Live data from Hacker News

From where I left

antirez.com

281–290 of 472 posts

Re: From where I left

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get the hardcopy? (I already have the paperback for "Crafting Interpreters", but I prefer to buy hardcopies if available) As far as I was aware, there are only paperbacks.

There are only paperbacks. By "hardcopy", they meant "printed". I sell print editions through Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. Amazon is the lion's share, so I designed the print edition based on the formats they offer. At the time I started working on it, KDP only supported soft covers. They added hard covers right as I was finishing the book, and I didn't want to have to go back and redo everything. I have to admit that…

I'm not sure how these services work, but are you planning to offer hard covers as well for a "next print"?

I've had my eye on Crafting Interpreters for a bit now, and I don't mind paying extra for a nicer version — especially if it's going into the pockets of an independent writer.

Re: From where I left

#282

I’m amazed Antirez didn’t fork Redis and start fresh like Monty did MySQL. AWS, Azure and GC would be thrilled to support his work on an OSS fork. After 9 years surely any contractual constraints have expired? Maybe a sense of moral obligation? Or perhaps Redis Inc recruited him to prevent exactly this? Either way we all very much appreciate the work you have done. Redis has been a game changer for many of us running…

He has stock options in redis labs, so existing financial ties - although he mentions in his blog his comp for coming isn't wild, I wonder what the option package looks like

Re: From where I left

#283
post #68

For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons: 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust. 2. From a purely selfish point…

> Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free

It's worth noting that the bulk of the code was written by antirez with only ~12 others exceeding 100+ commits [1]. And if you continue scrolling the number of commits-per-user drops off fast. It's striking given how famous the project is.

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors

Re: From where I left

#284
I've been a redis / elasticsearch user since the early days. Seeing these companies grow has been sources of inspiration for me.

I'm glad you're back and look forward to redis's future. There is still a lot of work to be done.

In terms of licensing there is no right answer, large companies evidently abuse opensource, at the same time community is required to make projects like redis / elasticsearch grow.

This is a good move and I think the future is long with redis. So much to explore and so much more that can be done.

Re: From where I left

#286
post #283
post #68

For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons: 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust. 2. From a purely selfish point…

> Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free It's worth noting that the bulk of the code was written by antirez with only ~12 others exceeding 100+ commits [1]. And if you continue scrolling the number of commits-per-user drops off fast. It's striking given how famous the project is. [1] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors

It goes far beyond the actual codebase to the long tail of supporting projects, conference talks, blog posts, etc

Re: From where I left

#287
post #134
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc" I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is that such value never gets lost. People are able to fork, and after a fork for the original project to still lead will be require to put something more on the table. Inside Redis it was tried…

With open-source software, a license is as much a social contract as it is a legal one. People contribute because they want to be part of a community building something which is beneficial to everyone . Everyone contributes where they can, and in turn takes what they need. Redis Ltd. broke the social contract. They decided that the short-term profitability of the company was more important than the project as a whole…

No well-known permissive open software license includes any promise to do future development, much less to make it available under the same license terms. A key draw of permissive licensing is that anyone can fork and put new work under new and different terms.

Who would promise perpetual maintenance for nothing? What organization would sign up to be the only one that can't change terms for improvements?

I don't think "social contract" makes sense here. There's no sovereign power involved. In the sense used, "social contract" essentially means "not in the contract"---as in not in the terms. It's a back door for saying things that were never put down ought to be treated like they were in the license file, just because one side really wants them and doesn't want to DIY or pay for them.

If there are disappointed expectations, that's another thing. But being even very disappointed, and being able to find other like-minded people who would prefer no disruption and new freebies forever, doesn't make unfounded expectations enforceable, nor should it.

I'd be extremely careful speaking of any singular "community". And of assuming that everyone in it expected Redis or another similar project to work just like Linux or other exceptional projects. Most devs dealing with open source have a project relicense---among many others than simply grind to a halt---at some point in their career. For some devs, Redis may have been the first. Others "adopted" Redis knowing the risk and accepting it.

Re: From where I left

#288
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> although they are treated as radioactive by most companies Isn't this reason enough to not consider it an option?

AFAIK, the main issue of the GPL family of licenses is that they are rather poorly drafted. The GNU project has great evangelists but ideological-minded people make bad lawyers. Their licenses are long winded and hard to interpret, and often make assumptions about unsettled bits of copyright law. Their legal theories (eg. "GPL is not a contract") have been rejected by courts. In short, if you're a company wanting to…

Can you link some info on the portion about contracts having been rejected by the courts? I’m having trouble finding specifics on that myself.

Re: From where I left

#289
post #127
post #68

For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons: 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust. 2. From a purely selfish point…

> I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally I've re-read this a few times and I'm still not sure what "harmful to open source" means in this sentence, could you expand on this a bit when you have time? (readings I considered: this will dissuade people from using OSI licenses, this will dissuade people from trying to monetize open source components, this will dissuade people from…

Successful open source projects historically involve a bunch of companies lowering their costs by commoditizing expensive commercial functionality. Server operating systems, version control, programming environments used to be very expensive.

Linux, git, Python, Postgres, etc weren’t about getting rich, but about making something cheap and easy.

The paradox of these single company backed OSS projects is somehow making a big chunk of it free/open but collecting money off of other services. To me, I’m not sure that’s worked yet. Many will even say that these companies aren’t really doing open source in the traditional sense, but acting as commercial vendors that let you look at the code.

Post reply on HN