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Redis is open source again

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Re: Redis is open source again

#401

Post by eduction »

skrebbel wrote: post #384
eduction wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But how does that in practice prevent AWS and GCP from cloud-hosting your software without giving back? Seems to me that if Redis went OSL3, GCP could host it fine so long as they'd OSL3-distribute any changes they made. What is your definition of “giving back?” To me that means open sourcing your changes, which as you note is what the license requires.

Yeah sorry, stupid choice of words given the subject. I meant paying them for the privilege somehow, which has been Redis (the company)'s goal this whole time. GP suggests OSL3 solves this and I'm trying to figure out how.

Oh I see. IANAL but if the plan with agpl is to sell commercial versions for people who don’t want to worry about FOSS licensing/infection then it may be a great license for that precisely because of the lack of clarity. You can do similar with OSL - “pay us to get it under a different license where you can make a closed derivative work” - but OSL clearly allows linking (according to its author) without the mere linking requiring opening the thing that links it so it may be strictly worse for Redis.

I was merely saying OSL is better than agpl as a license (imo). It’s very clear. But lack of clarity can have strategic value.

Re: Redis is open source again

#402

Post by michaelt »

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…

> the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers

I'm not sure this is true. The OSI's definition of open source doesn't seem to have changed since ~2001 [1] - before AWS was founded - and it'd been around in various forms since ~1997.

This was the era of Microsoft's 2001-era "Shared Source license" which was deliberately GPL-incompatible; Bruce Perens, author of the definition, wrote "Microsoft's Shared Source program recognizes that there are many benefits to the openness, community involvement, and innovation of the Open Source model. But the most important component of that model, the one that makes all of the others work, is freedom." [2] (Perens also judged the first version of the "Apple Public Source License" insufficiently free [3])

They've kinda always been about not just being able to view the source, but also modify it, and redistribute the modified version, merge it into other software projects, make commercial use of it, etc etc

It just so happens that this stance, adopted well before AWS existed, works extremely well for AWS.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020126171934/http://opensource... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20010813210224/http://perens.com... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20010430042835/http://www.perens...

Re: Redis is open source again

#403

Post by School-Cotton »

homebrewer wrote: post #48
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…

The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull, so you should have expected it instead of feeling betrayed. I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.

> The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull

That’s an exaggeration. The vast majority of permissively licensed projects have never “rug pulled” and never will. It might be one possible reason to choose such a license but it’s very far from the only one.

Re: Redis is open source again

#404

Post by em-bee »

eduction wrote: post #382
em-bee wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Kyle’s point is pretty clear: it’s really hard to tell what agpl actually requires. So it’s a bad, unclear license whatever your position is - whether you think your code should virally make everything that links it open source, or if you expressly don’t wan…

but my point is that if i just share everything, as a FOSS enthusiast is wont to do, then i don't need to worry about the details. the details only matter for those who are not into FOSS and are forced to comply with the license without having the desire to do so.

one could argue that a complicated license reduces the attraction of my software, but again, if i am not out to become popular, i would not care about that. and for my paying customers they should not care either, because they are still getting more than they would from proprietary software, or they are paying me to get an exception.

so if the license for my software is to complicated for you, tough luck. it's not my job to accommodate that.

Re: Redis is open source again

#405

Post by rlpb »

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…

Take a look at Debian’s philosophy: https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

This predates the OSI definition. The philosophy is about what empowers the user. Business models (or their challenges) have nothing to do with it.

It just so happens that empowering the user also empowers competitors.

Re: Redis is open source again

#406

Post by lolinder »

michaelt wrote: post #402
blibble wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers I'm not sure this is true. The OSI's definition of open source doesn't seem to have changed since ~2001 [1] - before AWS was founded - and it'd been around in various forms since ~1997. This was the era of Microsoft's 2001-era "Shared Source license" which was deliberately GPL-incomp…

I'd argue it doesn't "just so happen" to benefit AWS, it was causal: Open Source created AWS. AWS is structured the way that it is in order to benefit from Open Source, and it grew to its current size by so benefiting.

In a lot of ways things like AWS are what the OSI set out to create when they set out to sell Free Software as an idea to corporations. This was the pitch.

Re: Redis is open source again

#407

Post by sunshine-o »

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…

> the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers

Thank you for pointing that out.

This is something I have noticed in the last decade:

A lot of fake, captured organisations have popup around open source. I once went down the rabbit hole to try to make a list and quickly found dozen of them. It is always very hard to understand what they do and employ a bunch of people who usually never wrote a single line of code.

One example found on the Fedora website is the "Digital Public Goods Alliance" [0]

- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/

Re: Redis is open source again

#408

Post by nozzlegear »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #394
sigzero wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's a reason not to use a distro right? If I type `sudo dnf install redis`, I want to install redis not valkey.

> Well that's a reason not to use a distro right? If I type `sudo dnf install redis`, I want to install redis not valkey. Using a distro that handles things your way is your privilege. I assume most people who install packages care about the functionality they provide, not the brand name - so it seems like a fair default for distros that aim to appeal to broad user bases imo.

> Using a distro that handles things your way is your privilege. I assume most people who install packages care about the functionality they provide, not the brand name

This is an amusing example of "the duality of man," having just finished reading a bunch of comments to the effect of "the user should have the ultimate say as to what apps they can install from the App Store" in the Apple thread.

Re: Redis is open source again

#409

Post by rank0 »

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.…

Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters?

Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software):

> On September 16, 2024, the Linux Foundation and Amazon Web Services announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.[15][16] Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation.

OpenSearch is Apache License 2.0. You can do whatever you want to/with it. How are Elastic the good guys in your mind?

Re: Redis is open source again

#410

Post by blibble »

lolinder wrote: post #389
blibble wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's really not though. The OSI quickly loses credibility when they try to push a definition that the community doesn't like (see the Open Source AI kerfuffle). Both the OSI and the FSF are agreed that Source Available with bans on specific use cases is not FOSS. When you've got freaking Richard Stallman opposing you you really have to do better than just scream "corporate capture". Engage with his idea of Freedom, d…

the OSI and the FSF agree, for different reasons

> Both the OSI and the FSF are agreed that Source Available with bans on specific use cases is not FOSS.

well... yes, because they decide the definition of the terms

> When you've got freaking Richard Stallman opposing you you really have to do better than just scream "corporate capture". Engage with his idea of Freedom, don't set up straw men.

Stallman has a very particular view of Freedom (itself a multifaceted term)

and he rather famously completely rejects the term "Open Source"

the situation we're finding ourselves in is one where three increasingly malevolent entities control and capture 100% of the value generated by writing and selling software with source code

if you're an employee of these entities, great for you

for the rest of us, this is a bad situation to be in

and certainly not one that could produce another Red Hat

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