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If one sells a copyright to another, how can that be considered sleazy ? Someone made the sell - to make money I presume - and another bought it, to perhaps mak

If one sells a copyright to another, how can that be considered sleazy ? Someone made the sell - to make money I presume - and another bought it, to perhaps make more money ? Seems not that out of reach ? I don't understand the bitterness around this debate, it seems most people are frustated that they have to pay for something that was free, but at the same time, they probably made money from what was free. I totally understand, with todays mess of maintainers not getting paid in full, that at some point, someone wants money for their work. Be it a person, a company or you doesn't matter. But right has to be right. I think we will see a lot of this the next 10 years, simply because we cannot afford maintainers not detecting backdoors in a code-review from some bad actor.

drewdevault 3y ago
To clarify, they did not purchase the copyright -- they purchased the trademark, and are using it to attempt to capture the practical value of the copyright. The copyright is by far the more valuable of the two, but they do not actually own it. Of the actual valuable object (the copyright, i.e. the codebase), about 80% was written by people outside of the employ of Redis Labs né Redis Ltd.
- fmajid 3y ago
  Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific (see the comments on http://antirez.com/news/121 http://antirez.com/news/121 ) In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences?
  - drewdevault 3y ago
    >Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific Well, trademarks are a form of IP. But in any case the copyright was never antirez's to transfer to anyone. In the absence of a CLA with a copyright assignment, every contributor retains the copyright to their contributions, and licenses them to everyone else (Redis Ltd included) under the terms of the BSD license. Legally speaking, Redis Ltd's SSPL code is, in effect, a fork of the Redis BSD code, in the same way that Redict is. >In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences? Thanks for the congratulations! As for Valkey, so far they've put a lot of time and energy getting the various corporate stakeholders on board with their fork and getting some marketing out (which is no small feat, to be sure, I shudder to imagine the number of lawyers involved), but they still have a lot of boots-on-the-ground work to do getting their fork up and running so it may be a while before our projects are interacting directly. From the limited communication we've had with them, it seems likely that we'll be able to collaborate insofar as reducing incompatibilities is concerned, maybe co-maintenance on the protocol specification, but not much more. Redict does plan on pulling useful patches from Valkey once they get the code going, though it's unfortunately not possible for them to pull from us unless they're on board with switching to a copyleft license -- and we encourage them to do so :)
fmajid 3y ago
The sleaze was in falsely claiming to be the "Home of Redis" at least 2 years before actually becoming so by hiring antirez (I remember seeing their huge billboards on Bryant & 9th in San Francisco, and it rankled).

drewdevault 3y ago

To clarify, they did not purchase the copyright -- they purchased the trademark, and are using it to attempt to capture the practical value of the copyright. The copyright is by far the more valuable of the two, but they do not actually own it. Of the actual valuable object (the copyright, i.e. the codebase), about 80% was written by people outside of the employ of Redis Labs né Redis Ltd.

fmajid 3y ago
Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific (see the comments on http://antirez.com/news/121 http://antirez.com/news/121 ) In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences?
- drewdevault 3y ago
  >Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific Well, trademarks are a form of IP. But in any case the copyright was never antirez's to transfer to anyone. In the absence of a CLA with a copyright assignment, every contributor retains the copyright to their contributions, and licenses them to everyone else (Redis Ltd included) under the terms of the BSD license. Legally speaking, Redis Ltd's SSPL code is, in effect, a fork of the Redis BSD code, in the same way that Redict is. >In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences? Thanks for the congratulations! As for Valkey, so far they've put a lot of time and energy getting the various corporate stakeholders on board with their fork and getting some marketing out (which is no small feat, to be sure, I shudder to imagine the number of lawyers involved), but they still have a lot of boots-on-the-ground work to do getting their fork up and running so it may be a while before our projects are interacting directly. From the limited communication we've had with them, it seems likely that we'll be able to collaborate insofar as reducing incompatibilities is concerned, maybe co-maintenance on the protocol specification, but not much more. Redict does plan on pulling useful patches from Valkey once they get the code going, though it's unfortunately not possible for them to pull from us unless they're on board with switching to a copyleft license -- and we encourage them to do so :)

fmajid 3y ago

The sleaze was in falsely claiming to be the "Home of Redis" at least 2 years before actually becoming so by hiring antirez (I remember seeing their huge billboards on Bryant & 9th in San Francisco, and it rankled).