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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

221–230 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#221

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.

The announcement just happened. I don’t know that we know the results yet.

Re: Redis is open source again

#222
post #177

Earlier 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.

What does trusting antirez help me if he’s working for another company?

Re: Redis is open source again

#223
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…

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.

There are good legal reasons to avoid the GPL; there are open legal questions about whether the GPL and its variants are enforceable.

Re: Redis is open source again

#224
post #218

MinIO 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…

I believe the AGPL doesn't actually require this, even though MinIO may think it does. I hope someone gets sued over this some day so we may find out

Re: Redis is open source again

#225
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…

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 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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797

Re: Redis is open source again

#226

Earlier 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…

There's more to it than just having a fast hashmap: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

(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

#227

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!

We kept using redis, the license change never affected us. We had no reason to switch.

From the blog post it seems like existing users kept using Redis but new users adopted alternatives instead.

Re: Redis is open source again

#228
post #216

Earlier 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.

I see, I misunderstood that. I have read it as an attempt to prevent redis taking the 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

#229

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.

The announcement just happened. I don’t know that we know the results yet.

Elastic announced they were switching back a few months ago, we should be able to measure the results by now.

Re: Redis is open source again

#230
post #134

Earlier 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).

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

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.

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