Redis is open source again • Hacker News Board

Re: Redis is open source again

#451

Post by fastball » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:51 AM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #364

jimbokun wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no possible way to compete against someone else who doesn't need to fund the development of the software but can still take in all the revenues and profits from deploying it as a service.

Not true, you can compete with the quality of the deployed service _separate_ from the development of the software. The quality of the service can include internal, at-scale optimizations that don't affect user-facing parity with the open-source software. Open source companies with SaaS offerings need to have plans to differentiate themselves on hosting quality, not features. Yes, you can do better at hosting your ow…

Silly take due to how these resources must be distributed. Redis corp is paying developers to work on Redis itself, so they have less money to spend on building out a cloud offering. AWS was not paying developers to work on Redis, so they have more money to spend on improving their cloud offering (of Redis).

"Impossible to compete" is hyperbolic (you can almost always compete), but from a business fundamentals perspective it is not a level playing field and odds of success in that arena are very very low. And as my sibling comment points out, this is massively compounded by the fact that (by their very nature), hyperscalers are also hosting other infra for you, whereas Redis Cloud is only going to be offering hosted Redis. So even if the DX/UX is much better for Redis Cloud, it is still an uphill battle to convince corpos and even SMEs to split up their hosting like that.

Re: Redis is open source again

#452

Post by fastball » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:52 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #377

antirez wrote: post #207

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.

I’d say that open source definitely lost, and lost real bad. Free Software won, as you ended up adopting the AGPL. It’s an important distinction.

No its not.

Re: Redis is open source again

#453

Post by fastball » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

gkbrk wrote: post #290

sigzero wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that is not normal at all, and absolutely should not be normalized.

It is much worse for my package manager to install a totally different software, than for my package manager to install a new version of the software I asked for that now has a different license. Also as an aside, SSPL is not closed-source.

If the distro wants to do something, they can throw a warning up saying "this package is now licensed with the SSPL, would you still like to install? Try installing valkey for a BSD-licensed alternative". But installing software I didn't ask for is bad, actually.

Re: Redis is open source again

#454

Post by Brian_K_White » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:58 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #367

lolinder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 keeps happening: 1. People put a lot of work into building databases. The license choice is OSS / FOSS. 2. Some people in the community (original authors, community leads) make a company around the database and continue developing it for years on end. They sometimes raise venture capital to expand the business. 3. Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily mill…

"walking off with your money"

This is the heart of all of these stupid takes. There is no "your money" for anyone else to walk off with. Nothing was stolen.

If you want to sell software, or rent access to software, then just do that honestly forom the outset. And good luck to you on that. I will not consume it unless I have no other choice, and I will not contribute to it at all period, even tertially by for instance developing things that use it or help people work out how to solve problems with it etc. In other words just generally not invest in it, in all the different ways one might invest in something. But hey maybe you will make something indispensible and do it better than anyone else can, and maybe you will get a bunch of other customers.

If you want to benefit from the adoption and goodwill and army of free work that comes with open source, then do that.

The honest reason to work on open source is because you yourself have recognized how much utility you have been given fo free because of it, and wish to pay it forward and basically add to humanity as a whole. What you get back out of it is the same thing everyone else does, the use of the software itself, plus your name being on it.

But if you license something open source, and then care the TINIEST BIT what someone else does with it beyond adhering to the attribution and share-alike terms, then you have missed the point of open source. You are bent about being "robbed" of something that was never yours in the first place. You have no right to Amazon's billions, even the part of it that they made by hosting a copy of some oss software you happened to have written. Amazon is not selling your property, they are selling a managed hosting service. You have no right to the revenue from that. The software being hosted is a community resource there for everyone to use like the air or water, only even better since unlike Nestle taking the water from everyone else, everyone else still has the software.

If anything the supposed injured party in all of these cases are the bad community members because they are often only OSS disingenuously in the first place. They start off with MIT/BSD style licenses because they know a lot of companies are allergic to GPL. But WHY are they so intolerant of GPL? Because GPL doesn't allow them to steal, but MIT allows them to steal. So they start with an MIT-type license because it's "commercial friendly" and then later cry that someone "stole" their B S freaking D licensed software.

People that do that were never writing open source for the purpose of adding to the community pool in the first place. It's either dishonest or at best, possibly honest but in that case just unbelievably incompetent and ignorant.

Re: Redis is open source again

#455

Post by cdelsolar » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:58 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #258

okanat wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hence "just using it" isn't a viable option. AGPL isn't LGPL, it infects anything that uses it over a network. 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 ha…

It’s amazing how much FUD there is over GPL/AGPL. I’ve seen at least 10 posts on this thread saying you have to open source your commercial software if you use the new Redis. I don’t know how there could be such a fundamental misunderstanding of one of the most common software licenses out there.

Re: Redis is open source again

#456

Post by fastball » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #283

sigzero wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I'm used to it" is a terrible reason for disagreement.

Re: Redis is open source again

#457

Post by jeswin » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

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…

If anyone betrayed the spirit of Open Source, it is those who were trying to siphon off the entire commericial value of these projects while contributing little back to the project.

Companies have to pay people to work on it. Hell, they are even entitled to profit from it. A world with commerically viable Open Source is way better than without it. Ditching OSS companies for trying to survive 90% of revenues going to $1T cloud vendors is counter productive.

Re: Redis is open source again

#458

Post by cdelsolar » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:00 AM UTC

bananapub wrote: post #163

matesz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, AGPL is a good license for enterprise, they don’t need to buy unless they want to modify source without releasing, am I wrong about this? Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good

> Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good what? why would you ask an LLM to generate some random text instead of looking up the actual answer?

Hi, it’s the year 2025

Re: Redis is open source again

#459

Post by fastball » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #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…

Isn't it though? They weren't contributing before and they weren't paying Redis corp before, now they are at least contributing to a fork (and still not paying Redis corp).

Presumably some of the things being worked on in Valkey, etc can be upstreamed back to Redis in some form (not entirely straightforward since it is a hard fork with a diff license, but concepts can be borrowed back too).

e.g. apparently Valkey has introduced some performance improvements. Redis can implement similar if it seems worthwhile. Without the fork those performance ideas might have never surfaced.

Re: Redis is open source again

#460

Post by fastball » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:08 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #422

aftbit wrote: post #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…

Yeah this take kind of surprised me, you really wanted Valkey to be the default option for cloud customers ensuring they'll have no migration path to your own offering? I just don't get it. You were getting $0 and now you're getting $0.

How often were people migrating from AWS Redis to Redis Cloud in the first place? I'm guessing not a lot.