Live data from Hacker News

Redis is open source again

antirez.com

281–290 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#281
post #196
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).

Nothing wrong in checking other alternatives, but Redis the company didn't call me to rejoin. I approached them to do something like an evangelist and bring back some kind of community vision inside. Then... if you can code, you end coding often times, and instead of doing the evangelist I wrote the Vector Set data type :D Just to clarify that me rejoining was not some kind of "winning back the community plan". I wrote at large about all that, even clearly stating that even the paycheck is modest (to avoid that kind of conflict of interest of the economical motivation).

Re: Redis is open source again

#282
post #105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically nobody is using valkey.

If you use the latest versions of Redis, you are benefiting from the continued efforts of the Valkey development community. [1] This is Open Source working well. Unfortunately, the reverse flow does not work. [1] https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13638

I wonder how that works legally with CLA. If the person who originally wrote the code is not the one who signs off the PR. I assume the lawyers have signed off on it.

Did they maintain the author's copyright notice as required by BSD-3?

Re: Redis is open source again

#283
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree probably because I'm just used to it. Most of your major distros do this, including Fedora and Debian (the two largest). Usually this is due to license issues.

Re: Redis is open source again

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

[flagged]

Re: Redis is open source again

#286
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…

> contributed a minor improvement to Redis under its original license [...] feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase

How does this work legally? You write some code, contribute it under a certain license... and... a company can just re-license your code under any license they like?

Re: Redis is open source again

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said exactly that's a win of the community. But money are needed to pay the folks that work at open source software, and the companies that went for the SSPL were trying to protect their business (and, as a side effect, wanted or not, the ability to pay for such work). I believe the software world failed to protect open source software in the cloud era, but in general the environment that we collectively created made the open source software won.

Re: Redis is open source again

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a widely accepted claim. I do not see SSPL as open source, and neither do OSI[0] or FSF[1] or Debian[2]. [0] https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l... [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html [2] https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/

We need to stop taking the OSI or FSF's positions on anything as particularly valuable. The OSI is captured entirely by corporate sponsors. Amazon was paying a full-time salary a year to the OSI when the SSPL issue happened, the OSI had no ability to take a moral pro-labor stance without crippling their own operations. They still do not meaningfully answer to individual users: The OSI recently refused to disclose who…

The OSI and FSF make sense by prohibiting stuff like the sspl. Open source should express freedom and by putting restrictions on certain users no matter how evil they are wont express freedom at all

Re: Redis is open source again

#289
post #286
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…

> contributed a minor improvement to Redis under its original license [...] feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase How does this work legally? You write some code, contribute it under a certain license... and... a company can just re-license your code under any license they like?

They require a Contributor License Agreement [0] whereby you grant them the copyright to your contribution. Which means they become the ultimate decision-maker for all contributions and can relicense however and whenever they wish.

[0] https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-...

Re: Redis is open source again

#290
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I update my packages and suddenly an open-source software is replaced with a closed-source one, I would blame my distro. It's totally normal for distros to replace packages like this with the best replacement they have.
Post reply on HN