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Why AWS Supports Valkey

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Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#31

Post by skywhopper »

tonyhb wrote: post #20
hbogert wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole open source model is scratching each others back but your own just a little bit more. But you make it sound as if aws was hypocritical for contributing and at the same time making money with it. Well ehh, isn't that the whole deal?

No, not given the people who created Redis, built distribution, made it a standard didn’t get paid. Open source isn’t about letting someone else gain from your work. It’s about openness. That’s why it’s of course in AWS’ benefit to support a fork. They claim to have helped the project therefore should be trusted going forward, despite latching onto it after the work was done to gain adoption. That’s fairly controllin…

The company that owns the name “Redis” did not create the software.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#32

Post by sverhagen »

hackcasual wrote: post #7

It's hard to quantify, but I think Amazon would have to be in the top contenders for most value gotten from open source software

If I use Redis software on AWS, am I getting the most value, or does AWS? Exactly by offering ready to go implementations of known open source projects, are they increasing or decreasing my AWS lock in? Does it even matter? If they didn't offer these, which are saving me effort (thus money) today, wouldn't I just be running these myself on an EC2 or ECS setup?

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#33

Post by Dalewyn »

dig1 wrote: post #26

It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it'…

>It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized.

We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#34

Post by chipdart »

blowski wrote: post #23
watermelon0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that apply to all cloud providers, not just AWS? All of them are heavily based on open source software, from Linux, KVM/Xen, and K8s to MySQL/Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra, etc.?

I’d guess the OP is right in nominal terms, because I think those companies combined have made less profit than AWS.

I don't think OP is right at all. Just because a company offers managed instances of any random FLOSS service that does not mean they are profiting out of that service.

From the customer standpoint, the choice is between running self hosted instances on bare VMs or use managed instances, and if managed instances are not available then they don't have a lot of alternatives. Managed instances are cheaper to run and operate, and are more reliable, thus it's more advantageous to use those services. For the cloud provider, they are getting paid either way.

It's not like function-as-a-service offerings, where cloud providers charge users a premium for computational resources that run on spare cycles and allow far higher utilization rates, thus getting paid in two or three different ways.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#35

Post by tsimionescu »

tonyhb wrote: post #13
tsimionescu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course. That is a major reason why people use open source. And since AWS was a contributor to Redis, why it would be absurd for them to pay license fees on a project they helped build and maintain.

Yeah, they probably could/should. It'd take a lot to get developer adoption and buy in to a separate product that AWS builds themselves, so they adopted Redis. Easy money. It's easier to piggyback on something that won while making lots of money from it and say "well, I helped..." if things chanbge. Then, they chastise the creators as bad people once the gravy train stops. AWS benefited from hosted redis before contr…

Redis is just one option that AWS offers. They have their own, separate technologies as well. But people were looking for managed Redis, so AWS started selling managed Redis.

Redis Inc also wanted to sell managed Redis, but they can't compete on price/features with AWS, so they instead used the leverage they bought over the Redis community to make Redis effectively non-FOSS.

AWS doesn't depend on Redis. They only have a Redis managed offering because people keep asking for managed Redis. They were also actively contributing to Redis. They really did everything right here, but it still wasn't enough for Redis Inc.

Note that I am not affiliated with either AWS or Redis in any way. I don't even use it in any of the projects I work on. I've just been following this conflict because I am interested in the way open source communities work.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#36

Post by chipdart »

_3u10 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> It doesn’t want to pay license fees.

When a business is strong-armed to pay for something, doesn't it make sense to spend the money on an alternative that is cheaper, more reliable, trustable, and preserves its control?

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#37

Post by chipdart »

hbogert wrote: post #6
_3u10 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter. Based on the open source license redis had before, what did aws do wrong? They didn't even have to contribute back, yet they did. Investors of redis based their SaaS offering on open source and community work. Now that they achieved critical mass they want to reneg on the license.

> And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter.

People who parrot these mindless rants on licensing purity would do well to learn what Redis inc actually is, what's it's relationship with Redis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_(company)

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#38

Post by jasode »

Dalewyn wrote: post #33
dig1 wrote: post #26

It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it'…

>It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.

>I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money,

Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money.

Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license.

That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license.

Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right.

The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community:

- start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change

vs

- start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL

[1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#39

Post by pritambarhate »

I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK.

Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.

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