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Why AWS Supports Valkey

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Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#51

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

Y_Y wrote: post #46
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'…

Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness? As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not. The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or wha…

No. The solution is to use a different license, one that doesn’t allow contributions to be re-licensed in this way. This isn’t as complicated as people are making out. They just don’t want to admit that the license is operating as intended, but rather, their feelings about classical ‘open-source’ have changed. Admitting that would be admitting that the Software Gods of the last ~50 years are imperfect in their eyes, which is jarring for the sort of people that complain about these situations in the first place.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#52

Post by BSDobelix »

justincormack wrote: post #48
BSDobelix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "asking for money", it's shutting down a usage of the code, and that's completely against the spirit of "free software", and even against the broader meaning of opensource[1]. However, I think everyone understands that it's a problem to make a living from small but important part of an bigger infrastructure, but this is the wrong way. The Linux Foundation will throw money at Valkey, Amazon will still sell th…

The Linux Foundation won't "throw money" at it, it will probably provide some legal support if needed, but project work is largely funded by the membership fees for the subfoundations, and at this project membership level thats not much unless eg AWS etc are contributing it.

>but project work is largely funded by the membership fees for the subfoundations

That's something completely different you are right ;)

>>Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Valkey Community

>>Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#53

Post by kouteiheika »

Y_Y wrote: post #46
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'…

Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness? As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not. The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or wha…

> Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness?

Of course there is. Don't require a CLA and use GPL instead of permissive licenses. Then any derivative work will have to legally be GPL compatible.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#54

Post by glenngillen »

chipdart wrote: post #37
hbogert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The Garantia Data rebrand and narrative reframing as the inventors of Redis is one of the greatest marketing efforts in OSS.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#55

Post by 094459 »

chipdart wrote: post #34
blowski wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ope…

[dead]

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#56

Post by [deleted] »

kouteiheika wrote: post #53
Y_Y wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness? As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not. The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or wha…

> Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness? Of course there is. Don't require a CLA and use GPL instead of permissive licenses. Then any derivative work will have to legally be GPL compatible.

[deleted]

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#57

Post by jillesvangurp »

pritambarhate wrote: post #39

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.

They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly.

Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years.

You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen.

I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition.

As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#58

Post by readams »

tecoholic wrote: post #44
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'…

I get that people get upset that their software of choice license is changed at the philosophical level. But I don’t get it at the economical level. When a project changes the license for a future version, the older versions are still available in the older open license right? So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”? Licen…

You can't just use old versions of software. You need security fixes, dependency updates, etc just to keep it running

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#60

Post by growse »

tecoholic wrote: post #44
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'…

I get that people get upset that their software of choice license is changed at the philosophical level. But I don’t get it at the economical level. When a project changes the license for a future version, the older versions are still available in the older open license right? So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”? Licen…

The bait and switch is because people feel the social contract has been broken.

If you start a project, invite people to come along and donate their free time to making it better, building (and benefitting from) a community of people working towards a common goal, suddenly switching that project to proprietary is a bit of a dick move.

Sure, it's legal, but for the people who thought they were collaborating together on something it feels a bit crappy.

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