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

771–780 of 815 posts

Re: Redis is open source again

#771

Post by zwaps »

WD-42 wrote: post #435
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…

Or start with the AGPL from the start instead of a pushover license and sell alternative licenses to hyper scalers if they want it.

I really would like to but from working in consulting I know that AGPL is banned in most companies since it’s specifics are completely diffuse and need to be hashed out in court (or are unpalatable).

In spirit the AGPL is what is needed but in practice it kills any corporate adoption sadly.

A license that singles out hyperscalers or goes by revenue is probably a better bet.

Maybe a license that is more clear canbe written, maybe not.

Re: Redis is open source again

#772

Post by zwaps »

palata wrote: post #527
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…

> A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright. A copyleft licence (not necessarily GPL, there is also MPL and EUPL) from the beginning on would result in (1), no need for a new license. But people "don't want strings attached" and are happier with permissive licences, and then they complain.

No you are wrong. People want adoption by any company other than hyperscalers. People would be happy to sell service contracts and the like while keeping their code foss, if only hyperscalers weren’t direct competitors to that.

But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department.

Which is why almost all cooyleft companies offer copyleft plus some corporate licensing even though in 99 percent of the cases it has nothing to do with the spirit of copyleft as companies just want to import and use the damn package in some completely unrelated internal project or whatever

The combination of unclear legal precedent and corporate governance means that copyleft in it’s current state exactly does not work as most people want

Re: Redis is open source again

#773

Post by zwaps »

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…

The issue is that hyperscalers will not host your product. They will fork it, close source it, and you get no benefit not even security research.

And if you use copyleft, nobody uses your product (or asks flr a commercial non FOSS license)

Re: Redis is open source again

#774

Post by zwaps »

jpc0 wrote: post #699
amrocha wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direct…

The fork is typically closed source so you do not get to benefit from it and neither does the public good.

This of course means that you should never use permissive licensing since it doesn’t provide many key benefits of what people thought oss would do. You could use copyleft but i guess with llms it kinda amounts to the same

Re: Redis is open source again

#775

Post by zwaps »

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…

Copyleft are sadly unclear legally which is why essentially no company uses copyleft licenses even if they should.

I mean the intend of apgl is exactly right, but in practice it means you can never ever use it in a company even if you really do not even want to change it or sell it or host it in isolation in any way.

That is really frustrating. Most internal licensing tools i have seen just literally blacklist any direct copyleft imports

Re: Redis is open source again

#776

Post by zwaps »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #743
amrocha wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok friend, when you come up with a business model to support OSS that doesn’t get destroyed by the internet giants let me know.

No one needs to come up with anything. OSS is already just fine. I don't know what you want, but it seems to be something you never had any right to, and no one needs to come up with anything to satisfy it.

It’s easy to say everyone else is wrong but the majority of innovation and new projects nowadays are coming from people wanting to do oss while still supporting a business with it. That is having it be more than a hobby.

Now you can say that this itself is already a misunderstanding and maybe you are right, but I think you forget also that software reality has changed and indeed there was a time when oss fulltime was viable.

Now the reality is that there is no business model other than closed source or oss with some inevitable rug pull of some sort.

And that is not what should be

Re: Redis is open source again

#777

Post by zwaps »

Genuine question: i want to start a project which fundamentally i would line to open source. I want people and in particular people working in companies to use my project.

However i also want to be able to make a living from it if it takes off ie build a business on it. I guess if that business has competition purely from hosted copies, that is also fine.

However, I do not want any hyperscalers to fork and close source the project. I want sny benefit to continue to be available.

So it seems I should choose Agpl. But i know that in most companies this leads to being blacklisted, especially in the EU where its legally unclear what the AGPL entails. Without corporate adootion i do not see the project gaining traction so i would only do it for myself.

With permissive licensing it seems a rug pull is inevitable to be able to do it full time.

What to do?

Re: Redis is open source again

#778

Post by f33d5173 »

zwaps wrote: post #777

Genuine question: i want to start a project which fundamentally i would line to open source. I want people and in particular people working in companies to use my project. However i also want to be able to make a living from it if it takes off ie build a business on it. I guess if that business has competition purely from hosted copies, that is also fine. However, I do not want any hyperscalers to fork and close sour…

You could dual license, under the agpl and a proprietary license.

Re: Redis is open source again

#779

Post by jpc0 »

amrocha wrote: post #740
jpc0 wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 direct…

If Amazon had to do enough maintenance work they’d just fork it and do it on their own proprietary version. They have literally done that. This goes back to my original point. You’re living in fantasy land.

I don’t see the problem with that. Good for them. How does that affect you?

Re: Redis is open source again

#780

Post by palata »

zwaps wrote: post #772
palata wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright. A copyleft licence (not necessarily GPL, there is also MPL and EUPL) from the beginning on would result in (1), no need for a new license. But people "don't want strings attached" and are happier with permissive licences, and then they complain.

No you are wrong. People want adoption by any company other than hyperscalers. People would be happy to sell service contracts and the like while keeping their code foss, if only hyperscalers weren’t direct competitors to that. But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department. Which is why almost all cooyleft companies offer copyleft plus some corporate li…

> But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department.

Because they always manage to find permissively-licenced alternatives! There are many different copyleft licences (not only the GPL family, take e.g. MPL or EUPL) that can be used and that are not "viral".

> The combination of unclear legal precedent and corporate governance means that copyleft in it’s current state exactly does not work as most people want

This is wrong. What it means is that corporate governance doesn't handle it correctly, because they don't need to.

If a project goes permissive because they want to please corporations, they shouldn't whine when they do. Otherwise they should just use a copyleft licence and teach the smaller companies that they can actually totally use that!

Post reply on HN