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The race to replace Redis

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Re: The race to replace Redis

#141

Post by pm90 »

anonthrow wrote: post #52
jsmeaton wrote: post #45

I’m usually pretty ambivalent when a company decides to move to a license like BUSL. Sure it’s not “free” - but practically it only affects the likes of AWS from freeloading while making extraordinary profits. Especially true when a given company started the project. I understand why some hold strong feelings on the principles of OSS. My perspective is we’ll have fewer nice things if we allow the likes of AWS to cann…

I agree with your points min general but want to share my experience and maybe some counterpoint. Being a customer of the redis labs' hosted solution, we noticed several issues: - RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's - RLs solution is not even close to elasticache in its ability to scale - when issues occur the organization internally moves incredibly slowly so simple issues can turn into prolonged outa…

> RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's

Its not cost effective if the service causes extended outages as you mentioned later.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#142

Post by mirekrusin »

vasco wrote: post #128
mythz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The licensing change only applies to their future versions which they own all contributions of which AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.

AWS leeches as much as Garantia Data no?

If you own copyrights you’re not the leech.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#143

Post by esquire_900 »

ensignavenger wrote: post #139
brody_hamer wrote: post #48

It wasn’t clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, which will continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!) So we as developers don’t have to scramble to replace redis in our SAAS apps and web based software. This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the re…

AWS was directly funding Redis development, from the article, they are one of the top contributors, they even employed one of the core redis maintainers full time to work on Redis.

Which is peanuts compared to the 350 million that the VCs invested. You're totally right, but I think the internal financial pressure is higher.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#144

Post by fractalb »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #133
fractalb wrote: post #116

I feel copyleft licenses look more favourable at this point of time. What’s the value of more free/business friendly licenses if you can’t guarantee that the same license will apply for all the future releases? Looks more like a bait and switch policy.

The future is never guaranteed. Much less if you have no paid contract with the people building and maintaining the floor underneath your feet.

AWS, GCP have assurance that they won't need to pay for their Linux infrastructure. What is it if it wasn't for copyleft licenses(GPL)?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#145

Post by francislavoie »

aragilar wrote: post #101
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not in Debian and their wiki straight up directs you to podman with a nice big scary warning about dockers root issue. https://wiki.debian.org/Docker Docker is dyeing on linux podman will be the only one that remains.

It's in Debian: https://packages.debian.org/sid/docker.io

That version is so old. I just use Docker's own apt repo to not fall behind.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#146

Post by crabmusket »

fractalb wrote: post #116

I feel copyleft licenses look more favourable at this point of time. What’s the value of more free/business friendly licenses if you can’t guarantee that the same license will apply for all the future releases? Looks more like a bait and switch policy.

Am I right in understanding that the relicensing was possible because of the CLA, not just because of the BSD license? Would a permissively licensed project that didn't use a CLA be vulnerable in the same way?

Re: The race to replace Redis

#147

Post by Thorrez »

mirekrusin wrote: post #142
vasco wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS leeches as much as Garantia Data no?

If you own copyrights you’re not the leech.

Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#148

Post by llm_trw »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #122
llm_trw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best idea I've come up with is a license which only grants the rights to a natural person to use the software otherwise it is identical to the MIT, GPL or AGPL, whatever your cup of tea is. If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.

Certainly not a new idea. As recently as early 1990s I licensed shareware that had terms requiring corporations to pay for a license with different fees and/or restrictions as those for individual, non-commercial users. Somehow this ideal was lost. Today, software authors seems allegiant to so-called "tech" companies, not to individual, non-commercial end users. As a non-commercial end user, I would prefer to use ver…

No, a non-commercial license is not a natural born person only license. If you're a human you get to use the GPL to your hearts content. If you're a corporation you do not.

It's not a hard concept to understand, but it does mean people can't steal from the commons so they spend a lot of time trying to not understand it.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#149

Post by llm_trw »

bawolff wrote: post #104
llm_trw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best idea I've come up with is a license which only grants the rights to a natural person to use the software otherwise it is identical to the MIT, GPL or AGPL, whatever your cup of tea is. If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.

This is not a new idea... i mean its so old it was called out as being "not free" back in the 80s by the gnu project.

The GNU project has failed at getting source code to users so badly that despite owning a half dozen GPL based devises I have no access to the source code of any of them.

At this point listening to them is at best pointless and at worst actively harmful. This is what happens when the last time you worked at a real job was some time in the 1980s.

Re: The race to replace Redis

#150

Post by meowface »

lolinder wrote: post #117
klabb3 wrote: post #70

Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes…

> that you can slap on a project without a legal team The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams. If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT and be done with it. If you're participating in a large decentraliz…

People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me.

You're right that it's probably not a great business model most of the time, but what is a good business model to collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating years of your life to something loved by millions of people? It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service with ads, or something.

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