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

641–650 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#641

Post by palata »

growse wrote: post #566
palata wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in a position where you can copy anything and crush competition is a problem. In terms of antitrust, I believe that if you could prove that Amazon forked and offered the service with the intent to crush the competition, it would be downright illegal. A current case is Meta: back then, Zuckerberg was happily writing (internally) that Facebook needed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat to prevent them from…

They can't "copy anything". They can only copy what they're explicitly legally allowed to. Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it.

I meant they have the resources to copy any product in a way that will crush the competition.

As in, they can build an alternative to an open source project, offer it for free (i.e. at a loss) for years until they capture the market, and then start enshittifying. This is an antitrust problem.

> Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it.

Yeah at the very least they should have started with a copyleft licence.

Re: Redis is open source again

#642

Post by eitland »

jenadine wrote: post #507
Macha wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sort of fine. As a personal user, someone could fork and maintain redis in that case, which wasn't true in the SSPL era. Now AGPL+CLA is not a license I'd contribute under, but also Redis is so far down my priorities that it wasn't a project I was going to be issuing PRs for anyway.

> AGPL+CLA is not a license I'd contribute under, Why not? Is it because only one company can make proprietary fork? Would you rather contribute to MIT software where everyone can make proprietary fork? Or AGPL without CLA where nobody can make proprietary fork?

> Would you rather contribute to MIT software where everyone can make proprietary fork?

In my case that is it.

I'm totally fine with people taking my MIT licensed code in a MIT licensed project and running with it.

However, working for free on someone elses code base knowing that they can always go commercial with it or do whatever they want while I and the rest of the community is stuck with AGPL, that is something I'd rather avoid, if possible.

Re: Redis is open source again

#643

Post by necovek »

larodi wrote: post #542
growse wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a suddenly emerging "gotcha". This risk has always existed. It existed when they chose to open source it in the first place. Time and time again we see the lesson being learned the hard way that "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".

> "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…

AI companies have not shied away from slurping anything available with complete disregard for the licensing of the material.

As such, code available is as much a boon to them as open source.

Re: Redis is open source again

#644

Post by palata »

ignaloidas wrote: post #588
palata wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in a position where you can copy anything and crush competition is a problem. In terms of antitrust, I believe that if you could prove that Amazon forked and offered the service with the intent to crush the competition, it would be downright illegal. A current case is Meta: back then, Zuckerberg was happily writing (internally) that Facebook needed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat to prevent them from…

Companies that build themselves on selling open source software put themselves in the position where anyone else can copy them and compete with them on price, and price alone. This is clearly the disadvantage of open source. It brings plenty of advantages, which is why people do it - but you can't have only the advantages and no disadvantages of open source. Open sourcing your product is a risky investment, and as wi…

As I said before, I believe that using permissive licences is a bad idea. I have seen multiple projects choosing a permissive licence as a way to compete against an already established copyleft project, just because it's easier to get adopted by companies. I find it unfair but also a bit stupid: by using a permissive licence, they allow anyone to compete with them with a proprietary fork.

Still, there is an antitrust question (that is slightly orthogonal): if TooBigTech can offer a similar product at a loss (e.g. for free) until they capture the market, then that's a problem. And they can only do it because they are too big, and that is an antitrust issue IMO.

Re: Redis is open source again

#645

Post by palata »

motorest wrote: post #565
palata wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is relevant. TooBigTech is killing smaller companies just because it is too big. When there are issues like this ("we made a successful product and someone forked it and it's killing us"), the "someone" is generally a BigTech, not 3 students in a garage. Then people complain about open source working/not working, and forget that the root problem is the monopoly that is screwing them.

> Of course it is relevant. No, it is irrelevant. Try to think about it for a second. You release a project under a license that grants everyone the right to use it as they see fit, including building a business on it. Everyone starts using the project as they see fit. Do you believe you now have the right to retroactively pull the license on a whim? No, you do not.

> No, it is irrelevant.

Yes, it is relevant.

Try to think about it for a second: multiple problems can exist in parallel:

1. Some company uses a permissive licence, sees a competitor making a proprietary product from their base, and starts whining. Too bad, they should have used a copyleft licence from the beginning on.

2. Some company makes a nice product. TooBigTech sees it and builds an alternative (be it a fork or from scratch, I don't care). TooBigTech offers it for free (because they can, because they are too big) and capture the market. The original smaller company dies, because they can't offer their product for free. Now TooBigTech can start enshittifying because they own the market, again.

> Do you believe you now have the right to retroactively pull the license on a whim?

If you own the copyright to the whole codebase, of course you can. All those contributors who signed a CLA and are now whining should think about that.

Re: Redis is open source again

#646

Post by palata »

motorest wrote: post #568
growse wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.

> Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. It's more fundamental that that. It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them. This is not limited to any managed service provided by a random cloud provider. The core reasoning is a corporation identifying end-users who are profiting from a service that direct…

> It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them.

If contributors refused to sign CLAs, then corporations would either not get contributions or not be able to arbitrarily change the licence. It's also the contributor's fault if they contribute to a permissive project and give up their copyright. Is it extortion if they agreed to it?

And then those contributors come whining because the corporation does whatever they want. Too bad, don't sign a CLA. And don't contribute to permissively-licenced projects if you don't want your code to end in proprietary products.

Re: Redis is open source again

#647

Post by palata »

growse wrote: post #564
palata wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is relevant. TooBigTech is killing smaller companies just because it is too big. When there are issues like this ("we made a successful product and someone forked it and it's killing us"), the "someone" is generally a BigTech, not 3 students in a garage. Then people complain about open source working/not working, and forget that the root problem is the monopoly that is screwing them.

Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.

> Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

Large companies using their dominant position to compete is not a feature of capitalism. Antitrust laws prevent that. It's just that the US ignores them.

> AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.

This part I agree with: if you build a permissively-licenced project, you don't get to whine when competitors use it in their own proprietary alternatives.

Re: Redis is open source again

#648

Post by palata »

pbronez wrote: post #620
palata wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I feel like nobody cares. It sucks, I know. Like climate change, biodiversity loss, the energy crisis.

Feels like we're pretty much screwed. Doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Re: Redis is open source again

#649

Post by palata »

vin047 wrote: post #637
growse wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a suddenly emerging "gotcha". This risk has always existed. It existed when they chose to open source it in the first place. Time and time again we see the lesson being learned the hard way that "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".

This is exactly what the AGPL was made to combat against. But open source devs still choose more permissive licenses first - presumably to attract corporate clients to use their product (and because devs are suckers to large corporate interests)

This. They choose a permissive licence, proudly advertise it ("use us instead of our competitor because they are copyleft and we are not"), and then come whining when other competitors benefit from the very fact that they chose a permissive licence.

Re: Redis is open source again

#650

Post by growse »

pbronez wrote: post #620
palata wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How is training a model on GPL code and then having it write code any different to having a human read GPL code and then write code?

Unless there's a specific copyright claim over a specific piece of code that was copied and published, it's hard to see how the GPL has any relevance.

Post reply on HN