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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

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Re: Redis is open source again

#371

Post by hmottestad »

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…

Dunno about Redis, but for Elastic I still feel sorry for them being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon. On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. Amazon is more than willing to sell you their Elasticsearch fork at a loss as long as they can eventually recoup the losses when Elastic inevitably dies. At which point they will naturally abandon the open sources side of their fork and continue development in private, at a much slower rate, while doubling the price of the AWS service. At which point you’ll have no choice but the pay up, cause there aren’t any competitors left.

Re: Redis is open source again

#372

Post by parrit »

theturtletalks wrote: post #272

When Antirez left Redis, he wrote an amazing blog post I go back to often [0]. In there he said: "I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad ar…

So nice to hear talk like that in the AI "your code is worthless age". Keep the craft going!

Re: Redis is open source again

#373

Post by dismalaf »

rdtsc wrote: post #117
dismalaf wrote: post #13

AGPL is cancer. Valkey already exists, people already switched, it's already landed in a bunch of distros. I don't see anyone moving back, especially when Valkey has some big corporate support. And for my personal usage, Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

> AGPL is cancer. Good, you can think it is cancer and stay away from it. You don't like it, don't use it. It's like those bright colored poisonous frogs from the Amazon. That's better than some newly made up license that's different than anything else, and you have to wonder how it would hold up in practice.

I agree it's better than their previous made up license. It won't win back everyone who left though. The ship has sailed. They should have gone GPL.

Re: Redis is open source again

#374

Post by znpy »

The post is a bit misleading as the agpl is a licensing option but not the license.

It’s a good trade-off though. Grafana does the same and they’re doing just fine.

I hope redis gets to live a long life now that’s more open than ever (essentially it’s free software now) :)

After the redis troubles I hope more people start to realise that the GPL license is the way really, and that other licenses (like the BSD that Redis used to use) are really just too risky.

Re: Redis is open source again

#376

Post by echelon »

blibble wrote: post #369
echelon wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This keeps happening: 1. People put a lot of work into building databases. The license choice is OSS / FOSS. 2. Some people in the community (original authors, community leads) make a company around the database and continue developing it for years on end. They sometimes raise venture capital to expand the business. 3. Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily mill…

the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers which is sort of funny because the term "Open Source" was itself coined to make it possible for people to seek funding to build companies based on the (crazy?) idea of producing software, then giving away its source code 20 years later, the structure of the industry has now changed, an…

> "Fair Software"?

That's the term most frequently used! I've seen a number of different efforts start to coalesce around this.

https://fair.io/

This was also a really nice license:

https://defold.com/license/

We need licenses like these to combat Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. "Open Source" is their grift now.

Re: Redis is open source again

#377

Post by znpy »

antirez wrote: post #207
simonw wrote: post #193

Lots of cynical takes in this thread - and I get it, there isn't a guarantee they won't relicense again in the future (they have a CLA that would let them) and people feel betrayed by the last license change. I think we should celebrate this anyway. It's a smart decision, it's what the community wanted to happen and it would be great if other companies with janky licenses could see "Redis relicensed to open source an…

Thank you, Simon. I believe that cases like Elastic and Redis returning back to an open source license is like writing on the rock: "open source won", at least in the system software space. Companies get created, prosper and fail over time, but this message is here to stay with us for a long time, and shapes the society of tomorrow. It's a win of the software community itself.

I’d say that open source definitely lost, and lost real bad.

Free Software won, as you ended up adopting the AGPL.

It’s an important distinction.

Re: Redis is open source again

#378

Post by andrepd »

hmottestad wrote: post #371
lolinder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dunno about Redis, but for Elastic I still feel sorry for them being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon. On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. Amazon is more than willing to sell you their Elasticsearch fork at a loss as long as they can eventually recoup the losses when Elastic inevitably dies.…

I sure wish I lived in a world where anti-competitive regulators weren't a joke.

Re: Redis is open source again

#379

Post by gitroom »

was honestly waiting for something like this, but that trust hit doesn't really fade for me - you think companies ever recover from stuff like this or do folks just move on for good?

Re: Redis is open source again

#380

Post by skybrian »

aftbit wrote: post #350

From the CEO blog post - https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ >This achieved our goal—AWS and Google now maintain their own fork Was this really the goal though? Forcing your biggest users to fork your software and maintain their own divergent version is not really good for anyone. Sure, Amazon and Google (or AWS and GCP - type confusion in the source material) now have to contribute some more engineering hours to the open…

Are there compensating benefits? For web browsers, having multiple, competing implementations is considered good.
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