Redis is open source again • Hacker News Board

Re: Redis is open source again

#611

Post by BoorishBears » Fri, May 02, 2025, 10:58 AM UTC

motorest wrote: post #513

BoorishBears wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Irrelevant.

You keep spamming this to anyone who replies to you: maybe your take is the irrelevant since it didn't stop them from pulling the rug in the first place?

> people drop these projects the moment

Noisy people always proclaim that they will, and hyperscalers gleefully market their forks... meanwhile it's mostly hyperscaler customers that they weren't going to get in the first place that actually move.

Elasticsearch was source available for 4 years and still saw massive growth.

People tried to spin Redis db-engine rankings dropping as being due to Valkey, but their trendline doesn't seem to have been affected at all by the change: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/Redis

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But to be more direct, I'm honestly unimpressed with this brand of reductionism.

It's super easy to keep yelling IRRELEVANT THEY WERE RUNNING AN OPEN LIBRARY AND SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED SOMEONE TO SHOW UP WITH A HAULER TO TAKE ALL THE BOOKS, but it's not useful.

I'd also rather have a software ecosystem that uses targeted defenses to counter hyperscalers (which are more like an invasive species) than one that throws up its hands at them.

For anything that isn't Linux-scale, the alternative is that most of the well funded development ends up being from hyperscalers and that just concentrates their power.

Re: Redis is open source again

#612

Post by lolinder » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:04 AM UTC

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.

Not a religion, but a term with a specific meaning, which meaning implies a collection of freedoms granted without discrimination. People are welcome to use licenses that revoke those freedoms, but calling them FOSS is confusing and muddies the waters.

See Llama's license: if it can be Open Source while having restrictions, then having an Acceptable Use Policy is okay, right? So Redis could create a license that bans its use if you host adult content, Star Wars fan fiction, or documents containing the letter R?

If Open Source doesn't mean a license that indiscriminately grants a set of specific freedoms then it's pretty useless as a term—all I know on hearing it is that a project's source code is available. Which reminds me, we already have a term for that: Source Available.

Re: Redis is open source again

#613

Post by gkbrk » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:07 AM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #610

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 company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee. Could you put a clause in the license that calls out those specific companies that you're concerned about and makes them pay, as well as any of their subsidiaries, a list that can be changed later? That way, smaller businesses around the software can still exist, nobody gets concerned with the license too much…

You could, but it still wouldn't be open source.

Re: Redis is open source again

#614

Post by arthur-st » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:07 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #459

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…

Isn't it though? They weren't contributing before and they weren't paying Redis corp before, now they are at least contributing to a fork (and still not paying Redis corp). Presumably some of the things being worked on in Valkey, etc can be upstreamed back to Redis in some form (not entirely straightforward since it is a hard fork with a diff license, but concepts can be borrowed back too). e.g. apparently Valkey has…

> They weren't contributing before

That is not true. Companies like AWS had paid staff working as OSS Redis core maintainers before the licencing schism. This talk of "achieving their goals" is just bluster serving no reason other than damage control.

Re: Redis is open source again

#615

Post by lolinder » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:09 AM UTC

trgn wrote: post #502

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…

> So what's really happening is that these FOSS companies want to have their cake and eat it too. talk about kicking down. So no harsh words about the big dogs who, while contributing nothing, and just due to sheer size and scale advantage, are capturing the lion's share of the enterprise value?

> contributing nothing

This is a line that gets thrown around very casually, but every assessment I've heard says that the big dogs are quite prolific contributors to these projects.

> capturing the lion's share of the enterprise value?

Ah, here's the Matt Mullenweg logic creeping in again [0]! This is basically his taunt towards DHH (though at least you're using it to cry foul rather than tease!): "although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others."

And this is where I think most of this aggression towards cloud providers is actually coming from: a significant number of these companies have bought into the idea that they're a failure if they fail to capture the majority of the value from their Open Source project. Which is understandable when you make a VC-funded business out of it, but makes no sense given that FOSS has always been about advancing the collective good, not raking it in.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20241014235025/https://ma.tt/2024...

Re: Redis is open source again

#616

Post by lolinder » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:12 AM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #610

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 company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee. Could you put a clause in the license that calls out those specific companies that you're concerned about and makes them pay, as well as any of their subsidiaries, a list that can be changed later? That way, smaller businesses around the software can still exist, nobody gets concerned with the license too much…

> a list that can be changed later?

No legal department will ever approve using software under a license like that. Who wants to risk being the next addition to that list?

Re: Redis is open source again

#617

Post by plufz » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:13 AM UTC

growse wrote: post #563

palata wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This risk has always existed. Doesn't mean it was not a problem.

The solution to the old problem of "what if someone uses my code to compete with me" is "don't open source your code". This isn't complicated. It's trade secrets 101. I'm being disingenuous though. Of course the bait-and-switch merchants know this, they're just banking on getting enough product momentum off the free labour of others before they cash in. That's the plan all along.

I think that is a little unfair. I don't know anything about the companies behind Redis and Elastic. But another possibility is that they want to make a good open source product and create some sort of business around it and find it difficult to make a waterproof moat. I'm sure that there are many other open source companies with the same basic strategy that are just more lucky, e.g. don't get AWS as competition.

Re: Redis is open source again

#618

Post by lolinder » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:15 AM UTC

KingMob wrote: post #550

lolinder wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that the OSI and FSF are trapped with their most hardcore followers, and can't effectively change, assuming they even wanted to. As for Stallman... his idea of freedom is very narrowly-scoped. In particular, it makes no distinction between hobbyists and megacorps, and is completely blind with respect to economics. By lumping hobbyists with companies, it makes the category error of extending human rights to co…

Corporations are collections of humans. There are certain ways in which extending human rights to corporations a mistake, but allowing them to use free software isn't one of them: either the individuals in the company are able to use the software or they are not, and if they are not then the software is not free.

Re: Redis is open source again

#619

Post by jraph » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:17 AM UTC

immibis wrote: post #529

immibis wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is a gift to everyone (including Jeffrey Bezos); free software is a sharing economy. The difference is whether the sharing is reciprocal. With open source it's a one way gift from you to Jeffrey. He could have paid you for that. At the very least you can make him pay with reciprocal sharing.

User freedom means not giving someone else the freedom to take away user freedom though, which is what doormat licenses (can we call them cuck licenses or is that too far for HN?) do.

> User freedom means not giving someone else the freedom to take away user freedom though

This sentence does a shortcut that's worth expanding on, because it can give the impression that permissive licenses don't respect user rights, and because it doesn't cleanly apply to every situations.

User freedom is full with a permissive license. If I get software under MIT, my freedom is fully respected.

But it is true that forcing downstream developers to respect the freedom of their users through copyleft licenses is one of the strategies to improve user freedom overall (Personally, that's why I prefer the (A)GPL - I'm not keen on helping).

There still are some situations where you might be better off using a more permissive license, when your code is small enough or would strongly benefit from the network effect, for instance if it's a codec, or if there already are alternatives that proprietary software can use [1,2].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Re: Redis is open source again

#620

Post by pbronez » Fri, May 02, 2025, 11:20 AM UTC

palata wrote: post #557

larodi wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away". perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some very outspoken open-source proponents do not open-source their core business components. I can understand they do it in order to exist as a company, as busineses, but I don't understand why they have to endure being shamed for staying closed-source, while all their…

I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem. I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Permissive don't protect the users in the first place, so...

So who’s gonna sue an AI company asserting that all code they produce is GPL due to being trained on GPL code?