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Why AWS Supports Valkey

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Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#91

Post by Kwpolska »

pizza234 wrote: post #74
dig1 wrote: post #26

It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it'…

Have you actually taken the time to understand the RSAL and SSPL? > If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period There is essentially only one restriction (the other is about formal notices) imposed by the RSAL, and it forbids to "Commercialize the software or provide it to others as a managed service". > IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here This is an uninformed o…

The licence forbids

> offering a product or service, the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Software or Modified version

How do you define how much value your app derives from Redis? If Redis is the primary data store for your app, does it count?

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#92

Post by dontupvoteme »

sverhagen wrote: post #32
hackcasual wrote: post #7

It's hard to quantify, but I think Amazon would have to be in the top contenders for most value gotten from open source software

If I use Redis software on AWS, am I getting the most value, or does AWS? Exactly by offering ready to go implementations of known open source projects, are they increasing or decreasing my AWS lock in? Does it even matter? If they didn't offer these, which are saving me effort (thus money) today, wouldn't I just be running these myself on an EC2 or ECS setup?

Why don't you compare tax returns to find out?

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#93

Post by dontupvoteme »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #57
pritambarhate wrote: post #39

I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK. Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.

They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills…

They do that because it's required of them out of sheer necessity, but it's the absolute bare minimum they can do because capitalism dictates it so

Just like you might imagine a leech could evolve some attribute to help defend its host against other predators.

I can't speak on the elastic vs open search topic though - does being part of the fiefdom of amazon work as a survival strategy?

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#94

Post by [deleted] »

sanxiyn wrote: post #71
Y_Y wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness? As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not. The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or wha…

The best option is to use GPL.

[deleted]

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#95

Post by shermantanktop »

zokier wrote: post #73
mooreds wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're missing is that people contribute (time, energy, code, attention) in the now expecting to be able to reap the benefits into the future. When I learn redis, I spend time and want to amortize that over a long period. When I integrate elastic search into my application, I expect to be able to use it in the same way far into the future. Relicensing, as you point out, doesn't affect past versions, but it sure…

But you are not forced to upgrade. You can just keep using the foss version indefinitely exactly the same way as before. That's the great benefit of foss, upstream changes can never force downstreams to do anything.

An ever-increasing list of CVEs represents erosion of value over time.

Software is a shark - if it stops moving, it dies.

(I heard that saying somewhere, and I think it is untrue of actual sharks but it is definitely true of software)

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#96

Post by Twirrim »

kgeist wrote: post #49
pritambarhate wrote: post #39

I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK. Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.

According to LWN [0], Redis was already maintained by big corporations/cloud providers: Tencent - 24.8% Redis Labs - 19.5% Alibaba- 6.7% Huawei - 5.2% Amazon.com - 5.2% Bytedance - 2.0% NetEase - 1.3% [0] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/

On the surface of it, it looks like literally no one wins. Redis Labs are going to lose a large amount of labour they've been getting for free. This seems like biting the hand that feeds it.

Users lose out on the fruits of that labour, harming bug fixes, feature development etc., as well as now having to consult with legal experts and the like to ensure there is no chance the fall afoul of the new license (you need to be really careful with the wording and the way it might be interpreted, not just how you interpret it or how Redis Lab's blog post suggests it is), and any time and hassles spent switching.

The people providing that labour now have the hassles and expense of forking, setting up governance, legal stuff etc, when they could have been just getting on with things.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#97

Post by jsmeaton »

nurtbo wrote: post #88

Was Redis Labs founded by Redis developers? I looked at its corporate history and was a bit confused (eg antirez seemed to be a consultant for them)

No, which is why I think there has been less support for the (previous) OSS company than some other projects.

Redis labs effectively became the defacto owner of the project later down the line when Antirez joined them. They inherited the project then tried to capture all of the value.

This isn’t a case of the original maintainers trying to sustain the project. It’s a hostile takeover that’s backfiring significantly. They brought Microsoft onboard as a partner hoping that would get them through the mess. Turns out that wasn’t enough.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#98

Post by matthewmacleod »

ephemeral-life wrote: post #15
matthewmacleod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately it seems that everyone loses - the Redis project slowly fades, nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more, and AWS continues on unaffected by the change.

> nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more This just shows you have no idea what sspl entails. It states you can use it for whatever you want, but if you want to provide the product as a service, you need to share all your infrastructure code for providing the service. Its basically agpl with a carve-out for AWS and that is so valid because AWS are vultures. They probably make the most money in the wo…

No, I think it means that you don’t understand the license. Since it is no longer open-source licensed, I can no longer use code from Redis (after this change) in open-source projects, since the licenses are not compatible.

Ton case it isn’t clear: I can’t now pick up, say, a module from Redis and use it in a GPL/MIT/BSD-licensed (i.e. open-source) project.

I would suggest making some time to research the effects because it obviously doesn’t work the way you think.

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#99

Post by skybrian »

dig1 wrote: post #26

It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it'…

I largely agree, except what the “bait” is.

Here’s where antirez said he chose BSD because he wanted to allow forks that change the license. [1]

Under BSD, forks that change the license and forks that don’t change the license are both okay, full stop. When antirez chose a BSD license, thinking he might do a proprietary fork later, it wasn’t “bait,” it’s how it works.

But when Redis, the company, said that Redis “has always been and will continue to be BSD licensed” [2], this was an implicit promise about what license the company would use for their own future improvements to Redis. In that sense, what they said is misleading, and maybe that’s bait.

So giving things away for free isn’t wrong, and making a proprietary fork isn’t wrong. It’s promising that you won’t do it and then doing it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39863371 [2] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/

Re: Why AWS Supports Valkey

#100

Post by chipdart »

pizza234 wrote: post #75
chipdart wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”? It's undoubtedly bait and switch. You have a company that portrays itself as the host of a project that relies on community contributions for maintenance, and all of a sudden that host unilaterally forces a licensing change where all users, including those who have been directly a…

> forces a licensing change where all users [...] are faced with an invoice-or-lawyer threat. You're spreading misinformation. See other comments about RSAL/SSPL.

> You're spreading misinformation. See other comments about RSAL/SSPL.

I think you are commenting on things you know nothing about.

Take the time you need to read through the license you are quoting.

Here's a link to the Redis Source Available License 2.0 (RSALv2):

https://redis.com/legal/rsalv2-agreement/

With RSALv2 you do not need to reach very far in the licensing terms to read the part where it explicitly prohibits users from providing Redis as a service, or even a modified version of it.

With Server Side Public License (SSPL) it's an even bigger shit show, as it forces any business that uses the software to release under the very same license all software and systems and even user interfaces (?!) that directly or indirectly interact with their project. As it is very easy to understand, this prohibits any company from adopting any software released under that license.

And of course it's so very convenient and an incredible coincidence that the same company that tries to force-feed these licenses to the world just so happens to sell proprietary "enterprise" versions of the same project.

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