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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

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Re: Redis is open source again

#351

Post by neonsunset »

Nab443 wrote: post #348
neonsunset wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT is one of the least restrictive licenses. If you think otherwise, I suggest checking if there's any aluminium foil on your head.

As a end user, I find it quite restrictive. There might be some software I won't be able to fork/modify because they were MIT. I'm not the owner of the software anymore.

"The MIT License (MIT) Copyright © 2025

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons..."

https://mit-license.org

Re: Redis is open source again

#352

Post by jonny_eh »

otterley wrote: post #209

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.

> you're not getting that trust back

It's not black and white. They'll get some trust back at least.

Re: Redis is open source again

#353

Post by gkbrk »

sneak wrote: post #314
jraph wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run a SaaS company with AGPL-licensed software, no problem. What do you think is nonfree about AGPL?

Not a differentiated one. The AGPL, in its quest to be a EULA, violates free software Freedom 0 ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html The AGPL literally demands specific functionality be present in the software that cannot be removed without breaking the license. The anticapitalist FSF zealots got so in love with the idea of closing what they c…

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

I can do this with AGPL software just fine. Which purposes are not allowed under AGPL?

Re: Redis is open source again

#354

Post by overfeed »

jimbokun wrote: post #316
lolinder wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that justification. These two companies (and the others like them) set up a model for funding their business knowing full well that they would have to compete with others who were able to provide the same service they were. That's always been baked into FOSS—you can't plan around a monopoly when you're releasing your code for free, that's part of the trade-off you make. When AWS and Co did provide hosting…

There is no possible way to compete against someone else who doesn't need to fund the development of the software but can still take in all the revenues and profits from deploying it as a service.

You make it sound like there is a way to compete against the same organizations if they funded the development of the software - it's not possible to compete against hyperscalers, period. Now that Amazon is funding a fork, is Redis, Inc in a better or worse position to compete?

Re: Redis is open source again

#355

Post by jan_g »

umajho wrote: 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…

Yeah, min.io really soured AGPL license, for me at least. Because of their stance I've switched away from min.io in our company and avoid everything AGPL like a plague. Having read the license many times and also all discussions around it, I understand that it should be fine to use an AGPL project in a commercial enterprise (without modifications, internally in backend network). However, if authors themselves of such a project believe and say otherwise, I'm really not going to risk anything and definitely not asking lawyers if "my specific use of min.io violates the license or not". I'm just using it as-is over network, internally in my backend deployment. Not modified and not exposed to external world.

Re: Redis is open source again

#356

Post by jaapz »

lolinder wrote: post #225
c0l0 wrote: 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 sh…

Interestingly their CEO states that AWS an Google forking redis and maintaining it separately was their "goal" all along. Because fragmentation is apparently good?

Re: Redis is open source again

#357

Post by gigatexal »

c0l0 wrote: 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…

I get the feeling. I also live in the real world and know that nobody except for a few (most notably RedHat) have figured out how to make sustainable money in open source. These closed licenses didn’t come out of nowhere. They came in response to places like AWS using the open source license to make a mint with a project — and doing so legally (it’s there in the license to do so) — but then the project suffers. So the license change is done to prevent that so the project — ostensibly — can survive. It makes sense. And so does wanting to live up to the promises of open source. It’s a tough situation for sure.

Re: Redis is open source again

#358

Post by em-bee »

eduction wrote: post #263

I'm always grateful for open source code, but on AGPL I can only quote the lawyer Kyle Mitchell: "Inebriated aliens might as well have beamed it down from space as a kind of practical joke..." "It’s not just hard for lawyers, who have the legal picture and can parse the whole license very carefully without passing out...It’s also hard for hackers, even those familiar with free software lore, who lack the legal side o…

maybe if you are a lawyer, and if you are trying to get around the license somehow, or of you have to defend the license against an abuser then the AGPL is challenging, but as a FOSS user and developer, it is pretty straightforward: the software runs on a server, you connect to it, you get access to the source that is running on the server. if you believe in the spirit of Free Software then there is no question what you should do.

if you are fussing about the details which code you need to share and which not then you are not following the spirit of Free Software. it's as simple as that.

also, consider that the AGPL is trying to be compatible to the GPL. that forces it to be more complicated. the OSL doesn't have that problem, and the OSL is also not compatible with the GPL, which is only ok if you don't want to integrate any other GPL software. although i suppose since the GPL doesn't require distribution on network access, this may not be an issue. but i don't know, i am not a lawyer. and so to be sure, i'll prefer the AGPL.

Re: Redis is open source again

#359

Post by kmeisthax »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #339
KZerda wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A copyleft license like the AGPL didn't stop MongoDB from rugpulling. I'd argue that the AGPL, and the copyright assignment that tends to go with it, makes it easier to rugpull because forking entities would be at an extreme disadvantage in keeping the lights on compared to the closed-sourcing company. A non-copyleft license, on the other hand, makes it much easier for a forking company to cover all the same niches a…

? How did MongoDB rug pull?

MongoDB used to be AGPLv3. A year after their IPO they realized "aww shit, Wall Street wants continuous growth, being profitable isn't enough" and decided to migrate to a completely new license, SSPL, that's designed to put everything surrounding the software in scope of the copyleft. The implication being that if Amazon were to offer MongoDB they'd also have to release all of AWS RDS[0] as a thing you could just download and use.

The community did not like this one bit, but MongoDB doesn't need to care about what the community thinks because they had CLA'd all their contributors. That is, if you wanted something in MongoDB upstream, you had to give MongoDB full copyright ownership over the software. Which exempts them from copyleft[1]. One of the critical parts of copyleft is the "no further restrictions" rule; otherwise copyleft is just proprietary with extra steps.

[0] I don't remember if they were hosting MongoDB as part of RDS or something else.

[1] As we've seen with the Neo4J lawsuit, copyright licenses cannot tie the hands of the copyright owner. The only way for copyleft to work is to create a Mexican standoff of contributors who will sue each other to death if any one of them decides to relicense without unanimous community consensus.

Re: Redis is open source again

#360

Post by hn_acc1 »

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…

What if you want implement a feature, but they don't have time to look at it and make sure it's secure, or support future bugs? Look at the xz (IIRC) hack - not everyone has tons of free time.

How long after they release their code are the required to keep this up? Do they need to respond to your requests within 5 business days?

If they retire / move on to another project, does the source code stop being open source?

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