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Control the Ideas, Not the Code

antirez.com

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Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#21

Post by echelon »

dominotw wrote: post #17
echelon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too. You must be joking. Until the whole of AWS and GCP are open source, they're taking absurd margins on your business and locking you in.

not sure i follow, thats the whole cloud hosting model. yeah you can self host to avoid that but thats a whole another tangent. If you are already locked in then whats the benfit of choosing redis from a pointy haired boss prespective.

Amazon and Google are pouring resources into reducing the fitness of the Redis project, pilfering insane revenues, yet not once has either offered to open source their own core platforms.

They're attacking another company that is powerless to defend itself.

And the community cheers it on.

How kind of them to ensure valkey remains "open" so you can continue to purchase it through their hyperscaler product. They'll get their margins through your other usage and they won't pass that along to the Redis project. They'll be keeping that for themselves.

Sucking the oxygen out of the room while they metastasize into every area of the economy they can grow into. Dumping on healthy markets like an invasive species. Then they buy up the shells of once healthy companies, lay off the workers, outsource the labor.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#22

Post by gen2brain »

inigyou wrote: post #6
logicprog wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence for Valkey "widely replacing" Redis, instead of just rapidly gaining adoption as well ? Additionally, it's important to clarify that the replacement was 100% over licensing issues — iirc predating the vibe coding entirely — not the use of AI to code, and that furthermore, no one has to my knowledge pointed to any flaws in the Redis codebase even correlated with AI use. So this is a disingenuo…

100% of the employers I worked for since the time of Valkey had replaced Redis with Valkey.

100% of the employers I worked for (one employee) never did that switch. The license did not affect us; we had nothing to do with AWS and the like, so we just continued using Redis like before. We already had our RPM builds, so whatever course distros took, we did not even care to look.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#23

Post by philipallstar »

echelon wrote: post #9
inigyou wrote: post #3

As a reminder, Redis was widely replaced by its non-vibe-coded fork Valkey.

As a reminder, Amazon and Google pillaged the Redis project and took all the profits of themselves. OSI purity is hyperscaler brainwashing. They don't want to pay you. They want to take your labor. Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars off of Redis while the original authors and the company formed around it have gotten none of that. The best licenses for new database projects are fair source and open core.…

This isn't true, I don't think. For example, Instagram was built on Django, but I don't believe the Django founders magically got money because their totally free to use OSS was used in the way it was licenced.

If you don't want people to use your software and make money, then don't release it with a licence that explicitly says you may make money from this software.

What was stolen?

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#25

Post by logicprog »

m_ke wrote: post #20
logicprog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do highly unusual, off the beaten path projects with AI. For instance, a game engine written entirely in LuaJIT, but allocating almost all data structures using CFFI, a very unusual, custom object-orientation DSL I designed myself, and that uses SDL3's SDL_gpu library to do all rendering, a ton of GLSL 4.6 compute shaders cross compiled to SPIR-V and Metal (which constraints what GLSL can be written), and is a hybr…

It's not an issue of usual vs unusual, I'm saying the models are way better at writing and maintaining django or react code bases than your own hand rolled architecture that you define in some docs that it has to learn and keep in context. All of the models do an amazing job making local edits and working in small greenfield projects but once you get to full production systems with close to a million lines things sta…

I haven't hit nearly a million lines, that's true, these projects are "only" 20k and 45k lines of code or so, respectively; however, I do have directed acyclic graphs of worker agents, managed asynchronously by the agent I chat directly with, do huge architectural refactors (the most recent, was to update everything in the codebase that used the sychronous Lua standard library `io` functions to use the asynchronous, multithreaded IO system I created for the editor — at least, everything that could use the new library, which I kept deliberately simple in a few ways, and everything that wasn't already temporary, but you know) and that's turned out quite well, and at least for me, 45k sloc is nothing to sneeze at, especially since with a green field project there's less examples to keep them on track. I do regularly check in to make sure it's using my design to the fullest, as well.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#27

Post by inigyou »

echelon wrote: post #18
antirez wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it costs less, and AWS is in a dominant position. Users here are playing the side of the bully since they don't care about what is right and wrong with the hyperscalers. "BSD is better than AGPL!" And give money to the wrong side of the history. Nor that I expected anything better, the single person has a given sensibility, the mass, as a whole, do whatever is in a given moment convenient or believed to be more…

I wish you'd chosen a "non free" fair source or open core license from the start. Amazon has stolen enormous wealth from you and your collaborators. People cheer for the hyperscalers even though AWS and GCP are not at all open source themselves, charge absurd margin, and do everything in their power to lock you in. It's really unfortunate. Thank you for Redis. Hopefully AI gives them extra competition. There doesn't…

In order to really leverage a nonfree (proprietary) or more-free (AGPL/SSPL) license you have to have a substantial thing to protect. If you try to protect something trivial, your competition will just implement it themselves, unless your price is low enough to make that not worth it. Redis is relatively trivial, it is a REmote DIctionary Service. Amazon could have written their own Redis quite easily.

They didn't, because the idea is sufficiently non-obvious, but ideas are protected by patents, not copyright.

Even RMS recommended using LGPL in some cases to maximize overall freedom by not making your competitors copy it. In the case of Redis, GPL probably would've maximised freedom (but not revenue) as Amazon still could've used it and released any changes they made.

Valkey has diverged from Redis, gaining features like vector search and multithreading.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#30

Post by rpdillon »

echelon wrote: post #9
inigyou wrote: post #3

As a reminder, Redis was widely replaced by its non-vibe-coded fork Valkey.

As a reminder, Amazon and Google pillaged the Redis project and took all the profits of themselves. OSI purity is hyperscaler brainwashing. They don't want to pay you. They want to take your labor. Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars off of Redis while the original authors and the company formed around it have gotten none of that. The best licenses for new database projects are fair source and open core.…

I don't find this argument compelling because you're selectively applying logic.

Okay, so you don't like AWS or Google. Fine. What about the thousands of other hosting companies that use Linux, Apache, Nginx, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl for their offerings? Are Yunohost and Dreamhost evil for using Postgres and not open-sourcing their orchestration layer?

The precise reason I build my sites on top of Linux and Apache and Postgres is because I can switch hosts at any time. But what you're advocating for is being completely locked in to the hosting service that is controlled by the company that happened to have authored the database. I would never use a product from a company that had that attitude because I would be completely beholden to them.

I get your frustration that AWS and Google make it hard for database vendors to release their work under a truly open source license. But what you're advocating for would destroy a huge amount of the value of self-hosting and open-source.

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