5 ms·

Redis Renamed to Redict

69 points by Tomte 3y ago

Kwpolska 3y ago
Uh, this article is so strangely written. The real thing that happened is https://codeberg.org/redict/redict https://codeberg.org/redict/redict — a fork of Redis by Drew DeVault under LGPL v3. I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it.
- Klonoar 3y ago
  Huh, wonder why redict is on codeberg and not Sourcehut (or maybe it is on the latter, and one's a mirror?).
  - apgwoz 3y ago
    I think Drew recognizes that people contributing to redict are likely more familiar/comfortable with GitHub, and that this is truly not a selfish act.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Where is Github relevant here? We're talking about Codeberg vs SourceHut, no?
      - sshine 3y ago
        Truly not a selfish act, but not an act without principles.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - apgwoz 3y ago
        Codeberg is more like GitHub which is where redis was previously hosted as a project.
        stavros 3y ago
        I see, thanks. I didn't realize Codeberg was hosted Forgejo.
- apgwoz 3y ago
  > Uh, this article is so strangely written. What part do you think is strange? To me, the article presents an alternate narrative that (in my opinion) rightly calls out relicensing of F/OSS as the actual fork since it’s being done in a (usually) hostile manner against the wishes of the community that lifted it to be relevant in the first place. I think the crack at Drew is (maybe) fair given the explanation of redemption, but also unnecessary. Drew’s hardline software freedom advocacy is the relevant information to the story. His promise of redict’s safe harbor is backed up by his profound stewardship of other projects.
  - Kwpolska 3y ago
    Redis is the original project and it continues, even if the licence change is a bad move. Redict is a brand new fork, currently at the “rename everything” stage. It may or may not succeed at being the “new Redis”. The people behind “old Redis” probably consider this title misleading and possibly defaming their project. Many people may decide to create other forks (I expect OpenRedis from Amazon any second now). (And I’m not a fan of Drew myself.)
    - gkbrk 3y ago
      > Redis is the original project and it continues For many people, Redis is an open-source in-memory data store. Redict is closer both in spirit and in legal usability to the Redis people have been using for many years compared to whatever got the Redis trademark now. If I do an `apt-get upgrade`, I don't expect to schedule calls with lawyers. I imagine most repos will switch to either this one or some other "renamed" projects, with the package name "redis" pointing to one of those.
- zem 3y ago
  the article isn't strange at all, it's pointing out that there are two projects based on the last-good-release-of-redis source code: 1. redict, maintained by drew de vault, which takes the stance that redis is finished software, works well, and just needs its existing feature set maintained and bug fixed 2. redis, maintained by redis labs, which seems to be experimenting with generative ai for the sake of adding features, and which practically needs to stay on the feature churn treadmill so that they can keep trying to extract a profit from it the author's (quite reasonable) position is that regardless of who gets to use the name "redis", the product that people know and love is going to live on as drew's branch of the fork, not redis labs'.
  - evanelias 3y ago
    But why is that a "quite reasonable" position? To me, it's the opposite: extremely unreasonable, bordering on ridiculous and over-dramatic. Consider: * This position conflates a license to use a product with the product itself. That's not how intellectual property works! * The blog post author is unilaterally speaking on behalf of a community, but it isn't clear that the author has ever contributed to Redis (has he?) or is a major part of the Redis community (is he?). I understand that he is a very accomplished coder and have heard many positive things about Zig, but where's the relation to Redis? * Ditto for Drew (maintainer of the fork in question), has he ever contributed to Redis or is he a major part of the Redis community? fwiw some people said this same thing about MySQL vs MariaDB, claiming (absolutely incorrectly) that Oracle's MySQL is the "fork". In that case, it wasn't a license change (MySQL is still GPL), but rather people that just didn't like the change in ownership. So it seems people will just invent mental gymnastics to justify this "X is really just a fork of X" when they don't like a decision by the intellectual property owner. In the MySQL/MariaDB case, the people saying this "MySQL is actually the fork now" were largely not terribly visible members of the community. And the Linux distributions who mapped the "mysql" package onto "mariadb" created a giant mess, since MySQL has remained more popular than MariaDB, and the two are absolutely not compatible with each other. Anyway, if you don't like Redis Ltd or what they've done here, that is fine and understandable! But it doesn't mean you can unilaterally declare that their product is a fork of itself, and the "real" project lives on elsewhere, and expect most people to go along with this as if it is a reasonable position.
- PeterZaitsev 3y ago
  The license choice is interesting here - this means if there are many committers and there is no requirements like CLA it becomes impossible to change the license and have proprietary forks without all contributors agreements. I agree though I would rather see them choose to stick to BSD and work on creating community of vendors (rather than Redis Labs monopoly) perhaps some purely Open Source, others proprietary.
- reconditerose 3y ago
  > I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it. The old development community is regrouping under https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv. As of right now we don't intend to change the license, we just want a more balanced governance that prevents a corporate entity to make this type of choice. We are currently planning a five person governance, with everyone coming from a different company. (We would love some independent maintainers, but there weren't any at the time
slekker 3y ago
A missed opportunity to named the fork "Redisnt" :^) Is the new license (LGPL) going to be problematic for infrastructure providers to offer a managed Redict?
- andreareina 3y ago
  Shouldn't be an issue for cloud SaaS. For self-hosted they'll have to provide an object file of the software minus the LGPL portion; that preserves the IP, it's more a bit of annoyance w.r.t. an extra step for the build process and distribution.
- senorrib 3y ago
  No. It doesn’t require disclosure of server side components like AGPL, and doesn’t spread out like GPL.
tayo42 3y ago
Cynically a bunch of, idk, clout chasers maybe or opportunists?, are going to try to fork to advance them selves and take advantage of some uncertainty? What does this guy know about redis? Agree with the other comment, this was written weirdly. Can't place my finger on why though.
- reconditerose 3y ago
  Drew seems like a great guy, but he wasn't the one maintaining Redis when the relicense happened. There are non-Redis contributors who are trying to figure out what to do nest, and people keep peppering me (one of those contributors) about this fork. I like the meta-point Andrew makes that Redis is the one that's forking, but the framing it around some other arbitrary fork doesn't sit well with me.
yawgmoth 3y ago
When developers do this is it really for the good of the community or is it a career advancing move? Because the community has a bunch of redis protocol compatible choices and I don't understand why pushing redis in particular over others is the right choice.
- apgwoz 3y ago
  > When developers do this is it really for the good of the community or is it a career advancing move? Drew had the opportunity to make money with this fork by hosting it on SourceHut, and potentially creating subscribers out of redict contributors. Instead, he chose to host on Codeberg, a German non-profit, that is more GitHub like. I think, this alone, shows that (in this case) it’s about community and preservation over everything else.
  - Kwpolska 3y ago
    You don’t need to pay to contribute to a project on SourceHut. But you must like the antiquated e-mail-based workflow.
    - apgwoz 3y ago
      Ah! Good to know about contributors being free. I’d still expect the size of redict’s community to be big enough to convert some folks to paid. But maybe I am overestimating the size of that community since the Redis company took over?
  - yawgmoth 3y ago
    That's good to know. Fwiw, I don't know anything about Drew nor was I trying to comment about him.
    - apgwoz 3y ago
      I didn’t think you were commenting on Drew, fwiw. This keeps happening, and the people stepping up sometimes have different motivations. I believe Drew’s are well intentioned, and am pointing it out as “I think it’s possible to go well.”
daitangio 3y ago
The title us wrong: it is a fork, not a rename if the project.
- CRConrad 3y ago
  Honestly -- sorry, dang, but -- RTFA. You missed the entire fricking point of it. By a mile.
- weikju 3y ago
  In the usual way, yes you are correct. I think the article is trying to present an alternative viewpoint, where the real Redis product is not the one that is still named "Redis" but the one that continues being opensource. So it is a fork, but we might as well accept that what is currently named Redis will slowly (or quickly?) morph into something unrecognizable, what with the focus on generative AI and commercialization...
antirez 3y ago
I like Andrew, but I think that this way of telling the story does not match the reality of the BSD license. With the BSD license, there are many potential forks of a project (with potentially different licenses) that compete at the same time in the "market" of the user base. Who puts the best developments, leads the race. When I stepped back from Redis, I formally left it in the hands of the Core Team the was constituted by Redis Inc. (the one that included three Redis Labs programmers, one from AWS, one from Alibaba), but this was a formal act from my side: with the BSD license any third party can fork, change name, continue the project with a different trajectory and with different goals. BSD code is a common good, and everybody can impress new directions, if willing to do so.
- stavros 3y ago
  This ignores the fact that the brand matters, though. If I fork postgres, nobody is going to just start using my fork over the official software, because the two aren't nearly the same. One has people behind it, the other doesn't. Yes, it may end up that Redict has the backing of the community, and Redis falls behind, but we shouldn't act like all the mindshare isn't currently with Redis (the brand).
  - antirez 3y ago
    Branding is important but it's not Coca-Cola and we are not normal customers of something. I believe that in the end who wins is who provides technical excellence and a license that works for the use case. The reality is that most of the times nobody wants to put substantial work into OSS projects for free (I understand the reasons), and I don't agree with this post when Andy says that projects can be set in maintenance mode just doing minimal work to take them frozen, even when they are mature projects. Moreover the current situation with Redis is not closed-but-maintained VS forks-possibily-without-development-force, because the SSPL is a quite open license. To put our destiny in the hand of what OSI approves or not is crazy IMHO. Actually for OSS to be viable in the future, we likely need many other licenses based on copyleft, that allows new projects developers to say, OK, I can use an open license because I have some protection from megacorps. Don't get fooled by a minority of strong voices, if you check Hacker News comments about Redis licese change, you will see that at this point many, many folks get that. Stallman was now almost erased from collective memory but with GPL what happened was exactly what was happening now with SSPL. Initially copyleft was used, and later stronger copyleft was used in successive versions / modifications of the license, like AGPL. So this problem is not new and people a the core of the Free Software movement addressed them in a very similar way decades ago. But now suddenly if a small company goes along the same lines, that is a violation of everything, while big companies like Amazon posing a major threat to future of OSS is fine.
fmajid 3y ago
I knew Redis Labs was a sleazy outfit back when they falsely claimed on billboards to be the “Home of Redis”. That they hired Antirez a few years ago and eventually bought Redis did not change this. We need to converge on one fork to supplant theirs, and redict seems as good as any. Unfortunately redict.com is squatted by DNS speculators.
stavros 3y ago
Why is this flagged? It seems like a reasonable post to me.
- gazby 3y ago
  Two reasons I can think of: 1) It involves Drew DeVault who isn't well liked on HN, and 2) the title implies Redis changed its name which it didn't.
  - hodgesrm 3y ago
    On the other hand it has comments from antirez that are of general interest.
jbiason 3y ago
The "Renamed To" was bothering me (like some other posters mentioned), and then it hit me why: Forks of large projects happen when something bad is going with the source (why fork something huge when things are going ok?), and marks the source as poisoned. Renamed means... It just changed name, everything is already, nothing to see here... Sure there is the mindshare on the name but people in IT for long knows what means when a fork of this size means.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[Dupe] Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789986

69 points by Tomte 3y ago

Uh, this article is so strangely written. The real thing that happened is https://codeberg.org/redict/redict https://codeberg.org/redict/redict — a fork of Redis by Drew DeVault under LGPL v3. I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it.

Klonoar 3y ago
Huh, wonder why redict is on codeberg and not Sourcehut (or maybe it is on the latter, and one's a mirror?).
- apgwoz 3y ago
  I think Drew recognizes that people contributing to redict are likely more familiar/comfortable with GitHub, and that this is truly not a selfish act.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Where is Github relevant here? We're talking about Codeberg vs SourceHut, no?
    - sshine 3y ago
      Truly not a selfish act, but not an act without principles.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - apgwoz 3y ago
      Codeberg is more like GitHub which is where redis was previously hosted as a project.
      - stavros 3y ago
        I see, thanks. I didn't realize Codeberg was hosted Forgejo.
apgwoz 3y ago
> Uh, this article is so strangely written. What part do you think is strange? To me, the article presents an alternate narrative that (in my opinion) rightly calls out relicensing of F/OSS as the actual fork since it’s being done in a (usually) hostile manner against the wishes of the community that lifted it to be relevant in the first place. I think the crack at Drew is (maybe) fair given the explanation of redemption, but also unnecessary. Drew’s hardline software freedom advocacy is the relevant information to the story. His promise of redict’s safe harbor is backed up by his profound stewardship of other projects.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  Redis is the original project and it continues, even if the licence change is a bad move. Redict is a brand new fork, currently at the “rename everything” stage. It may or may not succeed at being the “new Redis”. The people behind “old Redis” probably consider this title misleading and possibly defaming their project. Many people may decide to create other forks (I expect OpenRedis from Amazon any second now). (And I’m not a fan of Drew myself.)
  - gkbrk 3y ago
    > Redis is the original project and it continues For many people, Redis is an open-source in-memory data store. Redict is closer both in spirit and in legal usability to the Redis people have been using for many years compared to whatever got the Redis trademark now. If I do an `apt-get upgrade`, I don't expect to schedule calls with lawyers. I imagine most repos will switch to either this one or some other "renamed" projects, with the package name "redis" pointing to one of those.
zem 3y ago
the article isn't strange at all, it's pointing out that there are two projects based on the last-good-release-of-redis source code: 1. redict, maintained by drew de vault, which takes the stance that redis is finished software, works well, and just needs its existing feature set maintained and bug fixed 2. redis, maintained by redis labs, which seems to be experimenting with generative ai for the sake of adding features, and which practically needs to stay on the feature churn treadmill so that they can keep trying to extract a profit from it the author's (quite reasonable) position is that regardless of who gets to use the name "redis", the product that people know and love is going to live on as drew's branch of the fork, not redis labs'.
- evanelias 3y ago
  But why is that a "quite reasonable" position? To me, it's the opposite: extremely unreasonable, bordering on ridiculous and over-dramatic. Consider: * This position conflates a license to use a product with the product itself. That's not how intellectual property works! * The blog post author is unilaterally speaking on behalf of a community, but it isn't clear that the author has ever contributed to Redis (has he?) or is a major part of the Redis community (is he?). I understand that he is a very accomplished coder and have heard many positive things about Zig, but where's the relation to Redis? * Ditto for Drew (maintainer of the fork in question), has he ever contributed to Redis or is he a major part of the Redis community? fwiw some people said this same thing about MySQL vs MariaDB, claiming (absolutely incorrectly) that Oracle's MySQL is the "fork". In that case, it wasn't a license change (MySQL is still GPL), but rather people that just didn't like the change in ownership. So it seems people will just invent mental gymnastics to justify this "X is really just a fork of X" when they don't like a decision by the intellectual property owner. In the MySQL/MariaDB case, the people saying this "MySQL is actually the fork now" were largely not terribly visible members of the community. And the Linux distributions who mapped the "mysql" package onto "mariadb" created a giant mess, since MySQL has remained more popular than MariaDB, and the two are absolutely not compatible with each other. Anyway, if you don't like Redis Ltd or what they've done here, that is fine and understandable! But it doesn't mean you can unilaterally declare that their product is a fork of itself, and the "real" project lives on elsewhere, and expect most people to go along with this as if it is a reasonable position.
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
The license choice is interesting here - this means if there are many committers and there is no requirements like CLA it becomes impossible to change the license and have proprietary forks without all contributors agreements. I agree though I would rather see them choose to stick to BSD and work on creating community of vendors (rather than Redis Labs monopoly) perhaps some purely Open Source, others proprietary.
reconditerose 3y ago
> I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it. The old development community is regrouping under https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv. As of right now we don't intend to change the license, we just want a more balanced governance that prevents a corporate entity to make this type of choice. We are currently planning a five person governance, with everyone coming from a different company. (We would love some independent maintainers, but there weren't any at the time

slekker 3y ago

A missed opportunity to named the fork "Redisnt" :^) Is the new license (LGPL) going to be problematic for infrastructure providers to offer a managed Redict?

andreareina 3y ago
Shouldn't be an issue for cloud SaaS. For self-hosted they'll have to provide an object file of the software minus the LGPL portion; that preserves the IP, it's more a bit of annoyance w.r.t. an extra step for the build process and distribution.
senorrib 3y ago
No. It doesn’t require disclosure of server side components like AGPL, and doesn’t spread out like GPL.

tayo42 3y ago

Cynically a bunch of, idk, clout chasers maybe or opportunists?, are going to try to fork to advance them selves and take advantage of some uncertainty? What does this guy know about redis? Agree with the other comment, this was written weirdly. Can't place my finger on why though.

reconditerose 3y ago
Drew seems like a great guy, but he wasn't the one maintaining Redis when the relicense happened. There are non-Redis contributors who are trying to figure out what to do nest, and people keep peppering me (one of those contributors) about this fork. I like the meta-point Andrew makes that Redis is the one that's forking, but the framing it around some other arbitrary fork doesn't sit well with me.

yawgmoth 3y ago

When developers do this is it really for the good of the community or is it a career advancing move? Because the community has a bunch of redis protocol compatible choices and I don't understand why pushing redis in particular over others is the right choice.

apgwoz 3y ago
> When developers do this is it really for the good of the community or is it a career advancing move? Drew had the opportunity to make money with this fork by hosting it on SourceHut, and potentially creating subscribers out of redict contributors. Instead, he chose to host on Codeberg, a German non-profit, that is more GitHub like. I think, this alone, shows that (in this case) it’s about community and preservation over everything else.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  You don’t need to pay to contribute to a project on SourceHut. But you must like the antiquated e-mail-based workflow.
  - apgwoz 3y ago
    Ah! Good to know about contributors being free. I’d still expect the size of redict’s community to be big enough to convert some folks to paid. But maybe I am overestimating the size of that community since the Redis company took over?
- yawgmoth 3y ago
  That's good to know. Fwiw, I don't know anything about Drew nor was I trying to comment about him.
  - apgwoz 3y ago
    I didn’t think you were commenting on Drew, fwiw. This keeps happening, and the people stepping up sometimes have different motivations. I believe Drew’s are well intentioned, and am pointing it out as “I think it’s possible to go well.”

daitangio 3y ago

The title us wrong: it is a fork, not a rename if the project.

CRConrad 3y ago
Honestly -- sorry, dang, but -- RTFA. You missed the entire fricking point of it. By a mile.
weikju 3y ago
In the usual way, yes you are correct. I think the article is trying to present an alternative viewpoint, where the real Redis product is not the one that is still named "Redis" but the one that continues being opensource. So it is a fork, but we might as well accept that what is currently named Redis will slowly (or quickly?) morph into something unrecognizable, what with the focus on generative AI and commercialization...

antirez 3y ago

I like Andrew, but I think that this way of telling the story does not match the reality of the BSD license. With the BSD license, there are many potential forks of a project (with potentially different licenses) that compete at the same time in the "market" of the user base. Who puts the best developments, leads the race. When I stepped back from Redis, I formally left it in the hands of the Core Team the was constituted by Redis Inc. (the one that included three Redis Labs programmers, one from AWS, one from Alibaba), but this was a formal act from my side: with the BSD license any third party can fork, change name, continue the project with a different trajectory and with different goals. BSD code is a common good, and everybody can impress new directions, if willing to do so.

stavros 3y ago
This ignores the fact that the brand matters, though. If I fork postgres, nobody is going to just start using my fork over the official software, because the two aren't nearly the same. One has people behind it, the other doesn't. Yes, it may end up that Redict has the backing of the community, and Redis falls behind, but we shouldn't act like all the mindshare isn't currently with Redis (the brand).
- antirez 3y ago
  Branding is important but it's not Coca-Cola and we are not normal customers of something. I believe that in the end who wins is who provides technical excellence and a license that works for the use case. The reality is that most of the times nobody wants to put substantial work into OSS projects for free (I understand the reasons), and I don't agree with this post when Andy says that projects can be set in maintenance mode just doing minimal work to take them frozen, even when they are mature projects. Moreover the current situation with Redis is not closed-but-maintained VS forks-possibily-without-development-force, because the SSPL is a quite open license. To put our destiny in the hand of what OSI approves or not is crazy IMHO. Actually for OSS to be viable in the future, we likely need many other licenses based on copyleft, that allows new projects developers to say, OK, I can use an open license because I have some protection from megacorps. Don't get fooled by a minority of strong voices, if you check Hacker News comments about Redis licese change, you will see that at this point many, many folks get that. Stallman was now almost erased from collective memory but with GPL what happened was exactly what was happening now with SSPL. Initially copyleft was used, and later stronger copyleft was used in successive versions / modifications of the license, like AGPL. So this problem is not new and people a the core of the Free Software movement addressed them in a very similar way decades ago. But now suddenly if a small company goes along the same lines, that is a violation of everything, while big companies like Amazon posing a major threat to future of OSS is fine.

fmajid 3y ago

I knew Redis Labs was a sleazy outfit back when they falsely claimed on billboards to be the “Home of Redis”. That they hired Antirez a few years ago and eventually bought Redis did not change this. We need to converge on one fork to supplant theirs, and redict seems as good as any. Unfortunately redict.com is squatted by DNS speculators.

stavros 3y ago

Why is this flagged? It seems like a reasonable post to me.

gazby 3y ago
Two reasons I can think of: 1) It involves Drew DeVault who isn't well liked on HN, and 2) the title implies Redis changed its name which it didn't.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  On the other hand it has comments from antirez that are of general interest.

jbiason 3y ago

The "Renamed To" was bothering me (like some other posters mentioned), and then it hit me why: Forks of large projects happen when something bad is going with the source (why fork something huge when things are going ok?), and marks the source as poisoned. Renamed means... It just changed name, everything is already, nothing to see here... Sure there is the mindshare on the name but people in IT for long knows what means when a fork of this size means.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[Dupe] Some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789986