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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

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Re: Redis is open source again

#321

Post by crop_rotation »

_msw_ wrote: post #160
antirez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The fundamental idea was mine. Ideas can be improved, of course, and that's good. That was my point. However, allow me to say that Redis is fundamentally a "software of ideas" than anything else. Technologically it is far from impressive (Redis, ValKey, all the forks). 2. Redis 8 improves the same idea, too, released today. 3. If you claim [in a different comment here] you provided a lot of code to Redis, why you…

This exchange makes me sad. I know we can do better. I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job. I don't understand why people who have dedicated a lot of their time and emotional energy to keep open source ways alive and help build a community effort are attacked because they work for a company that needs to be ma…

Do you really want to know?

> I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job.

Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work(yes some random collection of repos and 2 PRs here and there is not the same thing) compared to how much it has benefited from open source. (I know I know OSS allows for all that so not claiming anything wrong). But it does show what the company policy must be towards open source (Consume all you can, contribute only when absolutely essential for the company barring exceptional circumstances).

> I don't understand why people who have dedicated a lot of their time and emotional energy to keep open source ways alive and help build a community effort are attacked because they work for a company that needs to be made the villain in the narrative.

Antirez is not attacking anyone above. English is not his first language and he is just putting out some of his thoughts (which people are free to disagree with but those are what he thinks), like how you casually slipped that you didn't get credit for one commit copied from valkey (where the copier is giving due credit in the PR by linking the source PR and the authors inline). So they copied a PR from valkey, and the redis blog post should give lots and lots of credits? If that was the standard, so many of AWS services will spend all their reinvent time giving credits to their source OSS projects.

Re: Redis is open source again

#322

Post by crop_rotation »

_Wintermute wrote: post #200
antirez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The fundamental idea was mine. Ideas can be improved, of course, and that's good. That was my point. However, allow me to say that Redis is fundamentally a "software of ideas" than anything else. Technologically it is far from impressive (Redis, ValKey, all the forks). 2. Redis 8 improves the same idea, too, released today. 3. If you claim [in a different comment here] you provided a lot of code to Redis, why you…

This comment has inspired me to switch to Valkey, thanks.

On the contrary it has made me appreciate antirez even more not just as a developer but as a true champion of open source who really wants open source to prosper and is willing to voice his opinions whenever required.

Re: Redis is open source again

#323

Post by thewebguyd »

Alupis wrote: post #241
dharmab wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make an open source, MIT licensed piece of software. I don't accept unsolicited contributions, but I document that people are free to fork the code and provide instructions on how to develop, test and build on your machine. Am I "fake open source"?

In my opinion, the spirit of open source goes beyond just tossing code over a wall for people to look at. In my opinion, it means accepting engagement from your users, their inputs and their contributions when/where warranted. In my opinion, for something to be truly open source, I should be able to fix a bug I ran into, or implement a feature from the backlog and contribute it back upstream. If upstream is just goin…

> In my opinion, the spirit of open source goes beyond just tossing code over a wall for people to look at. In my opinion, it means accepting engagement from your users, their inputs and their contributions when/where warranted.

I disagree. There's nothing about open source or the various open source licenses that require accepting engagement from the community and/or contributions.

Open source means allowing modifications, and sharing those modifications. It's in most licenses that the software is provided as is and without warranty.

> In my opinion, for something to be truly open source, I should be able to fix a bug I ran into, or implement a feature from the backlog and contribute it back upstream. If upstream is just going to ignore my contribution, pretend it doesn't exist, or reject it just because - then that codebase is just pretending to be open source.

A project not accepting outside contributions is still open source, not pretending to be, and the beauty of it is - if you want it to accept outside contributions, you are able to fork it and accept contributions on your own fork, or otherwise share your modifications. But there's absolutely no obligation of the original dev/owner to accept or engage with anything from the community. It's in the license, the software is provided as is and without warranty of any kind.

Maybe it's worthwhile to coin a new term, community software, to specifically make a distinction between projects that are community developed (accept contributions) vs those that don't.

Re: Redis is open source again

#324

Post by jimbokun »

_msw_ wrote: post #160
antirez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The fundamental idea was mine. Ideas can be improved, of course, and that's good. That was my point. However, allow me to say that Redis is fundamentally a "software of ideas" than anything else. Technologically it is far from impressive (Redis, ValKey, all the forks). 2. Redis 8 improves the same idea, too, released today. 3. If you claim [in a different comment here] you provided a lot of code to Redis, why you…

This exchange makes me sad. I know we can do better. I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job. I don't understand why people who have dedicated a lot of their time and emotional energy to keep open source ways alive and help build a community effort are attacked because they work for a company that needs to be ma…

> I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job.

The employment contract you signed.

Re: Redis is open source again

#325

Post by achillean »

echoangle wrote: post #76
kiitos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically nobody is using valkey.

Are there usage stats available? How do you know this?

Based on Internet-accessible services the number of Valkey servers is low (~120):

https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=valkey_version+port%3A...

Here's a chart of all Redis-compatible services (~55,000):

https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A6379+redis_vers...

Re: Redis is open source again

#327

Post by toast0 »

Alupis wrote: post #293
glenngillen wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked a few places that have major open source projects, it was eye opening to see how pervasive this seems to have become. It feels like over my lifetime I've watched the value/expectations/demands/definition of OSS shift from "source is available, and I can make changes to my own copy/fork of of it if required" to "source is available, and I will demand you make changes to it for me"

> source is available, and I will demand you make changes to it for me There seems to be a disconnect here. I agree, demanding someone else make changes for you is in poor taste. The issue is, some of these projects advertise themselves as being open source while having no meaningful way to contribute changes back upstream - ie. the spirit of open source. If I use your program for free, and encounter a bug, I should…

> There seems to be a disconnect here. I agree, demanding someone else make changes for you is in poor taste. The issue is, some of these projects advertise themselves as being open source while having no meaningful way to contribute changes back upstream - ie. the spirit of open source.

I mean, you're not demanding someone else make the changes. You're only demanding that they engage and build a community around their project and all that entails.

As long as the license is reasonable, anybody else could pick up the project and do the community building around it. Apache HTTP Server developed around community patches to NCSA httpd. I don't think hitch (from the people who brought you Varnish) is well know, but it started as stud with community patches. If something like this takes off, the originator will either start taking the community patches too, or not; it's their choice.

In the meantime, as a user, I get the benefit of whatever changes the origin provides and I can patch it as I want, and fix up problems that I see. That works for code dump open source and community open source,.

Re: Redis is open source again

#328

Post by cess11 »

neonsunset wrote: post #137
Alupis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a habit of "fake" open source. Particularly on Github. By "fake", I mean Microsoft largely treats their Open Source codebases like they are closed-source, in-house proprietary codebases that they happen to let members of the public look at. They'll accept a PR once in a while, but mostly it appears Issues and PR's are used as a free alternative to UserVoice. Every decision is made behind closed doors (p…

Garnet has a discord server and has been actively accepting community PRs, so I don’t know what kind of nonsense you are on about. What is it with .NET that compels you to lie? Also FOSS and open contribution are different things, as sibling comment notes.

MIT license is not FOSS, it's OSS at best.

Re: Redis is open source again

#329

Post by cess11 »

dharmab wrote: post #220
Alupis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a habit of "fake" open source. Particularly on Github. By "fake", I mean Microsoft largely treats their Open Source codebases like they are closed-source, in-house proprietary codebases that they happen to let members of the public look at. They'll accept a PR once in a while, but mostly it appears Issues and PR's are used as a free alternative to UserVoice. Every decision is made behind closed doors (p…

I make an open source, MIT licensed piece of software. I don't accept unsolicited contributions, but I document that people are free to fork the code and provide instructions on how to develop, test and build on your machine. Am I "fake open source"?

No, but you've deliberately chosen to not make it free software.

Re: Redis is open source again

#330

Post by _msw_ »

antirez wrote: post #254
avinassh wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this lwn article supports the argument that many cloud providers contributed back to Redis: https://lwn.net/Articles/966631 > It is also hard to reconcile the claims that cloud providers do not contribute with the actual commits to the Redis repository. A quick examination of the commits since the 7.0.0 release using gitdm shows 967 commits over that time period: Top changeset contributions by employer (Unknown) 331…

If you go into the GitHub of any of the forks, and check the contribution page, you will see this data is not correct. Probably all my commits are into this "unknown", since I push with @gmail.com account without being part of any organization for most of the time. This is likely some partial data of some specific fork or alike.

The LWN article is examining the 976 commits made after the 7.0.0 release. I don't think you had any commits during that time?

As is typical for software projects, early authors will be disproportionately represented in revision histories. I am still the #4 contributor to the Anaconda installer [1] originally used by Red Hat Linux, then RHEL, then Fedora, and others, despite not contributing to the code base for two decades.

[1] https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/graphs/contributors

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