Redis is open source again • Hacker News Board

Re: Redis is open source again

#201

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:00 PM UTC

tough wrote: post #197

atonse wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is from an era where Open Source wasn't the default for infrastructure. I don't know how you can extinguish something that's MIT licensed and has a million copies around the world.

I've read at least several stories from this era like AppGet's https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 I wouldn't trust Microsoft near my open source code base in 3 centuries They can extinguish it by just stealing all the code, and using their bigger marketplace advantage to become the defacto standard.

[deleted]

Re: Redis is open source again

#202

Post by tough » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:01 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #199

tough wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read at least several stories from this era like AppGet's https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 I wouldn't trust Microsoft near my open source code base in 3 centuries They can extinguish it by just stealing all the code, and using their bigger marketplace advantage to become the defacto standard.

I'm fairly impressed Microsoft managed not to name their Redis competitor "Cache", just to pollute the keyspace like they do with so many of their other products.

LMAO they're so evil its even mildly funny

Re: Redis is open source again

#203

Post by JamesSwift » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #36

benwilber0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your company invested hundreds of engineering hours switching from Redis to a clean fork of Redis?

I can easily see this for a midsize company. While it's likely an easy process to drop in valkey, creating the new instances, migrating apps to those new instances, and making sure there's not some hidden regression (even though it's "drop in") all takes time. At a minimum, 1 or 2 hours per app optimistically. My company has hundreds of apps (hurray microservices). That's where "hundreds of hours" seems pretty reason…

My understanding is that Valkey was forked directly from redis. So assuming you migrate at the forks point-in-time, then it literally is the same code.

Re: Redis is open source again

#204

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #180

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which part of their explanation for rejecting it do you specifically disagree with?

The entire claim of https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l... holds down to "the right to make use of the program for any field of endeavor" and the SSPL does not prohibit the use of software in any field of endeavor.

The OSI then strays into a lot of nonsense that demonstrates just how bought and paid for they are, such as "the understanding that their work was going towards the greater good", like apparently... being used by a company which does not open source it's platform and treats its employees so poorly they have to pee in bottles. And of course, they immediately claim that "now... contributions are embedded in a proprietary product" because of course, the OSI believes they own the term and definition of open source, and that everything they don't agree with is inherently "proprietary".

And then of course, they suggest "relicensing is not evidence of any failure of the open source licensing model" even though it is very clear that businesses being unable to survive producing open source is kinda big flaw in the goal of promoting the public software commons. (Taking it a step further, if the FSF argues free software is a moral imperative, not fixing this is outright immoral.)

Re: Redis is open source again

#205

Post by wg0 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

kamranjon wrote: post #32

One of the big things I love about Redis is that it’s become this tool for me to learn new techniques and explore data. Like, the new vector sets feature has let me really explore dense vectors and custom search and taxonomy mapping and all sorts of areas that seemed like a high barrier to entry for me, but now I’m just streaming stuff into llama.cpp with an embedding model and storing it in Redis and being able to d…

Redis is in SQLite and Wireguard league of simplicity and elegance.

Re: Redis is open source again

#206

Post by kevinsf90 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

kiitos wrote: post #149

ziddoap wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and statistically zero customers are using them You've said this twice now, but not provided any data or even a hand-wave to a possible source so that others could go get the data and look at it. If it's statistically something, where are the stats?

[flagged]

I recently moved on to a new company, but my prior company had a pretty large scale Elasticache Redis deployment in production (over 50 large clusters in us-east-1), and were in the middle of a complete migration to Valkey due cost savings, improved performance, and reduction in memory usage.

We've already completed migrating several large production clusters and I can confidently say that the migration had been pretty smooth and seamless.

Valkey is certainly production ready (at least on AWS it is). The team is looking forward to expedite and complete the migration

Re: Redis is open source again

#207

Post by antirez » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

simonw wrote: 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…

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.

Re: Redis is open source again

#208

Post by reconditerose » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

avinassh wrote: post #123

giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft made one called Garnet, I wouldn't say its a fork though, its basically compatible with Redis and implemented mostly in C#. It supports the RESP wire protocol from Redis for ease of compatibility. https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

Garnet fascinates me. Their benchmarks even claim that it is better than Redis and also Dragonfly. Are there any papers or write ups explaining what makes Garnet fast? (I do know its based on FASTER)

The tl;dr is it's just a lockless hashmap attached to a TCP server with a log. Simple Get/Set operations are highly optimized, so with high batching they are able to efficiently fetch a lot of data efficiently. The architectures scales very well when you add threads and data access that is uniform.

It struggles a bit on certain types of workloads like hot keys, think heavy hitting a single sorted set. It's a cool architecture.

Re: Redis is open source again

#209

Post by otterley » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

If there's a lesson to be learned from this drama, it's that changing a software license from a liberal open-source one to a anti-competitive one (even if the source is still available and open to contribution) is a one-way door and loses trust. Once done, even if you recognize your error and revert the license, you're not getting that trust back.

Re: Redis is open source again

#210

Post by jzb » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

kiitos wrote: post #68

placatedmayhem wrote: post #3

I'm curious whether the community will trust Redis-the-company again after this, or if they'll choose to stick with Valkey. The other concern is at least some big company legal departments are wary of AGPL software, which makes Valkey, still BSD, more attractive to them. Edit: Regardless, thank you and the rest of the folks inside Redis for pushing to bring this back to OSS!

Statistically nobody is using valkey.

That kind of assertion really needs some backup or it's just noise. I'll be honest and say that I have no idea what the usage stats for Valkey are -- and it may be that it's a drop in the bucket compared to Redis. But I don't know. Can you back this up or is this just your gut feeling?