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Redis is forked

vickiboykis.com

91–100 of 206 posts

Re: Redis is forked

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them. I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed…

First of all, you can "recall a gift", if it is legal. I don't think I've seen people arguing that these re-licensing actions are not legal . But if you mean that you can't recall a gift without making people mad, then yep, that's true! But keeping people from being mad is not the only thing that matters. But the real problem I have with, "I hope the lesson will be learned" is that the lesson people are learning is "…

We're living in a society, with certain systems baked into it.

Fighting to change those systems and norms is a Good Thing™, but I'm too pessimistic to act today as if the change is coming tomorrow. I'll both work to change those systems, AND act as if they're here to stay.

Re: Redis is forked

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP suggested the CSP should give 0.1% of their revenue to open source software they make their revenue from. As Redis isn't the only SaaS AWS offers, I was gracious and allocated 10% of those 0.1% to it.

Got it. It would actually be less than that since the number you selected was for revenue, not profit which is what OP asked for. Looking at some prior years it looks like AWS profit is close to 1/4 their revenue, so $90 billion would leave them with (generously) $25 billion profit. 0.1% of that would be $25 million and 10% of that (your estimate of Redis's share) would be $2.5 million.

What can I say? I'm very generous with other people's money.

Re: Redis is forked

#93
post #18

I thought the author was bringing in genAI for little reason...then I clicked through. For some reason storing vectors and chats is core to Redis' vision of its future. ( https://redis.io/blog/the-future-of-redis/ ) I'm, generally, a mobile dev so I'm not familiar with redis. My handwave-y understanding is its a in-memory key/value DB. I don't understand how that brings anything to the table for genAI. Couldn't the p…

Redis will be used for genAI as it's always used: answer queries faster. Users are not interesting in waiting, answers need to be immediate. Plus reducing load on whatever you got behind Redis is a nice bonus.

Naively, I don't understand how Redis would be involved at all. Ex. in simplest system set up, we're running O(seconds) network request that relays output from a GPU to a client. Again, I'm a naive mostly mobile dev, but I'd presume the same machine running inference would stream the response JSON.

Re: Redis is forked

#94

If AWS and other cloud providers gave if only 0.1% of the profit they generate out of these open source projects back to the developers we probably wouldn't have this problem. Unfortunately they don't and it's only fair that eventually those developers take it in their own hands. It's not a great situation but it's certainly understandable.

Disregarding the question of if the CSP compete fairly with providers of open source SaaS, your math is broken: AWS revenue is about $90.76B, though most of it isn't from Redis, I'd assume. But let's be generous, and assume 10% of that is. So about $10mm. For the recent version, Redis-the-company contributions to Redis-the-software were less than third of the code base, so let's say they get $4mm. That's very little…

Revenue is irrelevant, profit is what matters. The vast majority of the cost of any redis service offered is going to be the cost of the underlying compute and disk resources used. In some cases the margins could be close to nonexistent after paying for the resources utilized and the people to manage it, and it's used as a table stakes service that needs to exist for people to want to use your platform.

The vast majority of these projects didn't seem to have a problem with large companies like Netflix using their software, even if it was put on a cloud server, as long as it was managed by Netflix. Now that the management portion is moved to the cloud provider, along with some amount of possible profit, it's a large problem? Was it not a large problem when the companies were using these projects directly? Was there not some assumption and hope these companies would use these projects by the people contributing to them?

Re: Redis is forked

#95

Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Sometimes the fork will gain traction and become the de facto "true" version (see Hudson -> Jenkins). Sometimes the fork will flop and people will largely stick to the original despite whatever caused the schism (see Terraform -> OpenTofu). Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on…

I'm actually surprised by how well received Valkey is right now, given that they forked not too long ago. Below are GitHub engagement insights for the two projects:

https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&nb=all

For a longer case study, you might be interested in Elastic and OpenSearch

https://devboard.gitsense.com/opensearch-project?id=e766e581...

Both projects are quite healthy, but Elastic is still clearly more popular.

Re: Redis is forked

#96
post #36
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it If it wasn't open-source it won't be as popular as it is in the first place, Redis is also using ton of open source software or libraries for free. Not defending AWS/GCP/Azure, I actually got my software used when i was young by a large company for free (not even a mention- Still using it i think, 5M+ Play Store Down…

Open Source is, by and large, intended by the creator to donate their ideas to benefit humanity as a whole; many people feel that using their thing to help strengthen an (ethically questionable) monopoly is acting against that core goal.

This is why the most viral AGPL license you can find is the only right license for Open Source. There is no downside: for honest, upstanding developers who want to use your code, there's no problem, because their code was going to be Open Source, too. For the soulless corporations, they'll either not use your code, or contribute back their modifications, a win-win for everyone.

The only losers are people who are engaging with the Open Source community in bad faith, viewing it as something to steal from, rather than participate in.

Re: Redis is forked

#97
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $2B is fake money though, the $4M would be actual paycheck.

Yes, and per year.

Last year, valuation multiple for public across tech was about 2.6. That would make this contribution worth less than $11M in valuation.

Considering Redis raised about $350M, $11M valuation is minuscule compared to the expected valuation to make that investment worthwhile.

Re: Redis is forked

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you can "recall a gift", if it is legal. I don't think I've seen people arguing that these re-licensing actions are not legal . But if you mean that you can't recall a gift without making people mad, then yep, that's true! But keeping people from being mad is not the only thing that matters. But the real problem I have with, "I hope the lesson will be learned" is that the lesson people are learning is "…

We're living in a society, with certain systems baked into it. Fighting to change those systems and norms is a Good Thing™, but I'm too pessimistic to act today as if the change is coming tomorrow. I'll both work to change those systems, AND act as if they're here to stay.

I'm not sure if this was a purposeful allusion or not, but I entirely agree that you "can't recall a gift" in exactly the same sense that you can't keep talking on a payphone for a long time when someone is clearly waiting; because, you know, we're living in a society!!

Re: Redis is forked

#99
I really don’t get why Redis didn’t keep the same license but with an addendum that companies (where this applies to the ultimate parent company) that have more than some huge amount of revenue (say, $5 billion), can’t resell it. Similar to the license provision for the Llama2 model. That wouldn’t upset people nearly as much, since it would only apply to a handful of hyper scalers, and then Redis the company could cut deals with all of them to make a bit of money. Now they will end up with much less because of these fully open source competitors that were only created because of their foolish license change.

Re: Redis is forked

#100

Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Sometimes the fork will gain traction and become the de facto "true" version (see Hudson -> Jenkins). Sometimes the fork will flop and people will largely stick to the original despite whatever caused the schism (see Terraform -> OpenTofu). Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on…

> Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them. I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed…

> Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again

That's actually an accurate description of what's happening with these re-licensing dramas. Redis versions from before the split are still BSD-licensed. They can't recall those gifts. The re-licensing only applies to newer versions.

Of course, it wasn't just people employed by Redis, Inc. who were providing the gifts. My (vague) understanding is that a lot of contributions came from people at AWS, etc. Technically, AWS was providing those "gift" contributions to Redis -- because Redis, Inc. maintains the copyright for community contributions -- and Redis was then re-gifting those contributions to the world, via the BSD license. That's all fine and dandy until the big contributors realized they're actually fiercely competing with each other for cloud customers, and it's not realistic for Redis, Inc. to compete with the largest cloud provider on Earth without any technical moat whatsoever. Hence the re-licensing.

I think the breakdown in trust for Redis, Inc. is overblown. By far the biggest contributor to valkey (madolson) is employed by AWS. Does the OSS community really think that's a better organization to back in the long term?

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