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Why AWS Supports Valkey

92 points by alexbilbie 2y ago

_3u10 2y ago
[flagged]
- hbogert 2y ago
  And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter. Based on the open source license redis had before, what did aws do wrong? They didn't even have to contribute back, yet they did. Investors of redis based their SaaS offering on open source and community work. Now that they achieved critical mass they want to reneg on the license.
  - watermelon0 2y ago
    There are multiple hosted Redis providers, not just Redis Labs and AWS. I'm not sure why Redis OSS couldn't live on as open source product, while companies (including Redis Labs) offer managed Redis solutions.
    - forty 2y ago
      It's nearly impossible to compete with AWS on hosting. People host their stuff on AWS, it's so much easier to take the fully integrated solutions of AWS than a third party vendor that they have realistically no chance of competing. That plus the fact that a competitor wanting to sell to AWS customers would have to host their own offering on AWS for bandwidth cost and latency reasons, and being forced to pay a competitor to play is always a sign that unfair competition is going on. The rule of thumb is that you should be either be a platform or participate in the competition on that platform but never do both (applies to App Store, Amazon Marketplace, etc etc)
    - skywhopper 2y ago
      It does live on. It’s called “Valkey” now.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter. People who parrot these mindless rants on licensing purity would do well to learn what Redis inc actually is, what's it's relationship with Redis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_(company)
    - glenngillen 2y ago
      The Garantia Data rebrand and narrative reframing as the inventors of Redis is one of the greatest marketing efforts in OSS.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Yes, of course. That is a major reason why people use open source. And since AWS was a contributor to Redis, why it would be absurd for them to pay license fees on a project they helped build and maintain.
  - tonyhb 2y ago
    Yeah, they probably could/should. It'd take a lot to get developer adoption and buy in to a separate product that AWS builds themselves, so they adopted Redis. Easy money. It's easier to piggyback on something that won while making lots of money from it and say "well, I helped..." if things chanbge. Then, they chastise the creators as bad people once the gravy train stops. AWS benefited from hosted redis before contributing. It wasn't adopted out of benevolence. They're still doing it with Memcached, for what its worth.
    - hbogert 2y ago
      The whole open source model is scratching each others back but your own just a little bit more. But you make it sound as if aws was hypocritical for contributing and at the same time making money with it. Well ehh, isn't that the whole deal?
      - tonyhb 2y ago
        No, not given the people who created Redis, built distribution, made it a standard didn’t get paid. Open source isn’t about letting someone else gain from your work. It’s about openness. That’s why it’s of course in AWS’ benefit to support a fork. They claim to have helped the project therefore should be trusted going forward, despite latching onto it after the work was done to gain adoption. That’s fairly controlling and manipulative.
        floating-io 2y ago
        See my above comment; Redis Labs did not create redis.
        2y ago
- chipdart 2y ago
  > It doesn’t want to pay license fees. When a business is strong-armed to pay for something, doesn't it make sense to spend the money on an alternative that is cheaper, more reliable, trustable, and preserves its control?
foobarkey 2y ago
[flagged]
- matthewmacleod 2y ago
  Ultimately it seems that everyone loses - the Redis project slowly fades, nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more, and AWS continues on unaffected by the change.
  - kmac_ 2y ago
    It's more profitable for Amazon in the long term, as they can potentially eliminate competition. Amazon's use of "open-source advocacy" is questionable, and I wonder if anyone believes it.
  - ephemeral-life 2y ago
    > nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more This just shows you have no idea what sspl entails. It states you can use it for whatever you want, but if you want to provide the product as a service, you need to share all your infrastructure code for providing the service. Its basically agpl with a carve-out for AWS and that is so valid because AWS are vultures. They probably make the most money in the world from postgres but aren't even in the top 3 contributors[0]. [0] - https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/importance-of-giving-back-to-postgresql https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/importance-of-giving-back-...
    - citrin_ru 2y ago
      In at lest some (many?) companies AGPL and SSPL are not in the list of allowed licenses (developers not allowed to use open sources components unless they have one of approved licenses). Even if technically they can use Redis not breaking SSPL, lawyers often err on a side of caution.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Except that SSPL has some complex requirements, is not tested in any court, and is not compatible with any other open source license. So you can't for example incorporate the new Redis into a GPL/AGPL piece of software, at all.
hackcasual 2y ago
It's hard to quantify, but I think Amazon would have to be in the top contenders for most value gotten from open source software
- watermelon0 2y ago
  Wouldn't that apply to all cloud providers, not just AWS? All of them are heavily based on open source software, from Linux, KVM/Xen, and K8s to MySQL/Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra, etc.?
  - blowski 2y ago
    I’d guess the OP is right in nominal terms, because I think those companies combined have made less profit than AWS.
    - chipdart 2y ago
      I don't think OP is right at all. Just because a company offers managed instances of any random FLOSS service that does not mean they are profiting out of that service. From the customer standpoint, the choice is between running self hosted instances on bare VMs or use managed instances, and if managed instances are not available then they don't have a lot of alternatives. Managed instances are cheaper to run and operate, and are more reliable, thus it's more advantageous to use those services. For the cloud provider, they are getting paid either way. It's not like function-as-a-service offerings, where cloud providers charge users a premium for computational resources that run on spare cycles and allow far higher utilization rates, thus getting paid in two or three different ways.
      - 094459 2y ago
        [dead]
- sverhagen 2y ago
  If I use Redis software on AWS, am I getting the most value, or does AWS? Exactly by offering ready to go implementations of known open source projects, are they increasing or decreasing my AWS lock in? Does it even matter? If they didn't offer these, which are saving me effort (thus money) today, wouldn't I just be running these myself on an EC2 or ECS setup?
deleted 2y ago
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dig1 2y ago
It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it's worth noting that many others were left with a sense of dissatisfaction after the license change. The same is true for ES, Mongo, and Grafana (to name a few). If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period. Don't bait people by giving something for free and then making all sorts of excuses later. IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here. ES and Mongo still use and rely on AWS for their managed offerings. OpenSearch (mainly pushed by AWS) is vibrant and very alive. Redis will be ditched by distros and die a slow death, and (probably) Valkey will be in the next distro major versions. But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.
  - jasode 2y ago
    >I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money. Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license. That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license. Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right. The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community: - start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change vs - start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL [1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392
veselin 2y ago
It seems recent years give us a lot of licenses (for core infra software) and now for LLMs. They all say in very legalese basically: these top 5-10 tech companies will not compete fairly with us, thus they are banned from using the software. The rest are welcome to use everything. I wonder if US monopoly regulation actually starts to work well, which I see some signs of happening, will all this license revert back to fully open source?
pritambarhate 2y ago
I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK. Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.
- kgeist 2y ago
  According to LWN [0], Redis was already maintained by big corporations/cloud providers: Tencent - 24.8% Redis Labs - 19.5% Alibaba- 6.7% Huawei - 5.2% Amazon.com - 5.2% Bytedance - 2.0% NetEase - 1.3% [0] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/
  - Twirrim 2y ago
    On the surface of it, it looks like literally no one wins. Redis Labs are going to lose a large amount of labour they've been getting for free. This seems like biting the hand that feeds it. Users lose out on the fruits of that labour, harming bug fixes, feature development etc., as well as now having to consult with legal experts and the like to ensure there is no chance the fall afoul of the new license (you need to be really careful with the wording and the way it might be interpreted, not just how you interpret it or how Redis Lab's blog post suggests it is), and any time and hassles spent switching. The people providing that labour now have the hassles and expense of forking, setting up governance, legal stuff etc, when they could have been just getting on with things.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly. Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years. You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen. I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition. As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it.
xrd 2y ago
We really need to investigate the implications of monopoly power mixed with open source. That really wasn't contemplated originally.
gigatexal 2y ago
Absolutely hilarious and ironic for AWS to say they support an Apache project fork of Redis when it was their hosting Redis and ostensibly not paying Redis or somehow working with them to do it causing RedisLabs to do what only they can and go closed to be able to sell their own hosted services providing Redis. How else would they compete with AWS?
_joel 2y ago
They talk about OpenTofu, are they going to do cdktf for opentofu then?
- LogicWolfe 2y ago
  https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1335 https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1335 It’s currently working, but a commitment to ensure it stays that way is marked as pending decision.
binary132 2y ago
“To save a buck”. Didn’t even need to read the article :) Free Software is the only way
dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
I'm sorry, I just hate this foul language. Amazon claims that "Redis broke with the community that helped it grow and left them stranded" whereas the sole reason for the license change was Amazon itself who takes open source projects and gives its creators nothing in exchange. They will bend over backwards and create their own forks like OpenSearch rather than collaborate with the creators. And at the end, they will stab the creators with passive and active-aggressive accusations like these.
- chrisoverzero 2y ago
  > […] rather than collaborate with the creators. How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL? Also, who do you believe the creators of Redis are?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
    > How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL? This is quite simple, and should have happened before these companies decide to switch licenses because of Amazon. Each time Amazon decides to use an open source product, instead of doing it for free, they should contact the parent company and offer them a fee. There are many advantages of such an arrangement: a single version exists, the parent company has a stable source of income etc. I might be mistaken, but this path was possibly chosen by Citus and Azure, and nobody seems to complain.
    - growse 2y ago
      > Each time Amazon decides to use an open source prouct, instead of doing it for free, they should contact the parent company and offer them a fee. What if, instead of doing that, they hired some of the people making significant contributions to the project? Would that count?
      - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
        It depends. For example, when Ubuntu first appeared and Canonical hired some prominent Debian maintainers, they were criticized for that. But I believe the final net benefit was positive. The problem here is what happens when Amazon stops to pay them. If the owner of the project is a foundation or a similar organization, it may have better chances of survival.
zokier 2y ago
I would be far more sympathetic to these sspl corporations if they subjected themselves to those same license terms. But instead they play this some animals are more equal than others game.
- evanelias 2y ago
  That wouldn't ever make sense though. They're the licensor. You don't ever need a license in order to use intellectual property that you own. By definition the license is what allows third parties to use or redistribute copyrighted software.
  - xenago 2y ago
    It makes perfect sense. They claim all these benefits to users for these non-foss licenses and then themselves avoid them like the plague
    - evanelias 2y ago
      No, legally what is being suggested above is nonsensical. If you own the copyright to a work, you can freely use that work, and you can license it to others. As the copyright holder, you get to decide what terms go in that license, but you do not need to abide by those terms-of-use yourself since you are the licensor, not the licensee. Suggesting otherwise would be a bizarro-world where musicians need to pay to listen to their own music, authors need to pay to read their own books, and so forth. That's completely absurd, nothing works this way. There are certainly valid reasons to be upset at a software company for changing the license for new versions of its software, but this is not one of them!
- xenago 2y ago
  They're total hypocrites! For instance Graylog switched to OpenSearch to reap the benefits, but themselves push the awful SSPL on their users. I have no respect for these organizations. Provide real open source software or start up closed from the get-go, don't build on community contributions for a while and then switch to closed while marketing as being open!
d-z-m 2y ago
Big bad Redis Inc. won't let us host their software as a service anymore! Good thing AWS(champions of open-source software) are here to help! Seriously though, very duplicitous framing by AWS. Ignoring the clear existential threat to Redis's business if they allow other managed offerings to undercut their own.
- Spivak 2y ago
  What other framing is there? There was an OSS project called Redis that existed before Redis Inc., who gave their software to the OSS community in the hope it that would be useful to others. Millions of people including AWS started using it under the pretense that it was and would continue to be OSS. Redis Inc. saw $$ after Redis Enterprise and their hosted offering were luke warm successes at best and took all the code, even the parts that were contributed by other members of the OSS community, and made it proprietary. Even if you're not affected by this license change because you aren't hosting Redis there is no reason to believe that you won't be on the chopping block for the next license change when Redis Inc.'s numbers must go up. The trust has been completely broken. You would be crazy to base your business on Redis now. AWS and the Linux Foundation are the ones keeping the original Redis, the community project that existed before the business, alive for the benefit of everyone.
  - d-z-m 2y ago
    I see it as an incentive problem. How are the maintainers of these projects to receive the support they need? Companies like AWS are incentivized to take all they can take and contribute nothing in return, "it's FOSS, baby". Redis Inc. is incentivized to continue the development and improvement of Redis, because the success of Redis is directly proportional to the success of their business. Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat.
    - Spivak 2y ago
      > Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat. Why do you say that? AWS is going to be providing Valkey as a service to millions of paying customers via their ElasticCache offering. Every cloud provider will be doing something similar. It's the same story with OpenSearch, it's now deeply integrated into AWS and used not just directly by their customers but by other AWS services. That's honestly the best model for OSS, many financially interested parties who want the software to exist to support their business, but the software itself isn't their business. And now there's not a conflict of interest for the project to hold back features because they want to save them for the enterprise tier. The software getting better for everyone directly benefits their hosted offering. I think there's a strong case that given a time machine Redis should have never been OSS so they could sell software licenses. But at the same time Redis wouldn't have become a household name for developers and have the huge ecosystem of tooling surrounding it were it not for the fact that it's OSS.
oneplane 2y ago
The irony here is that this AWS post is correct content-wise, but has nothing to do with AWS itself, they are just in it for the money. The same article would apply to Terraform (and OpenTofu as the fork now), which was a much more clear "community doesn't want this" case. There were a few companies that provided a bit of hosted terraform services, but it was hardly at any significant scale. Yet the same thing happened: community doesn't want a restrictive license.
nurtbo 2y ago
Was Redis Labs founded by Redis developers? I looked at its corporate history and was a bit confused (eg antirez seemed to be a consultant for them)
- jsmeaton 2y ago
  No, which is why I think there has been less support for the (previous) OSS company than some other projects. Redis labs effectively became the defacto owner of the project later down the line when Antirez joined them. They inherited the project then tried to capture all of the value. This isn’t a case of the original maintainers trying to sustain the project. It’s a hostile takeover that’s backfiring significantly. They brought Microsoft onboard as a partner hoping that would get them through the mess. Turns out that wasn’t enough.
deleted 2y ago
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yndoendo 2y ago
Sorry, I loose respect for those defending Amazon. Terrible behavior towards their workers, push against consumer protection, and anticompetitive antics like price-fixing highlight their deplorable behavior. They only way I do business with them is taking their money and not giving them a penny. Their Walk Out technology original statements and working reality show they find with grifting to prop up their image. Here is good example of economics. How much is a $25 Amazon gift card worth? Some it many be $25 and others it is $0, and in-between for people looking to off load their gift card for pennies on the dollar.

92 points by alexbilbie 2y ago

_3u10 2y ago

[flagged]

hbogert 2y ago
And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter. Based on the open source license redis had before, what did aws do wrong? They didn't even have to contribute back, yet they did. Investors of redis based their SaaS offering on open source and community work. Now that they achieved critical mass they want to reneg on the license.
- watermelon0 2y ago
  There are multiple hosted Redis providers, not just Redis Labs and AWS. I'm not sure why Redis OSS couldn't live on as open source product, while companies (including Redis Labs) offer managed Redis solutions.
  - forty 2y ago
    It's nearly impossible to compete with AWS on hosting. People host their stuff on AWS, it's so much easier to take the fully integrated solutions of AWS than a third party vendor that they have realistically no chance of competing. That plus the fact that a competitor wanting to sell to AWS customers would have to host their own offering on AWS for bandwidth cost and latency reasons, and being forced to pay a competitor to play is always a sign that unfair competition is going on. The rule of thumb is that you should be either be a platform or participate in the competition on that platform but never do both (applies to App Store, Amazon Marketplace, etc etc)
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    It does live on. It’s called “Valkey” now.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter. People who parrot these mindless rants on licensing purity would do well to learn what Redis inc actually is, what's it's relationship with Redis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_(company)
  - glenngillen 2y ago
    The Garantia Data rebrand and narrative reframing as the inventors of Redis is one of the greatest marketing efforts in OSS.
tsimionescu 2y ago
Yes, of course. That is a major reason why people use open source. And since AWS was a contributor to Redis, why it would be absurd for them to pay license fees on a project they helped build and maintain.
- tonyhb 2y ago
  Yeah, they probably could/should. It'd take a lot to get developer adoption and buy in to a separate product that AWS builds themselves, so they adopted Redis. Easy money. It's easier to piggyback on something that won while making lots of money from it and say "well, I helped..." if things chanbge. Then, they chastise the creators as bad people once the gravy train stops. AWS benefited from hosted redis before contributing. It wasn't adopted out of benevolence. They're still doing it with Memcached, for what its worth.
  - hbogert 2y ago
    The whole open source model is scratching each others back but your own just a little bit more. But you make it sound as if aws was hypocritical for contributing and at the same time making money with it. Well ehh, isn't that the whole deal?
    - tonyhb 2y ago
      No, not given the people who created Redis, built distribution, made it a standard didn’t get paid. Open source isn’t about letting someone else gain from your work. It’s about openness. That’s why it’s of course in AWS’ benefit to support a fork. They claim to have helped the project therefore should be trusted going forward, despite latching onto it after the work was done to gain adoption. That’s fairly controlling and manipulative.
      - floating-io 2y ago
        See my above comment; Redis Labs did not create redis.
      - 2y ago
chipdart 2y ago
> It doesn’t want to pay license fees. When a business is strong-armed to pay for something, doesn't it make sense to spend the money on an alternative that is cheaper, more reliable, trustable, and preserves its control?

foobarkey 2y ago

[flagged]

matthewmacleod 2y ago
Ultimately it seems that everyone loses - the Redis project slowly fades, nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more, and AWS continues on unaffected by the change.
- kmac_ 2y ago
  It's more profitable for Amazon in the long term, as they can potentially eliminate competition. Amazon's use of "open-source advocacy" is questionable, and I wonder if anyone believes it.
- ephemeral-life 2y ago
  > nobody can use its code on open-source projects any more This just shows you have no idea what sspl entails. It states you can use it for whatever you want, but if you want to provide the product as a service, you need to share all your infrastructure code for providing the service. Its basically agpl with a carve-out for AWS and that is so valid because AWS are vultures. They probably make the most money in the world from postgres but aren't even in the top 3 contributors[0]. [0] - https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/importance-of-giving-back-to-postgresql https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/importance-of-giving-back-...
  - citrin_ru 2y ago
    In at lest some (many?) companies AGPL and SSPL are not in the list of allowed licenses (developers not allowed to use open sources components unless they have one of approved licenses). Even if technically they can use Redis not breaking SSPL, lawyers often err on a side of caution.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Except that SSPL has some complex requirements, is not tested in any court, and is not compatible with any other open source license. So you can't for example incorporate the new Redis into a GPL/AGPL piece of software, at all.

hackcasual 2y ago

It's hard to quantify, but I think Amazon would have to be in the top contenders for most value gotten from open source software

watermelon0 2y ago
Wouldn't that apply to all cloud providers, not just AWS? All of them are heavily based on open source software, from Linux, KVM/Xen, and K8s to MySQL/Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra, etc.?
- blowski 2y ago
  I’d guess the OP is right in nominal terms, because I think those companies combined have made less profit than AWS.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    I don't think OP is right at all. Just because a company offers managed instances of any random FLOSS service that does not mean they are profiting out of that service. From the customer standpoint, the choice is between running self hosted instances on bare VMs or use managed instances, and if managed instances are not available then they don't have a lot of alternatives. Managed instances are cheaper to run and operate, and are more reliable, thus it's more advantageous to use those services. For the cloud provider, they are getting paid either way. It's not like function-as-a-service offerings, where cloud providers charge users a premium for computational resources that run on spare cycles and allow far higher utilization rates, thus getting paid in two or three different ways.
    - 094459 2y ago
      [dead]
sverhagen 2y ago
If I use Redis software on AWS, am I getting the most value, or does AWS? Exactly by offering ready to go implementations of known open source projects, are they increasing or decreasing my AWS lock in? Does it even matter? If they didn't offer these, which are saving me effort (thus money) today, wouldn't I just be running these myself on an EC2 or ECS setup?

deleted 2y ago

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dig1 2y ago

It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it's worth noting that many others were left with a sense of dissatisfaction after the license change. The same is true for ES, Mongo, and Grafana (to name a few). If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period. Don't bait people by giving something for free and then making all sorts of excuses later. IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here. ES and Mongo still use and rely on AWS for their managed offerings. OpenSearch (mainly pushed by AWS) is vibrant and very alive. Redis will be ditched by distros and die a slow death, and (probably) Valkey will be in the next distro major versions. But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.
- jasode 2y ago
  >I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money. Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license. That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license. Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right. The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community: - start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change vs - start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL [1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392

veselin 2y ago

It seems recent years give us a lot of licenses (for core infra software) and now for LLMs. They all say in very legalese basically: these top 5-10 tech companies will not compete fairly with us, thus they are banned from using the software. The rest are welcome to use everything. I wonder if US monopoly regulation actually starts to work well, which I see some signs of happening, will all this license revert back to fully open source?

pritambarhate 2y ago

I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK. Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.

kgeist 2y ago
According to LWN [0], Redis was already maintained by big corporations/cloud providers: Tencent - 24.8% Redis Labs - 19.5% Alibaba- 6.7% Huawei - 5.2% Amazon.com - 5.2% Bytedance - 2.0% NetEase - 1.3% [0] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/
- Twirrim 2y ago
  On the surface of it, it looks like literally no one wins. Redis Labs are going to lose a large amount of labour they've been getting for free. This seems like biting the hand that feeds it. Users lose out on the fruits of that labour, harming bug fixes, feature development etc., as well as now having to consult with legal experts and the like to ensure there is no chance the fall afoul of the new license (you need to be really careful with the wording and the way it might be interpreted, not just how you interpret it or how Redis Lab's blog post suggests it is), and any time and hassles spent switching. The people providing that labour now have the hassles and expense of forking, setting up governance, legal stuff etc, when they could have been just getting on with things.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly. Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years. You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen. I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition. As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it.

xrd 2y ago

We really need to investigate the implications of monopoly power mixed with open source. That really wasn't contemplated originally.

gigatexal 2y ago

Absolutely hilarious and ironic for AWS to say they support an Apache project fork of Redis when it was their hosting Redis and ostensibly not paying Redis or somehow working with them to do it causing RedisLabs to do what only they can and go closed to be able to sell their own hosted services providing Redis. How else would they compete with AWS?

_joel 2y ago

They talk about OpenTofu, are they going to do cdktf for opentofu then?

LogicWolfe 2y ago
https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1335 https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1335 It’s currently working, but a commitment to ensure it stays that way is marked as pending decision.

binary132 2y ago

“To save a buck”. Didn’t even need to read the article :) Free Software is the only way

dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago

I'm sorry, I just hate this foul language. Amazon claims that "Redis broke with the community that helped it grow and left them stranded" whereas the sole reason for the license change was Amazon itself who takes open source projects and gives its creators nothing in exchange. They will bend over backwards and create their own forks like OpenSearch rather than collaborate with the creators. And at the end, they will stab the creators with passive and active-aggressive accusations like these.

chrisoverzero 2y ago
> […] rather than collaborate with the creators. How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL? Also, who do you believe the creators of Redis are?
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
  > How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL? This is quite simple, and should have happened before these companies decide to switch licenses because of Amazon. Each time Amazon decides to use an open source product, instead of doing it for free, they should contact the parent company and offer them a fee. There are many advantages of such an arrangement: a single version exists, the parent company has a stable source of income etc. I might be mistaken, but this path was possibly chosen by Citus and Azure, and nobody seems to complain.
  - growse 2y ago
    > Each time Amazon decides to use an open source prouct, instead of doing it for free, they should contact the parent company and offer them a fee. What if, instead of doing that, they hired some of the people making significant contributions to the project? Would that count?
    - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
      It depends. For example, when Ubuntu first appeared and Canonical hired some prominent Debian maintainers, they were criticized for that. But I believe the final net benefit was positive. The problem here is what happens when Amazon stops to pay them. If the owner of the project is a foundation or a similar organization, it may have better chances of survival.

zokier 2y ago

I would be far more sympathetic to these sspl corporations if they subjected themselves to those same license terms. But instead they play this some animals are more equal than others game.

evanelias 2y ago
That wouldn't ever make sense though. They're the licensor. You don't ever need a license in order to use intellectual property that you own. By definition the license is what allows third parties to use or redistribute copyrighted software.
- xenago 2y ago
  It makes perfect sense. They claim all these benefits to users for these non-foss licenses and then themselves avoid them like the plague
  - evanelias 2y ago
    No, legally what is being suggested above is nonsensical. If you own the copyright to a work, you can freely use that work, and you can license it to others. As the copyright holder, you get to decide what terms go in that license, but you do not need to abide by those terms-of-use yourself since you are the licensor, not the licensee. Suggesting otherwise would be a bizarro-world where musicians need to pay to listen to their own music, authors need to pay to read their own books, and so forth. That's completely absurd, nothing works this way. There are certainly valid reasons to be upset at a software company for changing the license for new versions of its software, but this is not one of them!
xenago 2y ago
They're total hypocrites! For instance Graylog switched to OpenSearch to reap the benefits, but themselves push the awful SSPL on their users. I have no respect for these organizations. Provide real open source software or start up closed from the get-go, don't build on community contributions for a while and then switch to closed while marketing as being open!

d-z-m 2y ago

Big bad Redis Inc. won't let us host their software as a service anymore! Good thing AWS(champions of open-source software) are here to help! Seriously though, very duplicitous framing by AWS. Ignoring the clear existential threat to Redis's business if they allow other managed offerings to undercut their own.

Spivak 2y ago
What other framing is there? There was an OSS project called Redis that existed before Redis Inc., who gave their software to the OSS community in the hope it that would be useful to others. Millions of people including AWS started using it under the pretense that it was and would continue to be OSS. Redis Inc. saw $$ after Redis Enterprise and their hosted offering were luke warm successes at best and took all the code, even the parts that were contributed by other members of the OSS community, and made it proprietary. Even if you're not affected by this license change because you aren't hosting Redis there is no reason to believe that you won't be on the chopping block for the next license change when Redis Inc.'s numbers must go up. The trust has been completely broken. You would be crazy to base your business on Redis now. AWS and the Linux Foundation are the ones keeping the original Redis, the community project that existed before the business, alive for the benefit of everyone.
- d-z-m 2y ago
  I see it as an incentive problem. How are the maintainers of these projects to receive the support they need? Companies like AWS are incentivized to take all they can take and contribute nothing in return, "it's FOSS, baby". Redis Inc. is incentivized to continue the development and improvement of Redis, because the success of Redis is directly proportional to the success of their business. Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    > Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat. Why do you say that? AWS is going to be providing Valkey as a service to millions of paying customers via their ElasticCache offering. Every cloud provider will be doing something similar. It's the same story with OpenSearch, it's now deeply integrated into AWS and used not just directly by their customers but by other AWS services. That's honestly the best model for OSS, many financially interested parties who want the software to exist to support their business, but the software itself isn't their business. And now there's not a conflict of interest for the project to hold back features because they want to save them for the enterprise tier. The software getting better for everyone directly benefits their hosted offering. I think there's a strong case that given a time machine Redis should have never been OSS so they could sell software licenses. But at the same time Redis wouldn't have become a household name for developers and have the huge ecosystem of tooling surrounding it were it not for the fact that it's OSS.

oneplane 2y ago

The irony here is that this AWS post is correct content-wise, but has nothing to do with AWS itself, they are just in it for the money. The same article would apply to Terraform (and OpenTofu as the fork now), which was a much more clear "community doesn't want this" case. There were a few companies that provided a bit of hosted terraform services, but it was hardly at any significant scale. Yet the same thing happened: community doesn't want a restrictive license.

nurtbo 2y ago

Was Redis Labs founded by Redis developers? I looked at its corporate history and was a bit confused (eg antirez seemed to be a consultant for them)

jsmeaton 2y ago
No, which is why I think there has been less support for the (previous) OSS company than some other projects. Redis labs effectively became the defacto owner of the project later down the line when Antirez joined them. They inherited the project then tried to capture all of the value. This isn’t a case of the original maintainers trying to sustain the project. It’s a hostile takeover that’s backfiring significantly. They brought Microsoft onboard as a partner hoping that would get them through the mess. Turns out that wasn’t enough.

deleted 2y ago

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yndoendo 2y ago

Sorry, I loose respect for those defending Amazon. Terrible behavior towards their workers, push against consumer protection, and anticompetitive antics like price-fixing highlight their deplorable behavior. They only way I do business with them is taking their money and not giving them a penny. Their Walk Out technology original statements and working reality show they find with grifting to prop up their image. Here is good example of economics. How much is a $25 Amazon gift card worth? Some it many be $25 and others it is $0, and in-between for people looking to off load their gift card for pennies on the dollar.