Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Redis is open source again

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#511

Post by motorest »

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.…

> 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.

That's specious reasoning at best.

The whole point of FLOSS is that anyone is free to use it how they see fit. Whether it's a hobbyist doing a pet project or a FANG using it as their core infrastructure, they are granted the right to use it how they see fit.

That's exactly why they started to use it to begin with. Isn't it?

When a random corporation decides to pull the rug on the established user base expecting to profit from the pain of migrating existing services, it is not the user base who is the bad actor.

Re: Redis is open source again

#512

Post by kstrauser »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #167

So with redis being AGPL, who counts as a user? If you have a webapp that uses redis on the backend for a task queue, do the users of the webapp count as users of redis, and you then have to provide source to redis? Is there a chance that you might have to release your apps code to be compliant?

No. Users of Redis are the ones connecting to it. Furthermore, the Redis client library that you link into your program is MIT licensed. Unless you embed Redis directly into your app, you'd never have to release your own code to use it.

Re: Redis is open source again

#513

Post by motorest »

BoorishBears wrote: post #439
rank0 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 projec…

Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic. And they were using an open source piece of software, but scaling it with closed source secret sauce on top of that. The license was saying they'd have to open up their secret sauce or pay, and their response was to leave the table instead. OpenSearch still lacks tons of really basic functionality…

> Amazon's product had confusing naming and positioning, and lagged in compatibility which created a headache for Elastic.

Irrelevant.

Elastic decided to release software to the public with a license that granted everyone under the sun the right to use it how they saw fit. This included also selling services.

That became a big part of their business model as it drove up it's adoption rates and popularity. If Elastic kept things like Elasticsearch proprietary, they would hardly have the same adoption rates.

You can't have it both ways. Why do you think people drop these projects the moment these corporations decide to pull the rug from under their userbase?

Re: Redis is open source again

#514

Post by porker »

lolinder wrote: post #392
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 solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat. Yes, this would be the honest thing to do, but people don't do it because using a non-FOSS license loses you adoption. The step you're missing in your little timeline is that the only reason the pr…

This purist mindset is killing the long term viability of open source. If hyperscalers can make money from successful projects but open source founders can't, in 10 years we'll have fewer open source projects.

Licence freedoms don't have to be all or nothing, or apply to everyone in the world. It can be open source and have restrictions. Anything else turns open source into a religion.

Re: Redis is open source again

#516

Post by rastignack »

porker wrote: post #514
lolinder wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat. Yes, this would be the honest thing to do, but people don't do it because using a non-FOSS license loses you adoption. The step you're missing in your little timeline is that the only reason the pr…

This purist mindset is killing the long term viability of open source. If hyperscalers can make money from successful projects but open source founders can't, in 10 years we'll have fewer open source projects. Licence freedoms don't have to be all or nothing, or apply to everyone in the world. It can be open source and have restrictions. Anything else turns open source into a religion.

It’s not about religion. PostgreSQL devs do make money right ? Despite RDS.

Re: Redis is open source again

#517

Post by hodgesrm »

bradgessler wrote: post #485

I got a really stupid email from Redis®* a year ago that wanted me to put a disclaimer on the “first page” where Redis®* appeared on a website, as if it was a paper legal document. That was the very moment Redis®* died for me—I’ve never encountered a tech company that was so aloof about how tech works. Hopefully that damage is undone. — *Redis is a registered trademark of Redis Ltd. Any rights therein are reserved to…

It's not the only company that does this. That's why foundations typically ask for the trademark and logos as part of donating code.

Re: Redis is open source again

#518

Post by porker »

lolinder wrote: post #289
tasuki wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> contributed a minor improvement to Redis under its original license [...] feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase How does this work legally? You write some code, contribute it under a certain license... and... a company can just re-license your code under any license they like?

They require a Contributor License Agreement [0] whereby you grant them the copyright to your contribution. Which means they become the ultimate decision-maker for all contributions and can relicense however and whenever they wish. [0] https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-...

IMO the anger people direct at source available licences would be better directed at CLAs. They're what hands the power away.

Don't contribute to projects with CLAs people without reading them carefully and understanding what can happen! Then you won't be surprised if a project is relicensed because you know you signed an agreement to let them do that.

Re: Redis is open source again

#519

Post by Brian_K_White »

tyg13 wrote: post #509
Brian_K_White wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then sell software. I said that first thing. Where is the fantasy in that? If you don't understand it such that you think it's a fantasy (despite the ocean of existing software as proof that is produced, and countless published manifestos from people who do it describing why they do), well that's a you problem not a me or anyone else problem. You don't get it, that's fine, then simply don't get it, and don't particip…

If they try to sell their software, by your own admission, you won't consume it. That's the point. The fantasy is the idea that some of these open-source products would even work as a closed-source proprietary business model.

Then don't try to sell it. Or make something else that people can't live without and are willing to pay for and can't just pay themselves to write an equivalent instead of paying rent to you forever, whatever, what's it to me or anyone else?

Do whatever you want but it's no one else's problem if you can't figure out what.

Ya got no argument here.

Re: Redis is open source again

#520

Post by FooBarWidget »

Cloud vendors have been strip-mining open source for years, yet judging by user and contributor sentiment on forums such as HN, and the lack of OSI-approved licensing innovation, there’s been no meaningful progress toward a solution. If anything, I get the feeling that the community is effectively more on the side of cloud vendors than on the side of authors. It seems the community at large doesn't care about authors' businesses suffering. Meanwhile, they largely don't oppose cloud vendors forking the latest open source version either.

AGPL protects better against cloud strip-mining than most opens source licenses, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem of big cloud vendors easily outcompeting authors' businesses. AGPL only compels source sharing when the software is modified and offered over a network. But cloud providers can sidestep that by hosting the unmodified version. They excel at operations at scale and sales. Most open source consumers seem to care more about benefiting from this than about the authors' struggles.

Fair source licenses — such as SSPL and Elastic License — while not OSI-compliant, are designed thoughtfully to balance authors' business and user needs, and don’t impact the vast majority of users. They often only restrict cloud-scale commercial hosting, not self-hosting or local use. Yet they trigger disproportionate outrage.

This is part of a broader problem: the community’s lack of empathy for authors. It is unsustainable. Open source maintainer burnout has been going on for a long time now. The "indie" open source author community is aging. Meanwhile, many big open source projects come from large coporations who use open source as a loss leader.

My impression is that:

1. the community at large is too stuck in ideological purity, in an age where the original FOSS ideology is a bad fit. Permissive licenses made sense when open source was a grassroots movement fighting for adoption — not when it’s powering trillion-dollar clouds.

2. People prioritize their own short-term interests too much.

Companies are doing open source because of the momentum we built over the past few decades. This momentum is being eroded by maintainer burnout, fragmented ecosystems, and declining trust between authors and users. Yet the open source consumer and authorities such as FSF and OSI effectively neglect indie author health. This is going to collapse one day.

If we want open source to survive as more than just free labor for cloud providers, we need a new movement—one that defends both user freedom and author sustainability.

Post reply on HN