Is it a business decision right ?
Redis is open source again
231–240 of 815 posts
Re: Redis is open source again
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we need to get back to state where we take software licenses serious in letter and in spirit. The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.
I mean isn't lying bad? They literally made public statements saying they "will always remain BSD." https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/
They already had made a strong statement by choosing BSD when GPL was at their disposal. That is a much stronger statement than some blog post that reflects a momentary snapshot of their plans.
It is just that people don't hear what they don't want to hear. Every BSD or MIT is a loud and clear statement to deny the guarantee that derivative works will remain free and open.
Re: Redis is open source again
#233I 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…
Anyway: thanks for having contributed to Redis :)
Not quite. Company can easily change license at any time. No string attached.
Re: Redis is open source again
#234Re: Redis is open source again
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why are they spending any time switching away from Redis at all unless they are a hosting provider offering Redis-as-a-service? I wasn't aware the license had any negative affect on private internal use.
Many legal departments cannot afford nuance when a newsworthy license change occurs. The kneejerk reaction is to switch away to mitigate any business risk.
I doubt having lawyers review your usage is more expensive than spending hundreds of hours of dev time to migrate.
Re: Redis is open source again
#236I 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…
Anyway: thanks for having contributed to Redis :)
Good decision, I hope the best for Redis!
Re: Redis is open source again
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but not the same infrastructure and configuration and documentation. Any reasonable operation will also do validation and assurance. That adds up if you have a sizable operation. "Hundreds of hours" is also not some enormous scale for operations that, say, have lots of employees, lots of data, and lots of instances.
The part you are thinking of is not the time consuming part.
Re: Redis is open source again
#238I 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…
I agree. That ship has sailed, at least for the foreseeable future. We switched to Valkey and it's our choice for a couple upcoming projects as well. To switch back now after this whole ordeal would make no sense at all.
Re: Redis is open source again
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You do realize the owners of the copyright can relicense it under any terms they want, even if it's a copyleft license like GPL, right?
Unless a CLA transfers copyright to the project owner, the copyright owners are every historical contributor to the project. Each contribution is owned by the contributor alone and they alone are able to grant rights to it.
A CLA often tries to mitigate this by making contributors give the project owners special rights at the time of contribution.
(Note that even if relicensed, this itself can never revoke licenses granted for prior versions unless that license specifically had revocation written into it.)
Re: Redis is open source again
#240I'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.
Yet. It's a drop-in replacement, and both faster and cheaper.