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Redis is open source again

antirez.com

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Re: Redis is open source again

#651

Post by lolinder »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #630
lolinder wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that justification. These two companies (and the others like them) set up a model for funding their business knowing full well that they would have to compete with others who were able to provide the same service they were. That's always been baked into FOSS—you can't plan around a monopoly when you're releasing your code for free, that's part of the trade-off you make. When AWS and Co did provide hosting…

> now it's suddenly AWS who are the bad guys for using the FOSS software the way the license always said they could That's not a fair representation of the objection. The thing under contention here is a behemoth freeloading for substantial profit. The reason it's viewed as bad is because that behavior undermines the community at large. Participants need to contribute back proportional to their benefit when realistic…

> The reason it's viewed as bad is because that behavior undermines the community at large. Participants need to contribute back proportional to their benefit when realistically able lest the community decline over time.

Why? No one has been able to articulate this for me. Why does Amazon using the software cause the community to decline? Doesn't it make the software more popular with broader reach?

When you give software away for free, you've given it away for free. You're producing it with the intention of it being used. Why does that suddenly become a problem when it gets used on a large scale?

Re: Redis is open source again

#652

Post by amrocha »

jpc0 wrote: post #621
amrocha wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Companies cost money to run. Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support. I don’t understand this take, if Google/AWS/Microsoft decide to host your service and some vulnerabilities are discovered then you got free Security Research done, your product would either have remained vulnerable or someone else would have filed the same bug. You own the code so…

Look, in principle I don’t disagree with anything you said.

However, I think OSS is a net positive to the industry, and would like to see it remain that way.

The classic way to monetize OSS has been to provide hosting and support for a price.

Now the internet giants are taking that entire pie for themselves.

If we agree that we want OSS to be a viable option going forward, and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project, then what do you suggest be done?

Re: Redis is open source again

#653

Post by palata »

7952 wrote: post #575
palata wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters? The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition. That would be the point of antitrust, I guess? I mean if regulations were actually enforced.

Do AWS really sell things at a loss?

Sorry, I didn't want to imply that they do. This would be illegal as per antitrust regulations.

What I wanted to say is that AWS using a permissively-licenced project is fine. The project should have thought about the licence beforehand and started with copyleft from the beginning on. Their problem now.

But a more general problem I see is that even if you use a copyleft license for your project, you have the risk to be crushed by anti-competitive behaviours coming from TooBigTech. It's not rare, they do that all the time and the US doesn't enforce anything. And when others (like the EU) try to do it, the US put pressure because they defend their US TooBigTech.

The latter is not a model or licencing issue, it's an antitrust issue. Now Amazon could compete with Redis without doing it illegaly, but they can only because they are so big. And the fact that they are so big is related to the lack of antitrust enforcement (it's documented, TooBigTech have all abused their dominance forever).

Re: Redis is open source again

#654

Post by amrocha »

palata wrote: post #640
amrocha wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like copyleft licenses! But they don’t solve the problem of cloud providers pulling the rug out from under companies based on open source companies.

Not sure I understand your message. If you have a copyleft licence without a CLA, then the copyright is distributed between all the contributors, which makes it almost impossible to change the licence. And because it is copyleft, it means that the sources need to be distributed to the users. So TooBigTech can build a service upon a copyleft project, but they have to distribute their changes, which means that the comm…

Gotcha, I see what you’re saying.

I didn’t know about Grafana. That sounds awesome.

Maybe you’re right about this being an antitrust issue though.

Re: Redis is open source again

#655

Post by merb »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #294
merb wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You seem to be opposed to software freedom. The SSPL is a viral copyleft open source license, it merely requires users to open source things . The SSPL is only restrictive in the same way as the GPL is, it requires granting users software freedom.

The sspl is basically hostile to a certain user base, one could say it’s rassist. And that’s against the spirit of the fsf.

Re: Redis is open source again

#656

Post by snotreal »

williamstein wrote: post #308
Zambyte wrote: post #72

Very interesting that this is happening at the same time that NATS is going proprietary. Obviously Redis is way more well known, but as someone who has built a bunch on NATS over the last few years, this makes Redis an interesting choice to migrate to again.

Context: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829008 - https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/1632 - https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/issues/6832 I also built a lot on NATS Jetstream, and I'm questioning my decision in light of the threatened license change.

Why? Have you actually ready Synadia's comments where they made it clear that they always intended to maintain the Apache 2 Version by contributing the stuff they build back to the main repo? It just won't be as fast, so they can make some money first which will fund them giving it away.

You said "I also built a lot" Are you making money off those projects or get paid for your services for that use?

Re: Redis is open source again

#657

Post by jraph »

detaro wrote: post #625
jraph wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are not allowed to modify an AGPL program without adding a mandatory feature to provide the currently-running source code to a remote network user of the software That's not true. You only need to provide the modified source code somewhere. You might want to read it again :-) It seems like you have a wrong idea of what the AGPL does. edit: I see an immediate downvote. If whoever did this thinks I'm wrong, pleas…

The problematic clause is this one: > if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source The application does not have to directly provide its own exact source code, but it must advertise where to find it. And it's quite unclear what exac…

Fair enough! Thanks for the interesting comment.

Re: Redis is open source again

#658

Post by ddorian43 »

geysersam wrote: post #554
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…

I don't get it, why don't gcp and aws just pay the Redis company instead of paying their own (expensive!) engineers to maintain a fork?

Because they think it's cheaper/better for them.

Re: Redis is open source again

#659

Post by jraph »

immibis wrote: post #628
jraph wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That is true. I'm talking general purpose. If you're putting something you made on the internet, and there's a good chance it's useful to someone, I recommend AGPL unless you have a specific argument against it. Also notice that it's easier to grant more permission than to take it away.

I completely agree with you there.

Re: Redis is open source again

#660

Post by eduction »

em-bee wrote: post #404
eduction wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are fussing about the details which code you need to share and which not then you are not following the spirit of Free Software. it's as simple as that. Kyle’s point is pretty clear: it’s really hard to tell what agpl actually requires. So it’s a bad, unclear license whatever your position is - whether you think your code should virally make everything that links it open source, or if you expressly don’t wan…

but my point is that if i just share everything, as a FOSS enthusiast is wont to do, then i don't need to worry about the details. the details only matter for those who are not into FOSS and are forced to comply with the license without having the desire to do so. one could argue that a complicated license reduces the attraction of my software, but again, if i am not out to become popular, i would not care about that…

> but my point is that if i just share everything, as a FOSS enthusiast is wont to do, then i don't need to worry about the details.

That’s only true if you also don’t care what other people are required to do with your code. People who want copyleft enforced for their contributions will care if the license actually enforces it, and how.

> if the license for my software is to complicated for you, tough luck

Sure, fine. My whole point in the last comment is that it’s complicated for the /creator/. Wasn’t talking about the user. A badly written license cuts both ways.

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