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I'm assuming people are forking this as we speak. Kind of sad to see companies cut themselves off from their own developer communities. I understand why they d

I'm assuming people are forking this as we speak. Kind of sad to see companies cut themselves off from their own developer communities. I understand why they do it. I just don't agree it works long term. Most Redis users have never paid the company behind it even a single cent. Me included. So, I can appreciate them doing this in order to make some money. Except it won't change my behavior; I'll just use the fork. Just like the vast majority of other Redis users, external Redis contributors, all of the cloud providers currently offering Redis commercially, and by the time this runs it course probably a fair bit of current Redis employees. Given the large amount of commercial users and cloud providers offering Redis, I don't think it will take long for them to get organized even. They pretty much have to given that they have lots of users paying them for this. There are some precedents with Terraform, Elasticsearch, Red Hat, and a few other big players now dealing with a lot of their target users and potential customers depending on open source forks. As a business strategy alienating future users like that seems misguided. When Oracle took ownership of Sun's open source projects (including such things as mysql, hudson, openoffice, etc.), they quickly lost control of most of that. Oracle's attempts to convince the world to use their closed source offerings never amounted to much. Even with Java, they more or less gave in and openjdk is where the action is these days. Except for a few banks, very few people use the Oracle JDK. There's no need, Oracle has long ago stopped pretending there's any advantage to that. All the development happens on OpenJDK. There are half a dozen different companies offering certified builds. Anecdotically, I consult on Elasticsearch and Opensearch. Most of my recent clients default to Opensearch. It's just the way it is. They all go for the free and open source option. The point here is that this can only end in one way: the creation of a Redis fork that will be used by the vast majority of current Redis users.

pjmlp 3y ago
I see it ending in another way, long term FOSS will be considered a phase in the industry, never to be repeated again, as the industry settles back on trial and demo versions, without full features available on the free tier/source code.
- stephenr 3y ago
  That might make sense if the tools in question were created by corporations who used OSS as a pseudo demo. Redis the project/tool existed long before Redis the company owned it. Vagrant existed before HashiCorp owned it. Significantly: both companies dropped permissive licensing after the creator of their (original) products stepped away, and both are venture capital backed companies. So we could just as easily say "I see that long term people will preemptively fork projects the moment they are owned by a VC backed company"
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Which many developers only adopted, because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money.
    - stephenr 3y ago
      > because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money I think you somehow missed the point where Redis the project existed and was extremely popular before it was owned by what is now Redis the company. The competition for redis in the early days wasn't paid alternatives, it was other open source alternatives; Redis just provided a more featured solution.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Which people adopting Redis didn't had to pay for, if they had to, they would rather suffer with those other less capable open source alternatives instead.
        stephenr 3y ago
        The point is that it wasn't developed by VC money. It was bought with VC money after the fact. It wasn't a "demo" for a paid product funded by corporate dollars or VC funding, it was just a thing that someone created, and released as an open source project. It's hilarious that you think the companies dropping open source licenses for the products they bought are going to stop the industry using open source. As I said originally, it's going to have the opposite affect: it's going to make the industry embrace the very nature of open source and create forks of projects, the moment there's a sniff of a corporate buy out, specifically because of this type of activity.
thrdbndndn 3y ago
And Redis as a company can get some cash from certain amount of clients that decided to stick with Redis (even in Oracle's case, this was a non-trivial amount of money)? It sounds like a win-win to me.
throwaw12 3y ago
> I'll just use the fork For personal projects maybe yes, doesn't work for companies, they can't chase for thousand different forks of Redis and try to understand why feature isn't working properly on their version. Unless single fork emerges as a winner
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Why would there be thousands of forks? We only need one good one. I'm predicting such a fork backed by several core committers, and possible several cloud providers will emerge pretty quickly because they all need this to continue to exist as free and open source. AWS is not going to pay Redis a cent. Nor is Azure. Or Google. Or people commercializing open stack. All of those offer Redis support currently. Lots of their users use it.
lethedata 3y ago
I think the long term game works if you look at it from a Broadcom style prospective. You're not looking to snag many users but rather the few very expensive ones who have built themselves around the product. From the Businesses prospective they'll pay the increased prices to avoid moving completely or in the short term during migrations. To avoid the short term, providers could "buy time" and keep prices low until the project deviates far enough from forks, making migration much harder, then increase prices. Either way, long term they can end up with a lot of money from a few companies rather than continuing to support many mixed sized companies. I don't like it either but I can see it working.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The reason this inevitably faceplants is lack of access to real user feedback. Invariably, someone looks at the numbers and realizes "We could make way more money if we only catered to the top 2% of our customers!" Unfortunately, opinions and needs of the top 2% of customers != a generally useful product. Thus, the reason to try and maintain user volume is better product-market feedback to guide development, instead of revenue.
- crote 3y ago
  Do those users actually exist, thought? Broadcom is able to screw over its customers because they have to choose between either reworking a core part of their infrastructure, running legacy code without support (provided you have a perpetual license), or paying a huge license fee. With Redis, the current version is already open-source: you can maintain it yourself, switch to a drop-in replacement community fork, or pay one of the dozens of SaaS companies to run it for you. Switching away from the official Redis flavor can be as simple as a one-line change in your infrastructure recipe. If they increase their prices, why would anyone stay? I think MySQL is probably a better comparison. After Oracle's acquisition they have been trying quite hard to add vendor lock-in and extract money out of it, but these days MariaDB has essentially made it completely irrelevant. I wouldn't be surprised if the future of Redis looked quite similar.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
lamontcg 3y ago
[flagged]
- api 3y ago
  This is the issue: FOSS has largely become free labor for SaaS companies.
- smokel 3y ago
  It is, however, also incredibly realistic. People are not using open source for the hippie philosophy. They are using it because it is free (as in beer), but even more importantly: they are using it because non-free licenses are a terrible pain in the ass. Legal aspects are a headache, and the amount of effort to get someone in your company to pay even a tiny amount for some library or service is a serious hurdle. I would not be surprised if adopting a non-free library would take a typical company ~40 man hours of work. At current rates, that translates to quite an expensive license.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Just getting open source adopted in my company takes around 10 man hours, and that is for something like a compiler that is only for internal use. If we will ship/expose it to customers we do due dalliance that probably amounts to 40+ man-hours to verify we can accept the license terms for that use and that the project doesn't have some hidden license issue (someone copied in code with a different license, link to something with a different license...). Getting close source is even more work though - now we need someone to negotiate license terms (that is make sure our proposed use is compatible with the license we buy). We also make sure there is no risk of using their code (what if the closed source binary library has some AGPL3 code in it). I'm not even sure how to go through that process.
  - api 3y ago
    That may be true, but a lot of the creators of open source do in fact do it for the "hippie philosophy." That disconnect will eventually kill it. Why work hard to just be free labor for SaaS companies and people who don't care about you?
volongoto 3y ago
Microsoft introduced an almost drop in replacement 3 days ago[1]. It is claimed to work with most Redis clients. I believe this will change things quite a bit a least for Azure users. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-garnet-an-open-source-next-generation-faster-cache-store-for-accelerating-applications-and-services/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-ga...
- CyanLite2 3y ago
  Looks neat, but probably only for internal MSFT usage. For what it's worth... Microsoft was quoted in the Redis press release as a cloud provider that has partnered officially with Redis under this new licensing scheme.
  - Rapzid 3y ago
    What only for MSFT usage? It looks like it's MIT licensed and.. Written in C# which is very interesting.
  - enormousness 3y ago
    Here's Microsoft's blog post on the topic of Redis relicensing btw: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-what-you-need-to-know/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-...
    - jrochkind1 3y ago
      Answered almost none of my questions.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  There are many drop in replacements (we use keydb), but, depending on the features you use, there are a lot of api compatible (but sometimes lacking features) compatible drop ins. We migrated of a large redis cluster overnight; 0 software changes.
  - 3y ago
Shakahs 3y ago
Beyond forks, at this point Redis is an API target that has been implemented by other databases (Dragonfly, Upstash, AWS ElastiCache Serverless).
- CyanLite2 3y ago
  Which is why I think Redis (the company) will change the protocol and it will end up fragmenting the community.
- remram 3y ago
  And Apache kvrocks
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
There is a work-in-progress fork here already: https://codeberg.org/redict/redict https://codeberg.org/redict/redict
miraculixx 3y ago
> Most Redis users have never paid the company behind it even a single cent. Me included. Most users never will. That's the fallacy made by MBA types. They dream up some lofty sums "if only everyone paid us money". What they don't realize is that most users will find alternatives.
mmahemoff 3y ago
Cynical take: Oracle didn’t need MySQL to be a profit center since it already offers a much more expensive alternative. They enjoyed good ROI by fragmenting the MySQL community, chilling usage and external development, and therefore slowing down the whole project.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  MySQL is used as upsell, when it can't take the requirements any longer, there is Oracle RDMS over there with a nice upgrade deal discussed over lunch.

pjmlp 3y ago

I see it ending in another way, long term FOSS will be considered a phase in the industry, never to be repeated again, as the industry settles back on trial and demo versions, without full features available on the free tier/source code.

stephenr 3y ago
That might make sense if the tools in question were created by corporations who used OSS as a pseudo demo. Redis the project/tool existed long before Redis the company owned it. Vagrant existed before HashiCorp owned it. Significantly: both companies dropped permissive licensing after the creator of their (original) products stepped away, and both are venture capital backed companies. So we could just as easily say "I see that long term people will preemptively fork projects the moment they are owned by a VC backed company"
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Which many developers only adopted, because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money.
  - stephenr 3y ago
    > because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money I think you somehow missed the point where Redis the project existed and was extremely popular before it was owned by what is now Redis the company. The competition for redis in the early days wasn't paid alternatives, it was other open source alternatives; Redis just provided a more featured solution.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Which people adopting Redis didn't had to pay for, if they had to, they would rather suffer with those other less capable open source alternatives instead.
      - stephenr 3y ago
        The point is that it wasn't developed by VC money. It was bought with VC money after the fact. It wasn't a "demo" for a paid product funded by corporate dollars or VC funding, it was just a thing that someone created, and released as an open source project. It's hilarious that you think the companies dropping open source licenses for the products they bought are going to stop the industry using open source. As I said originally, it's going to have the opposite affect: it's going to make the industry embrace the very nature of open source and create forks of projects, the moment there's a sniff of a corporate buy out, specifically because of this type of activity.

thrdbndndn 3y ago

And Redis as a company can get some cash from certain amount of clients that decided to stick with Redis (even in Oracle's case, this was a non-trivial amount of money)? It sounds like a win-win to me.

throwaw12 3y ago

> I'll just use the fork For personal projects maybe yes, doesn't work for companies, they can't chase for thousand different forks of Redis and try to understand why feature isn't working properly on their version. Unless single fork emerges as a winner

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Why would there be thousands of forks? We only need one good one. I'm predicting such a fork backed by several core committers, and possible several cloud providers will emerge pretty quickly because they all need this to continue to exist as free and open source. AWS is not going to pay Redis a cent. Nor is Azure. Or Google. Or people commercializing open stack. All of those offer Redis support currently. Lots of their users use it.

lethedata 3y ago

I think the long term game works if you look at it from a Broadcom style prospective. You're not looking to snag many users but rather the few very expensive ones who have built themselves around the product. From the Businesses prospective they'll pay the increased prices to avoid moving completely or in the short term during migrations. To avoid the short term, providers could "buy time" and keep prices low until the project deviates far enough from forks, making migration much harder, then increase prices. Either way, long term they can end up with a lot of money from a few companies rather than continuing to support many mixed sized companies. I don't like it either but I can see it working.

ethbr1 3y ago
The reason this inevitably faceplants is lack of access to real user feedback. Invariably, someone looks at the numbers and realizes "We could make way more money if we only catered to the top 2% of our customers!" Unfortunately, opinions and needs of the top 2% of customers != a generally useful product. Thus, the reason to try and maintain user volume is better product-market feedback to guide development, instead of revenue.
crote 3y ago
Do those users actually exist, thought? Broadcom is able to screw over its customers because they have to choose between either reworking a core part of their infrastructure, running legacy code without support (provided you have a perpetual license), or paying a huge license fee. With Redis, the current version is already open-source: you can maintain it yourself, switch to a drop-in replacement community fork, or pay one of the dozens of SaaS companies to run it for you. Switching away from the official Redis flavor can be as simple as a one-line change in your infrastructure recipe. If they increase their prices, why would anyone stay? I think MySQL is probably a better comparison. After Oracle's acquisition they have been trying quite hard to add vendor lock-in and extract money out of it, but these days MariaDB has essentially made it completely irrelevant. I wouldn't be surprised if the future of Redis looked quite similar.
- ipaddr 3y ago

lamontcg 3y ago

[flagged]

api 3y ago
This is the issue: FOSS has largely become free labor for SaaS companies.
smokel 3y ago
It is, however, also incredibly realistic. People are not using open source for the hippie philosophy. They are using it because it is free (as in beer), but even more importantly: they are using it because non-free licenses are a terrible pain in the ass. Legal aspects are a headache, and the amount of effort to get someone in your company to pay even a tiny amount for some library or service is a serious hurdle. I would not be surprised if adopting a non-free library would take a typical company ~40 man hours of work. At current rates, that translates to quite an expensive license.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Just getting open source adopted in my company takes around 10 man hours, and that is for something like a compiler that is only for internal use. If we will ship/expose it to customers we do due dalliance that probably amounts to 40+ man-hours to verify we can accept the license terms for that use and that the project doesn't have some hidden license issue (someone copied in code with a different license, link to something with a different license...). Getting close source is even more work though - now we need someone to negotiate license terms (that is make sure our proposed use is compatible with the license we buy). We also make sure there is no risk of using their code (what if the closed source binary library has some AGPL3 code in it). I'm not even sure how to go through that process.
- api 3y ago
  That may be true, but a lot of the creators of open source do in fact do it for the "hippie philosophy." That disconnect will eventually kill it. Why work hard to just be free labor for SaaS companies and people who don't care about you?

volongoto 3y ago

Microsoft introduced an almost drop in replacement 3 days ago[1]. It is claimed to work with most Redis clients. I believe this will change things quite a bit a least for Azure users. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-garnet-an-open-source-next-generation-faster-cache-store-for-accelerating-applications-and-services/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-ga...

CyanLite2 3y ago
Looks neat, but probably only for internal MSFT usage. For what it's worth... Microsoft was quoted in the Redis press release as a cloud provider that has partnered officially with Redis under this new licensing scheme.
- Rapzid 3y ago
  What only for MSFT usage? It looks like it's MIT licensed and.. Written in C# which is very interesting.
- enormousness 3y ago
  Here's Microsoft's blog post on the topic of Redis relicensing btw: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-what-you-need-to-know/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-...
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    Answered almost none of my questions.
anonzzzies 3y ago
There are many drop in replacements (we use keydb), but, depending on the features you use, there are a lot of api compatible (but sometimes lacking features) compatible drop ins. We migrated of a large redis cluster overnight; 0 software changes.
- 3y ago

Shakahs 3y ago

Beyond forks, at this point Redis is an API target that has been implemented by other databases (Dragonfly, Upstash, AWS ElastiCache Serverless).

CyanLite2 3y ago
Which is why I think Redis (the company) will change the protocol and it will end up fragmenting the community.
remram 3y ago
And Apache kvrocks

WhyNotHugo 3y ago

There is a work-in-progress fork here already: https://codeberg.org/redict/redict https://codeberg.org/redict/redict

miraculixx 3y ago

> Most Redis users have never paid the company behind it even a single cent. Me included. Most users never will. That's the fallacy made by MBA types. They dream up some lofty sums "if only everyone paid us money". What they don't realize is that most users will find alternatives.

mmahemoff 3y ago

Cynical take: Oracle didn’t need MySQL to be a profit center since it already offers a much more expensive alternative. They enjoyed good ROI by fragmenting the MySQL community, chilling usage and external development, and therefore slowing down the whole project.

pjmlp 3y ago
MySQL is used as upsell, when it can't take the requirements any longer, there is Oracle RDMS over there with a nice upgrade deal discussed over lunch.