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Redis is open source again

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Re: Redis is open source again

#531

Post by palata »

theamk wrote: post #484
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…

All companies should do this.. if anything so we know what not to use. Any sort of proprietary product (be it fully closed source, source-available, or "open source with limitations") is always a risk. You were happily using database X, but they got acquired by Broadcom and now their product costs 100x what it was before. What do you do now? That's why it is much safer to adopt open source - worst case is the company…

> worst case is the company goes under, but you still keep using last released version indefinitely, and hope new entity (maybe even hyperscaler!) forks the code

But it's not always the worst case, is it? If the licence is permissive, an hyperscaler can just take is and make a proprietary product out of it.

Hence copyleft licences without a CLA. Nobody could make Linux proprietary because the copyright is shared between so many people/companies.

Re: Redis is open source again

#532

Post by immibis »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #426
umbra07 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only because OSI says so. I don't agree with the idea of OSI defining my philosophical positions and technical terms for me, just like I don't agree with the BSD people excluding GPL from the definition of open source.

I'm sympathetic to the OSI not being the only authority. So, have the DFSG, FSF, any BSD, or literally anyone credible endorsed it as Free and/or Open Source?

None of them have bothered to evaluate it or have explicitly decided it's not worth evaluating for now. They haven't endorsed it as Proprietary and/or Closed Source either.

And notice the OSI's objection actually makes no sense and could apply to any copyleft license! By the same reasoning, AGPL isn't open source. Yet they say it is.

Re: Redis is open source again

#533

Post by palata »

scargrillo wrote: post #510
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…

This breakdown hits hard because it’s not just about business models — it’s about trust. Open source succeeded because it created shared public infrastructure. But hyperscalers turned it into extraction infrastructure: mine the code, skip the stewardship. The result? We’ve confused “open” with “free-for-the-powerful.” It’s time to stop pretending licenses are enough. This is about incentives, governance, and resilien…

Before moving from permissive licences to non-open-source licences (because they have exceptions for TooBigTech), an easy step would be to use copyleft licences, wouldn't it?

Re: Redis is open source again

#534

Post by immibis »

merb wrote: post #288
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to stop taking the OSI or FSF's positions on anything as particularly valuable. The OSI is captured entirely by corporate sponsors. Amazon was paying a full-time salary a year to the OSI when the SSPL issue happened, the OSI had no ability to take a moral pro-labor stance without crippling their own operations. They still do not meaningfully answer to individual users: The OSI recently refused to disclose who…

The OSI and FSF make sense by prohibiting stuff like the sspl. Open source should express freedom and by putting restrictions on certain users no matter how evil they are wont express freedom at all

So copyleft licenses are out?

The OSI wrote some nonsense that implies copyleft licenses cannot be open source, and the FSF hasn't yet taken any position at all.

Re: Redis is open source again

#535

Post by luchsio »

sophacles wrote: post #312
tough wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does SQLite try to embrace, extend, and extinguish their competitors?

Does Microsoft do this in 2025? Like seriously - I haven't heard of them doing it in quite a long time. I know they were atrocious in the 90s and 00s, I'm not disputing that at all. Are there any examples of them continuing this behavior in the last decade though? Further, a huge percentage of the people making those decisions back then are no longer with the company, different people are in charge, etc. The industry…

Just read this a few days ago, so maybe the behaviour is better than it was, but still. Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750535

Re: Redis is open source again

#536

Post by palata »

rlpb wrote: post #405
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…

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.

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

IMHO copyleft licences are better for the user and permissive licences are better for competitors. Still people keep going with permissive licences.

Re: Redis is open source again

#537

Post by palata »

amrocha wrote: post #480
Brian_K_White wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"walking off with your money" This is the heart of all of these stupid takes. There is no "your money" for anyone else to walk off with. Nothing was stolen. If you want to sell software, or rent access to software, then just do that honestly forom the outset. And good luck to you on that. I will not consume it unless I have no other choice, and I will not contribute to it at all period, even tertially by for instance…

You’re living in theoretical fantasy land. Yeah, it’d be great if everything was open source and everyone was happy. But that’s not really what happens. Redis and Elastic are popular exactly because there’s entire companies behind it constantly maintaining it, securing it, and adding features. If you want use open source software at your job that’s a hard requirement. No, you can’t use “MySillyKeyValueCache” that Tim…

> Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support. This is what you should be really mad about. The internet giants are literally killing open source.

They would have to publish their changes if those projects used copyleft licences. Copyleft licences don't force to "contribute back", but they force disclosing the changes, that the community can then benefit from.

Re: Redis is open source again

#538

Post by boruto »

kamranjon wrote: post #32

One of the big things I love about Redis is that it’s become this tool for me to learn new techniques and explore data. Like, the new vector sets feature has let me really explore dense vectors and custom search and taxonomy mapping and all sorts of areas that seemed like a high barrier to entry for me, but now I’m just streaming stuff into llama.cpp with an embedding model and storing it in Redis and being able to d…

Could you please link any blog post which goes into what you are talking about, I feel I am also at the high barrier to enter situation about this stuff

Re: Redis is open source again

#539

Post by palata »

golergka wrote: post #467
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…

> Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later Previous versions are still available under the original license, right? So if you don't want to use it with a new license, you're in the same situation as if company went out of business or stopped support and development for any other reason. There are no safety mechanisms for that either.

An existing safety mechanism is to do exactly what Linux does: have a copyleft licence and no CLA. So that the copyright is shared between the contributors (so it's impossible to change the licence) and the licence enforces sharing your changes of the project.

Re: Redis is open source again

#540

Post by Snakes3727 »

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 contributed heavily to a project during its early days and spent almost 2.5 years helping it grow. For awhile i was one of the most active contributors.

Then there was talk of turning the project into an actual business, and myself and a few of the original contributers were offered extremely poor paying jobs. That no one took. Then they got a CEO, investors and we were basically forced out of the project unless we joined the company.

I distinctly remember being in a call where we were told they would be relicensing it eventually and launching a SaaS. To protect our work from being used by large companies. I laughed and pointed out the irony in that call that you were doing the same thing.

After that they changed their policy such they do not accept outside PR's. It has killed any interest in supporting open source projects outside personal stuff.

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