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It wasn’t clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, which will continue to be supported and maintain
by brody_hamer 3y ago
It wasn’t clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, which will continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!)
So we as developers don’t have to scramble to replace redis in our SAAS apps and web based software.
This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.
Redis’ blog post: https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-licensing/ https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-li...
- dkuntz2 3y agoWell, except for the fact that "redis" the organization didn't create redis and isn't even the main developer of redis. The origin of Redis the company is literally as a hosting provider for the open source redis that they didn't create.
- objektif 3y agoThis is what I am confused about so what right do they have to enforce AWS from selling Redis when they do not own it?
- mythz 3y agoThe licensing change only applies to their future versions which they own all contributions of which AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.
- happymellon 3y ago> AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore. Doesn't AWS employ Madelyn Olson? I mean, AWS have paid for Redis development. Not exactly a leech.
- mythz 3y agoYep still the biggest leachers. Token hires and flowery PR campaigns doesn't entitle them to most of the profits of other vendors products or absolve them of their predatory behavior. But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.
- happymellon 3y agoErr, after this license change Redis Inc will be the biggest leechers considering they didn't contribute the majority of the code. > Yep still the biggest leachers Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever they want. That's not leeching.
- mythz 3y agoRedis Labs was a long time sponsor for the full-time development of Redis then later compensated the creator of Redis for their rights to Redis Technology and branding who was ended up retiring from technology to write Sci-Fi books. By contrast AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back, making them the biggest leacher and the primary motivation for the relicensing to prevent mega corps with unfettered access to their future contributions that AWS repackages to compete against them. So whilst their previous license allowed AWS to leech off them, it's now been relicensed to prevent them from profiting off their future investments without compensating anything back.
- jakupovic 3y agoDuring an all-hands around 2008 I asked AWS leadership whether AWS was going to open source their technologies the answer was we're thinking about it. 16 years later it has not happened, nor it will given the record ;(
- objektif 3y agoHow does one buy rights to an open source technology?
- vasco 3y agoAWS leeches as much as Garantia Data no?
- mirekrusin 3y agoIf you own copyrights you’re not the leech.
- Thorrez 3y agoWho owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.
- firstSpeaker 3y agoI wonder if there is a qualitative analysis of the commits. Aka, it changed a line of comment vs it introduced a new feature or refactored and increased long term viability, etc.
- mirekrusin 3y agoI think you're right. Some projects require signing copyright transfer before making commits (legal document claiming that you are a) copyright holder and b) you transfer those rights to them ie CLA [0]) so single entity holds whole copyrights. They usually have a GHA that checks it when proposing PRs. It doesn't look like redis has any of this. So they run RedisLabs purely on trademark + admin rights on GH on redis/redis. If that's the case then they also cannot legally change licence of code that's already there because they're not sole copyright holders of that code. ps. as a side note that's why ie. SQLite doesn't allow external contributions at all, even though their code is Public Domain – because they can legally claim full copyright/authorship. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
- vasco 3y agoIf you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some point. Other than that unless you are one of the contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of leeching.
- nebulous1 3y agoFrom what I understand they acquired the rights to redis from antirez sometime after employing him. I assume he received money for this.
- tapoxi 3y agoTrademark, and it's licensed under BSD. Basically Redis Inc is the one making the fork, which retains the Redis name since they purchased it from antirez.
- x3n0ph3n3 3y agoNot only that, AWS has been offering redis-as-a-service longer than the "Redis" organization has been.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoBut if the shoe were on the other foot, AWS wouldn’t hesitate to rip the carpet from under anyone.
- chii 3y agoIt doesnt matter if they would've or not. Presumed innocent until proven guilty (via action). Using this as an argument doesn't work to justify redis inc's actions.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoI think your use of innocence is referring to your perceived ethical and moral compass, so while you have a theoretical point about guilty and innocent, your argument isn’t based on legality of actions which ultimately is all that matters. But if you think AWS would have any shred of ethics when it comes to a topic like this, you’re much more optimistic than I am.
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoI believe that Redis has an agreement of sorts with Salvatore Sanfilippo / Antirez, the creator of Redis.
- radicalbyte 3y agoAmazon / Google / Microsoft made a massive mistake by not hiring Antirez, it's chump change for them to throw him $1-2M a year at him so he can work on Redis for them full time.
- mariusor 3y agoHas anyone asked Filippo if he still wants to work on Redis "for them" though? The fact that he stepped down suggests he doesn't.
- radicalbyte 3y agoHe sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation. Again, it's chump change, these companies drop that kinda money all the time in aquihires..
- chipdart 3y ago> He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation. It sounds like a very bad deal for the likes of Amazon et al. The likes of Amazon offer Redis alongside memcache just because cloud adopters might want to use a memory cache service,but there is no value in buying trademarks for it. I mean, just take a quick look how Amazon offers managed RDBMS, and how the specific DB is just an afterthought behind a compatible interface. People seem to think that just because some company has cash that they should mindlessly spend it on things that add absolutely no value.
- emmp 3y agoHe worked there for 5 years. It probably didn't feel "random" for him.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoI continue to have mixed feelings about this kind of thing. A (very) long time ago the Apache developers could have gone down this route. > You can only run Apache under very specific circumstances! Or memcached: > You are only allowed to run a memcached server if you're only caching your own website! We see how nonsensical this is
- wmf 3y agoMore like you can run Apache except in specific circumstances. People will put up with a lot if there's no alternative.
- crasshit 3y ago> without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers. Redis organization doesn't pay any sort of compensation to developers who contribute to redis source code. I do not see any difference here.
- ajmurmann 3y agoDoesn't Redis Labs employ paid contributors? Does Amazon donate their contributions back to the community?
- x3n0ph3n3 3y agoAccording to the linked article, Amazon has contributed 5% of the contributions to Redis, while Redis, the company, has contributed 20%.
- jpc0 3y agoI'm not for or against in this case. I'm anti what Redis the company is doing but I don't give a crap otherwise. Are we really counting contribution based on LoC? Haven't we over the decades decided that isn't valid? Guess every person that makes this claim should once again have their performance based on LoC... Some simple examples, I'm not saying this is the case though. What if most of Amazon's contributions are high impact contributions where most of Redis orgs are simply maintenance or feature pushes. What if the same is true for a 1% contributor? By your own statement doesn't Tencent then have a larger claim to redis that Amazon or Redis does?
- sverhagen 3y ago> Are we really counting contribution based on LoC? I think they didn't include the LoC in the article as anything other than a broad estimate of contributions, perhaps for lack of any better measurements.
- cloudboogie 3y agoRight, now count in contributions from other cloud providers: tensent, huawei, alibaba and you'll find out that they contributed much more, than actual redis-employed developers
- coredog64 3y ago> without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers. AWS employee Madelyn Olson was a committer on Redis since 2019. Since 2020, she was on the core team of maintainers.
- andrelaszlo 3y agoHere's what she wrote about the above article: > If you're looking for a primer on what is going on with Redis and why its license change matters, this is the article to read. As someone close to the situation, this is the best summary I've seen.
- a2800276 3y agoWhere?
- andrelaszlo 3y agoLinkedIn
- ufocia 3y ago> This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers. But the developers licensed the software at no charge. What kind of compensation are they entitled to then? Sounds like a case of sellers remorse/take-backsies one of the problems that open source was aiming to solve.
- bramblerose 3y agoThey are not entitled to compensation over their previous work, but you/me/AWS are also not entitled to their _future_ work.
- mahkeiro 3y agoBut when you see that currently Redis is mainly developed by Chinese companies or AWS all of this is rather ironic.
- jamespo 3y ago5% of contributions is not “mainly” from AWS
- ufocia 3y agoNot sure what you meant. Is it wrong for Chinese companies or AWS to develop Redis or is it great, or something in-between? I wonder how many bellyachers here contributed to Redis vs. just leeched. (Not a rhetorical question.) How many are just in the peanut gallery (just like I).
- ufocia 3y agoAbsolutely!
- 8note 3y agoDoes this mean they aren't accepting external contributions any more? If I put in a commit, what is redis going to pay me for executing my code?
- ensignavenger 3y agoAWS was directly funding Redis development, from the article, they are one of the top contributors, they even employed one of the core redis maintainers full time to work on Redis.
- esquire_900 3y agoWhich is peanuts compared to the 350 million that the VCs invested. You're totally right, but I think the internal financial pressure is higher.
- gklitz 3y agoAh, so it’s not about open source and moral responsibilities. It’s about the responsibility we all owe to VCs to ensure they make money. Gotcha.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoIsn’t that the deal we sign up for when we take VC money? I like free money as much as the next guy, but VC isn’t it.
- Macha 3y agoWho's we though? The former Garantia data did, but redis users didn't. (And also I'd argue most of redis' value to users was already in place before the VC backed company got involved)
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoYou’re right of course. From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects, if you’re using these things at scale it’s much more economical to buy some servers and hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis. But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.
- stephenr 3y ago> that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, I mean, they've already changed licensing for parts of the project twice in 6 years. I have zero faith that they won't pull a Vader and change the terms of the agreement again. > continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!) I'd guess that > 99% of any "improvements" Redis the company make, will affect < 1% of users. As has been pointed out numerous times, it's essentially "done" in terms of functionality - but as a VC funded company they have to constantly do "something", so they'll keep adding niche upon niche features, giving the resume padders at other VC companies something sparkly and new to spend their budgets on. Meanwhile 99% of people just need a fast key/value store, and maybe half of those need it to be distributed/replicated, and maybe a third need it to run some kind of scripting (Lua) to do "in-db" operations atomically. With the addition of native TLS several years ago redis is, for 99% of users "functionally complete". Sure, new TLS versions will come along and need support, kernel or library features they use will adapt or have improvements, etc, but I think you're vastly over estimating the amount of "improvements" to expect that will impact the vast, vast majority of users. > preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers Look I hate AWS more than most people would find reasonable, and even I'll admit they're not the "bad guys" in this scenario. The project was released as BSD licensed, so AWS could if they wanted, fork it, and offer a service based on that, and make any fixes/improvements just in their service offering. They didn't. They had paid staff contributing back to the redis project, for a number of years. This was literally the goldilocks project of the OSS world: Numerous massive tech companies who all have the financial ability to simply run their own fork, and the legal right to do so (due to BSD-3), willingly contributing to the maintenance of the project. As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis (and HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the tech community in general: if an OSS project you rely on transfers control from it's founder(s) to a company, you probably need to consider continuing with a fork from the last open version, because apparently "(try to) monetise popular open source" is the newest way to win the douchebag villain award given to MBAs at VC funded companies.
- fmajid 3y agoKeyDB, the multithreaded fork of Redis, is already way faster as a KV store.
- mort96 3y agoWhether it's gratis or not isn't the issue. Some people used Redis not only because it's free of cost, but also because it's open source. It's not anymore.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ufocia 3y agoThe copies that were created under BSD still are. Go fork and multiply. You can even make your contributions GPL or commercially licensed.
- fastball 3y agoIt is open source up until Redis 7.4. Why does it matter to you (someone that cares about it being open source) if future versions created by this specific company are not? You (or someone else) can fork it and continue the work in an open manner. AFAIAC that is the literal purpose of open source.
- mort96 3y agoI don't understand what your point is. I'm saying that it doesn't matter that the community edition is still free of charge, because it's the fact that it's not open source anymore that's the issue. What part of that are you responding to?
- kyriakos 3y agoIsn't this the same with Elastic? Or that was a different situation?
- fastball 3y agoYes, very similar. ElasticSearch changed licensing, so AWS forked it and created OpenSearch.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoYeah. As usual whenever something like this happens, there’s an endless supply of blatantly misleading FUD by open source license purists. Let’s not pretend that Redis has become unusable by….all but a few organisations selling hosted Redis solutions. The people who are “rushing” to replace Redis are probably doing so in a way that isn’t on their boss’s radar, and it’ll stay that way because their bosses would probably tell them to go do more important things.
- maerF0x0 3y agoWould be nice if Redis wasnt eating Lua's lunch and would make a big (public) donation to https://www.lua.org/donations.html#donation https://www.lua.org/donations.html#donation (Maybe they do, but it wasn't something i could find evidence of)
- lenerdenator 3y agoThe problem with this is, it's virtually impossible to compete against the FOSS trunk that your now-closed-source software branched off of, or FOSS clones of it. Low-end proprietary UNIXes got wiped out by GNU/Linux and the BSDs, for example. Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already exists. They'll do so because it is to their advantage to not charge for the license fees Redis now wants.
- fransje26 3y agoHow to saw off the branch you are sitting on.. > Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already exists. And they most possibly will. Goodbye, and thank you for the fish!