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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

341–350 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#341
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exchange makes me sad. I know we can do better. I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job. I don't understand why people who have dedicated a lot of their time and emotional energy to keep open source ways alive and help build a community effort are attacked because they work for a company that needs to be ma…

Do you really want to know? > I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job. Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work(yes some random collection of repos and 2 PRs here and there is not the same thing) compared to how much it has benefited from open source. (I know I know OSS allows fo…

> Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work

This may have been true a decade ago, but things are quite different now.

> compared to how much it has benefited from open source.

This is the nature of digital public goods. We are all going to disproportionately benefit from digital public goods relative to what can be produced as new digital public goods. No one will ever, EVER be able to "contribute proportionately" given the endless bounty of software made freely available for all to use.

> If that was the standard, so many of AWS services will spend all their reinvent time giving credits to their source OSS projects.

The observant should notice a change in this over the years. For example, the announcement for Amazon Q Code Transformation [1] acknowledged that OpenRewrite was used under the covers, even though it was an implementation detail that didn't have to be disclosed...

Of course these disclosures and good-faith intentions to engage on open-source community terms under long-established community norms don't always work out the way we hope. [2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/upgrade-your-java-applicati...

[2] https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-tools/issues/1443

Re: Redis is open source again

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there usage stats available? How do you know this?

Based on Internet-accessible services the number of Valkey servers is low (~120): https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=valkey_version+port%3A... Here's a chart of all Redis-compatible services (~55,000): https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A6379+redis_vers...

And how representative are publicly accessible redis/valkey instances for redis/valkey usage in general? And can shodan even differentiate Redis from a Valkey instance setup in a backwards-compatible way without being able to authenticate?

Re: Redis is open source again

#343
Doesn't AGPL give you LESS rights? (fewer?)

AGPL is pretty much a non-starter for any commercial development.

The RSALv2 let you use Redis, unless you were a service provider. Now, you can't use it for anything (EVERYTHING is accessed over a network now) without sharing your source.

So, before everyone but amazon could use it for commercial purposes, now no one can.

Re: Redis is open source again

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of free software (noting that "open source" is a watered down version of "free software") is for everyone to share their sohrce code. To that end, licenses that require sharing of source code are used. LGPL says, roughly, you must share the source code of this software to anyone you shared the binary to. GPL is more extensive: anyone you shared the binary or the binary of something built on this software to.…

SSPL isn't recognized as either open source or free software. I don't think it earns being discussed in the same context.

only because OSI says so. I don't agree with the idea of OSI defining my philosophical positions and technical terms for me, just like I don't agree with the BSD people excluding GPL from the definition of open source.

Re: Redis is open source again

#345
post #271

Great to see this. 12 years ago I wrote https://github.com/rcarmo/miniredis during a very slow weekend where I both wanted to get a feel for the internals of how Redis worked and have a little PubSub server I could call my own. I spent the entire weekend poring over the C code and found it some of the most beautiful C I'd ever read (ever since the heady years of SunOS), and now I feel I should at least go and update…

Do it. I'm thinking of making one for node.

Already started. python3 branch. Claude removed all my nice idiomatic conditional expressions, but the (few) tests I have for the server already pass, and the aioserver is coming next :)

Re: Redis is open source again

#346
post #343

Doesn't AGPL give you LESS rights? (fewer?) AGPL is pretty much a non-starter for any commercial development. The RSALv2 let you use Redis, unless you were a service provider. Now, you can't use it for anything (EVERYTHING is accessed over a network now) without sharing your source. So, before everyone but amazon could use it for commercial purposes, now no one can.

1) you can still use it under RSAL.

2) you only have to share what you change. You don’t have to change it to provide it as a service, but if you do, you have to share the code. That doesn’t seem particularly harsh and certainly doesn’t prevent providing it commercially.

Re: Redis is open source again

#347
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In word, but not in deed. I'll say it over and over again: COSS startups don't adopt the AGPL because they want to prioritize user freedom, they adopt it as a means of defense.

Absolutely in deed. Just because they don't have the same motives as you, doesn't stop it being a user freedom. Anything that shares the changes and improvements is a user improvement.

You misunderstand my point. Startups adopt the AGPL, not for user freedom, but because of the FUD that makes the AGPL just like SSPL in practice.

I wrote more about the issue here: https://keygen.sh/blog/whither-open-source/

Re: Redis is open source again

#348
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT license is not FOSS, it's OSS at best.

MIT is one of the least restrictive licenses. If you think otherwise, I suggest checking if there's any aluminium foil on your head.

As a end user, I find it quite restrictive. There might be some software I won't be able to fork/modify because they were MIT. I'm not the owner of the software anymore.

Re: Redis is open source again

#349
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…

> 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".

If the other companies can't figure out that adopting a janky license and alienating the community is the self-inflicted problem, then they are beyond help. Relicensing to open source not helping the company may serve as a cautionary tale for other companies and may prevent them from repeating the same mistake. As an open source enthusiast, the worst case scenario is companies switching licenses tactically and frequently to test the waters and walking back with no consequences; I'd prefer the cost of such actions to be swift and severe.

Re: Redis is open source again

#350
From the CEO blog post - https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/

>This achieved our goal—AWS and Google now maintain their own fork

Was this really the goal though? Forcing your biggest users to fork your software and maintain their own divergent version is not really good for anyone. Sure, Amazon and Google (or AWS and GCP - type confusion in the source material) now have to contribute some more engineering hours to the open fork, but why would anyone still want to use Redis now that there's a permissively licensed alternative maintained by the same cloud hyperscalers who will end up running it for you?

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