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.
Redis is open source again
221–230 of 815 posts
Re: Redis is open source again
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Redis said they would never do something and then changed their mind (which makes the whole concept of saying you will never do something useless), while Amazon never said they wouldn’t use open source software for free (which is their right).
I'd still trust more antirez than amazon as entities. Never trust a company.
Re: Redis is open source again
#223I 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…
The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull, so you should have expected it instead of feeling betrayed. I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.
Re: Redis is open source again
#224MinIO also switched to AGPLv3 a while back, and they stated that “the AGPL license requires that all software connecting with MinIO be 100% open source for you/your users not to be in violation of the license.”[^1] Since Redis and MinIO are somewhat similar, (Both can be used to store and retrieve data. Redis uses a custom protocol, and MinIO uses an S3-compatible API.) Should I assume that this statement also applie…
Re: Redis is open source again
#225I 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…
Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later and both companies have shown themselves to be untrustworthy stewards. They came groveling back when it turned out that community goodwill really did matter after all, but this is definitely a "fool me twice, shame on me" situation.
Re: Redis is open source again
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 arc…
(I'd imagine implementing mechanisms for resilient storage and larger than memory data sizes would be the hard parts)
Re: Redis is open source again
#227I'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!
We kept using redis, the license change never affected us. We had no reason to switch.
Re: Redis is open source again
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure what that would achieve? Combining programs under GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is possible (the resulting work is under AGPLv3).
The imbalance I think _msw_ refers to is the fact that Valkey couldn't both take code from a GPL-licenced Redis and keep its license. So either they relicense, or they can't take code from Redis but Redis can take code from Valkey.
However, if the intention was the other way (to allow valkey to take code from redis), valkey should just go for AGPL as well, there is little reason to pick GPL if the code sharing would be the motivation for the license change.
Re: Redis is open source again
#229If 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.
The announcement just happened. I don’t know that we know the results yet.
Re: Redis is open source again
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? They can already just copy the code they want from Valkey, since Valkey is 3 clause BSD... But maybe Valkey should switch to GPLv3 instead to correct this imbalance. https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13638
I am not sure what that would achieve? Combining programs under GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is possible (the resulting work is under AGPLv3).
In theory, one would not be able to offer a combined program under other licenses (in particular, RSALv2 and SSPLv1), as those licenses have conflicts with GPL obligations.
Direct contributions to the Redis project avoid this issue via a separate Contributor License Agreement. It would only mean that Redis developers could not unilaterally copy code from Valkey.
I'm not saying that the Valkey community should do this. Personally, I think it's better off as a BSD-3 licensed project, with the community fulfilling the promise made by others that it would always be that way.