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Redis is open source again

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Re: Redis is open source again

#691

Post by mfitton »

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…

Testing my LLM-detection abilities. Did you write this yourself? Or is this LLM produced?

The phrasings stick out to me as super GPT-like.

Re: Redis is open source again

#692

Post by miki123211 »

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…

A sufficiently capable LLM might be good enough to do cleanroom design on its own, with little to no human assistance. That would destroy the entire idea of copyright as it exists for software.

You need one agent that can write a complete specification of any piece of software, either just by using it and inferring how it works, or by reverse engineering if not prohibited by the license. You then have a lawyer in the middle (human or LLM) review it, removing any bits that are copyrighted. You then need another agent that can re-implement that spec. You just made a perfectly legal clone.

Cleanroom design is a well-established precedent in the US, and has been used before, just with teams of humans instead of LLMs.

I think some companies will be completely unaffected by this, as either the behavior of their code can't easily be infered just from API calls, or because their value actually lies in users / data / business relationships, not the code directly. Stripe would be my go-to example, you can't just reverse-engineer all their optimizations and antifraud models just by getting a developer API key and calling their API endpoints. They also have a lot of relationships with banks and other institutions, which are arguably just as important to their business as their code. Instagram, Uber or Amazon also fall into this bucket somewhat.

Re: Redis is open source again

#693

Post by rootnod3 »

Nah, as much as I loved the original Redis, they dropped the ball with the license change. To me it looks like they realized way too late. There was a window for them to turn back, but now it looks like they are bleeding some way or another and just trying to recuperate. In the meantime, other drop-in solutions took over.

Can't say that I feel sorry for them though.

Re: Redis is open source again

#694

Post by whizzter »

arghwhat wrote: post #214
reconditerose wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tl;dr is it's just a lockless hashmap attached to a TCP server with a log. Simple Get/Set operations are highly optimized, so with high batching they are able to efficiently fetch a lot of data efficiently. The architectures scales very well when you add threads and data access that is uniform. It struggles a bit on certain types of workloads like hot keys, think heavy hitting a single sorted set. It's a cool arc…

That's... Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a KV store. It's a hashmap on the network.

The difference is that Redis is single-threaded, the value proposition of Redis was/is a fast (in-memory) simple (single-threaded) server to serve things so much faster than a traditional DB. It was a perfect fit and became popular with the Ruby/Rails community,etc since those environments combined with traditional SQL servers are slogs compared to what a fast server like Redis could do.

As good as Redis is, modern computers with multiple cores potentially leaves a lot of performance on the table. Garnet seems to be a well designed multithread KV-store (though sadly the benchmark page doesn't list benchmark for more complex objects even if the simple cases looks good).

Re: Redis is open source again

#695

Post by dharmab »

fsckboy wrote: post #662
dharmab wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say you should avoid non-copyleft licenses? Indeed, all of my own OSS projects are non-copyleft.

loosely speaking: you said "avoid gpl". reason? "unenforceable". eliminating gpl from consideration, thus you advocate non-copyleft licenses instead. with me so far? but gpl's "unenforceability" could only mean it turns into a non-copyleft license, one which you say one should not use , so if one shouldn't use gpl because in reality it is a non-copyleft license, then you must be against non-copyleft licenses. just to…

Please link to where I said not to use copyleft licenses. Check the usernames carefully.

Note that I don't agree that GPL and MIT are equivalent, or that GPL becomes a non-copyleft open source license if not enforceable. IANAL but it might revert to the regular copyright law for wherever you publish software, not an open source license.

Re: Redis is open source again

#696

Post by adamc »

noirscape wrote: post #569
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…

I don't think the license pick is because of adoption - outside of a few specific cases, the license usually isn't the blocker to getting your tools/projects more widely adopted. I've written code in the past that I put under GPL that today, I'd probably use a different license for (BSD 3-clause has my preference these days, although I'd just prefer a generic non-commercial license instead). I don't really bother rel…

I think it might depend on the business. In some places, open source is the "safe pick" (particularly if you aren't selling software and are not worried about things like the GPL). In others, licensing concerns are huge.

Re: Redis is open source again

#697

Post by lolinder »

SweetLlamaMyth wrote: post #461
tedivm wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the ValKey fork happened so fast is that AWS was already sponsoring developers for the open source redis project.

And not merely "some developers", but a member of the Redis Core Team: https://redis.io/blog/redis-core-team-update/

Yeah, the whole "they give nothing back" line might be the worst part of the PR around these changes. It's obvious to anyone familiar with the ecosystem that it's not true, which damages the credibility of Redis's argument in the eyes of the people who matter most.

Re: Redis is open source again

#698

Post by merb »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #665
merb wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Racist against billionaires? C'mon. Also, you're wrong. The FSF's position is basically that software that is non-free is immoral, so any license which forces additional software to be released with a free license is inherently moral. A very copyleft license like the SSPL should be the peak of the FSF's goals.

As said no. A license should not discriminate not even against billionaires. Either you start with x and keep it that way or you are not better than the billionaires. Bait and switch is even worse than being a asshole

Re: Redis is open source again

#699

Post by jpc0 »

amrocha wrote: post #652
jpc0 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dev…

> and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project

Therein lies our disagreement, you don’t need to. If you are amazon and upstream is willing to accept requests then amazon can hire devs, and if someone eats their cake then those devs will eventually migrate to the new location.

As someone who did the initial work for OSS I put the code out there, if I dislike the direction a fork is taking I can ignore said fork and keep working on my own version, why do I need to use the version they are using.

It boils down to why did you even start an OSS project, if the intention was to make money or hire other employees you fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.

If you made a project that serves your own need, decide someone else may benefit so you publish it as FOSS online and it gets massive traction how does that change your need, you probably have no reason to make it commercially viable, it is still serving the same need it always has for you.

Now if it gets forked and the fork proves to be of better quality and still serves your need then switch to the fork for your own personal need and now someone else is doing the maintenance, so you end up being the “freeloader”.

And I’ve already discussed the “burden on the maintainer”, if it’s such an issue close access to issues and pull requests. No more burden.

Re: Redis is open source again

#700

Post by geodel »

matt-p wrote: post #605
motorest wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, anti trust rules should have stopped amazon. But they didn't, this directly hurts open source. What absurd, twisted logic. No, it does not affect open source. What are you talking about? > The problem is Amazon, not elastic that's trying to survive. No, the problem is Elastic trying to coerce end-users to pay them for using FLOSS projects. It makes absolutely no difference if AWS provides a managed service or…

So how should the maintainers eat? Or there should be none? Should they be Amazon employees?

They can create business with closed source software. No one demanded of them to create Apache License software.
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