsensical) license. The fact that the FSF wants a EULA but can’t have a EULA without violating Freedom 0 doesn’t make the AGPL suddenly logically sound. marcan has written about it in more detail than I care to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30044019 Stop using the AGPL. It violates the basic principles of free software. The ability to run a SaaS company with…

You can run a SaaS company with AGPL-licensed software, no problem.

What do you think is nonfree about AGPL?

Re: Redis is open source again

#262

Post by jillesvangurp »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #172
xiwenc wrote: post #9

A bit more info from CEO: https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ Sounds like SSPL did not yield the desired outcome. Glad AGPL is an option now.

It did yield the desired outcome: Google and AWS are no longer using it.

If by desired outcome you mean split the developer community and then chase them away to a newly forked competitor that is now widely used by all the cloud providers and users that prefer open source; complete success!

But I doubt that was the outcome that they hoped for. They created a large and successful competitor that by nature of being a fork does exactly the same thing. It's pretty hard to compete with yourself and the differentiate from your own product.

Honestly, I think Redis Inc. was better off when there was just one code base. AGPL just marginalizes them further. It's not an acceptable license for many corporate legal departments. So, it would necessitate buying a commercial license for such companies. I.e. Fortune 500 companies, public companies, and pretty much anything with a legal department worthy of the name. Note how Redis advertises AGPLv3 as "one" of the available licenses. The whole point of that license is selling commercial licenses.

Valkey is at this point stable and supported and a drop in replacement. It's pretty much the default choice for anyone not interested in buying a commercial license. That genie isn't going back in the bottle with this license choice.

More importantly, Valkey is a pretty active Github project with dozens of contributors in the last month. More than double those in Redis. Those commits aren't going to Redis. And Redis still requires the right to re-license your commits if you try to contribute. That's how they were able to pull this stunt to begin with. I doubt a lot of the Valkey contributors will be moving back to that status quo.

Re: Redis is open source again

#263

Post by eduction »

I'm always grateful for open source code, but on AGPL I can only quote the lawyer Kyle Mitchell:

"Inebriated aliens might as well have beamed it down from space as a kind of practical joke..."

"It’s not just hard for lawyers, who have the legal picture and can parse the whole license very carefully without passing out...It’s also hard for hackers, even those familiar with free software lore, who lack the legal side of the picture and a sense of what other ways things might have been said. Imagine how people who don’t know software, law, legal drafting, software architecture, hacker culture, or the self-styled 'philosophical' musings of one Richard M. Stallman feel."

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL

As Mitchell implies folks who want network copyleft should look into the more straightforward OSL3, IMO.

But it's something, and it's not my call to make because I didn't write the code, so properly I can only be grateful.

Re: Redis is open source again

#265

Post by sigzero »

Alupis wrote: post #256
ketzo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Many people switched to Valkey and didn't even know it. A lot like how many users are using MariaDB but think they are using MySQL. 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.

Well that's a reason not to use a distro right? If I type `sudo dnf install redis`, I want to install redis not valkey.

Re: Redis is open source again

#267

Post by atonse »

joshstrange wrote: post #242
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 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.

Ah so this is like how Android being open source was (almost) always bullshit. You had to play all kinds of google dances to get the google apps on them.

Fair point! good example of an attempt to extinguish.

Re: Redis is open source again

#268

Post by bornfreddy »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #118
weinzierl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure why Redis is blamed for the "rug pull". They didn't relicense the old versions. They just said "sorry guys, we don't want to support this project under those terms anymore". They are under no obligation to do that, legal or moral. Don't like it? No problem, fork it and maintain it yourself (as many did). But don't demand of others to continue to support the project under those terms if they do not want to. This is FOSS working as intended.

All those people that contributed, did so to the FOSS version. Their contributions live on in all the forks, both FOSS and proprietary (by Amazon & co., and Redis before today). So not sure where "betrayal" supposedly happened. Maybe when Amazon used their contributions too?

Re: Redis is open source again

#269

Post by jraph »

immibis wrote: post #142
xiphias2 wrote: post #41

,,for companies rooted in open source, it has posed a fundamental challenge: how do you keep innovating and investing in OSS projects when cloud providers reap the profits and control the infrastructure without proportional contributions back to the projects that they exploit?'' I don't see any exploitation happening. As DHH said, the main reason engineers open source their work is to give a gift to the world.

Open source is a gift to everyone (including Jeffrey Bezos); free software is a sharing economy. The difference is whether the sharing is reciprocal. With open source it's a one way gift from you to Jeffrey. He could have paid you for that. At the very least you can make him pay with reciprocal sharing.

I think you are not describing the difference between open source and free software but the difference between copyleft and permissive license.

Open source and free software licenses are basically the same (there are a few exceptions). For me, the difference is the focus. Free software cares about user freedom first.

Re: Redis is open source again

#270

Post by joshstrange »

atonse wrote: post #267
joshstrange wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah so this is like how Android being open source was (almost) always bullshit. You had to play all kinds of google dances to get the google apps on them. Fair point! good example of an attempt to extinguish.

I couldn't agree more with the Android comparison, I made the same comparison to VSCode a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787009
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