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Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Sometimes the fork will gain traction and become the de facto "true" version (

Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Sometimes the fork will gain traction and become the de facto "true" version (see Hudson -> Jenkins). Sometimes the fork will flop and people will largely stick to the original despite whatever caused the schism (see Terraform -> OpenTofu). Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.

NewJazz 3y ago
You think opentofu is a flop?
dainiusse 3y ago
I think it is too early to evaluate Terraform/OpenToFu. They're diverging now and it looks like OpenToFu are bringing on some wanted features.
- noodlesUK 3y ago
  I agree. It has only been a few months since the split. I have noticed more and more uptake of OpenTofu amongst colleagues, and I've personally switched. The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod.
  - waiwai933 3y ago
    That works while OpenTofu and Terraform files are compatible - but once they no longer are, presumably you'd have to standardise on one or the other.
    - xmprt 3y ago
      The point is that once they are no longer compatible, people would standardize on the one that they're familiar with which is most likely the one that's running on their machine.
      - NegativeLatency 3y ago
        There are enough pretty annoying and long standing terraform issues that if opentofu started picking them off I'd consider switching. You can kinda see this with vim and neovim where both are continuing to exist and benefit each other.
        wlonkly 3y ago
        Encrypted state files are either done or coming soon. That's going to be a big one, since Hashicorp used that as a selling point for Terraform Cloud.
      - waiwai933 3y ago
        But currently, people are equally comfortable with both; the CLI commands are exactly identical between the two, save for the name of the binary itself. In any org where both are in use, if people are forced to choose at some point, they will have to balance many other factors besides familiarity, such as features and confidence in the platform.
  - jareklupinski 3y ago
    > The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod. "It works on my machine!" "Then we'll ship your machine" Docker: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*Ibnwjo9LtUFxRY1MZgOcvg.png https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*Ibnw...
    - kdmccormick 3y ago
      Lol plain old VMs have been shipping your machine since well before Docker was around.
      - TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
        And in some cases, unfortunate git commands will ship your machine too!
  - hiatus 3y ago
    > The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod. I disagree—I think support of deployment tooling (like Atlantis) is the bigger proof. If you are running terraform on your local machine it is likely a very small company.
- Thev00d00 3y ago
  There is no incentive for users of tf to move, consumers are not impacted by the licensing changes. Opentofu hasn't shipped a 1.7 stable with removed blocks yet, whilst terraform is already on 1.8 with provider functions
  - cube2222 3y ago
    Hey, tech lead of the project here! Just to clarify, provider-defined functions are coming in OpenTofu 1.7, along with e2e state encryption. Generally, I recommend not comparing version numbers of Terraform and OpenTofu post-1.6. Implementing the e2e state encryption was non-trivial, and we wanted to make sure we get it right, so that's why the release took us a while. We also got a slight additional delay due to needing to handle the C&D letter OpenTofu got from HashiCorp[0], but that's all sorted now. The beta for 1.7 however is coming out this week, with the stable release planned in the next ~3 weeks. [0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/our-response-to-hashicorps-cease-and-desist/ https://opentofu.org/blog/our-response-to-hashicorps-cease-a...
    - vertis 3y ago
      I'm definitely in the camp that has moved my tiny company infra to opentofu. Thanks for all your hard work.
      - cube2222 3y ago
        That’s awesome! Appreciate the kind words :)
        vertis 3y ago
        In the very early days of Terraform, when it was 2 months or so old I helped a little. How many people did (so much more than me) with all these projects to be later betrayed by relicensing. > git log --pretty=format:"%h %an %ad %s" --date=short | grep "Luke Chadwick" dcd6449245 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add documentation for elb health_check 0eed0908df Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add health_check to aws_elb resource 96c05c881a Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Update documentation to include the new user_data attribute on aws_launch_configuration 15bdf8b5f9 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add user_data to aws_launch_configuration 8d2e232602 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-29 Update documentation to reflect the addition of associate_public_ip_address to the aws_instance resource 974074fee9 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-29 Add associate_public_ip_address as an attribute of the aws_instance resource
asia92 3y ago
Remember the joke that was ayojs?
geek_at 3y ago
Best example for a successful fork is gitea. It's so incredible what they have achieved since the fork from gogs
- notyoutube 3y ago
  (And then gitea was forked into forgejo, which is used by codeberg, iiuc)
  - rhdunn 3y ago
    I'm using Gitea locally. I haven't come across forgejo before. It seems to be forked on the basis of providing a fully open source solution (it states that some Gitea enterprise features are not present). Do you know what the main differences are and whether it is worth switching?
    - Macha 3y ago
      There are two main differences: 1. Gitea, Inc replaced the prior community leadership structure with one controlled by Gitea, Inc and have pivoted into being primarily about a hosted code SaaS they launched this year that didn't exist for the first 7 years of the project. They could do it because they had 2 of the 3 seats on the community stewardship organisation at the time to vote for it, but that wasn't always true. For a lot of people, Gitea's primary motivation was for the self-hosted and fully open use case, but now it's not clear that that will remain any more of a priority for Gitea Inc as it is for e.g. Gitlab 2. There were also some contributors who were interested for the sake of decentralising code forges (and not just git), and so were big into the forgefed project which was an activitypub based federation protocol. Gitea Inc were officially on board with that, but the contributors felt they weren't helpful enough to actually implementing that with missteps like letting grant funding from NLNet expire. The contributors from groups 1 and 2, and Codeberg banded together to make Forgejo after the Gitea change. Until the latest release (just last month) Forgejo was one way pulling all changes from Gitea, but they've diverged enough that they're now hard forks. Both have active development, but Forgejo's main unique focus is the federation stuff, while Gitea's was enhancing their CI offering. But while Gitea may have more development effort, being funded by a commercial organisation rather than volunteers and a non-profit, I think they have a long way to catch up to Gitlab in that front, so it feels like they've dropped their unique factor to try chase Gitlab.
ramesh31 3y ago
>Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." They are generally a good thing, save for the poor souls that will end up maintaining a project that was started with them while they were still active. The success of the fork doesn't matter so much as the direction it inevitably pulls the original project. The io.js drama gave us a huge step forward with NPM once their hand was forced. Hopefully some good ideas come of this too.
vdfs 3y ago
> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it If it wasn't open-source it won't be as popular as it is in the first place, Redis is also using ton of open source software or libraries for free. Not defending AWS/GCP/Azure, I actually got my software used when i was young by a large company for free (not even a mention- Still using it i think, 5M+ Play Store Downloads), but that is the spirit of open source
- snotrockets 3y ago
  Redis actually has very few external dependencies compared to most modern FOSS: IIRC, it only need libc and OpenSSL (the latter only if you build TLS) on your system, and provide their forked copies of Jemalloc, LUA, fpconv, HiRedis, Linenoise and Hdr_Histogram.
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    those vendored dependencies are still libraries that redis couldn't use if those libraries weren't open source for example, something like jemalloc is highly nontrivial
- hcrean 3y ago
  Open Source is, by and large, intended by the creator to donate their ideas to benefit humanity as a whole; many people feel that using their thing to help strengthen an (ethically questionable) monopoly is acting against that core goal.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    I think it's less about strengthening a monopoly and more about zero sum business models. If AWS/Azure/GCP/et al. ran a cloud version of X and the main company supporting the open source project was a going concern, I doubt many would have a problem with the entire scheme. However, in reality, every enterprise support dollar that goes through a third party cloud-managed offering is one that doesn't go to the first party. In which case, what dollars are left to pay the independent company that creates and supports the software? Granted, there are a lot of nuances to the above, but I think it's generally fair to say that third-party cloud companies are making more off managed open source offerings than they're paying to contribute to them.
stefan_ 3y ago
I remember when we had the libav fork. Turns out 10 bickering idiots pronouncing the freedom revolution were ultimately not half as productive as one Michael Niedermayer.
- merb 3y ago
  tbf, ffmpeg‘s api and thus libav is so obscure that it would be impossible to fork it and create a nice looking api, without bothering people. I vaguely remember the news about the Microsoft guy that was called out on twitter and I’ve read the issue and looked at some cli/api parameters and was stunned. So much possible flags. I hope that I will never need to deal with it. But still kudos for all the maintainers. It works and has probably support for all codes and all options of these codes.
snotrockets 3y ago
> Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them. I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed it in a way that doesn't allow such. You can't recall a gift because you don't like how the recipient is using it. Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again.
- slashdev 3y ago
  With the noise people make when you don't use an OSI open-source license, little wonder. But when Redis started I think we didn't yet boardly understand the limitations of OSI licenses in the era of big tech cloud computing. To people starting projects today, you have no excuse, we know better. Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free. OSI Open-source business models are dead. Don't make that mistake.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    They're not dead, just mostly dead. You can probably set up a decent privately-funded venture to deal in OSI software. The problem comes (as it always does) when the founders think they're the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and deserve a nine-or-ten-figure net worth for making a few nice, but ultimately not earth-shattering, software tools. Then they have to enshittify to get ready for the IPO.
    - snotrockets 3y ago
      nit: s/founders/executives/ (sometimes they are the same, but not always)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
Comma2976 3y ago
The hyperscalers weren't selling Terraform though, Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings. I'd say Elasticsearch is still the comparison to make here for a product that clouds just resold, then again, Redis the company didn't build Redis the software and their latest marketing smells more of VC hawkery than any reasonable pitch
- alex_lav 3y ago
  > Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings. Would love some data in support of this statement. Not saying you're wrong necessarily, just it feels like a perception vs. reality comment potentially.
  - pbronez 3y ago
    Easiest to check out the list of companies sponsoring OpenTofu https://opentofu.org/supporters/ https://opentofu.org/supporters/ For more details, you could listen to: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1471446 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1471446
    - alex_lav 3y ago
      A list of companies sponsoring OpenTofu confirms that TF was "losing" to tools like TerraGrunt and SpaceLift? Sorry I don't follow.
  - Comma2976 3y ago
    Don't have any data I must say, just a series of discussions here and elsewhere over the years, voicing either appreciation for the platforms above or displeasure with the logistics/price of TFcloud, e.g. with one I remember https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eaq8bh/terraform_emterprise_changing_pricing_model/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eaq8bh/terraform_em... The vast majority of projects that I've come across at work just had the tf CLI wrapped in a CI/CD pipeline + some bucket, but the managed competitors seemed to come up more often (compared to other tools/platforms) when people wanted to use/were using something as a service. Perhaps it's really just a perception thing, I never checked their financials edit: I think I went off-track from the point. The point was that the ones selling managed versions were not the hyperscalers, but people building wrappers and similar around it. The other commenter with the list of fork-backers illustrates that nicely.
zer00eyz 3y ago
>> Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Whats funny about this one is as follows: 1. The license: BSD? LGPL? Do both... nothing says that you cant make the product available under both licenses. You prevent another rug pull... 2. The platform: Do both, Run the thing on GitHub like it always has been and back it up to the other platform. If MS makes GitHub into the next source forge... then you're already half way out. 3. The name: Not a hill any one should die on. Pick three, ask amazon legal to clear them or FSF legal to clear them and vote. Redict and valkey are both fucking stupid names... Yea you might have to live with storage mcstoreface but that would be better than either of the current options. As for FOSS drama... Lacking any clear leadership, peoples ability to self organize is limited. These sorts of things happen all the time (systemd, x vs waylaid, how many unix forks?) The winning side is almost always the one with clear leadership.
lenerdenator 3y ago
Part of the bet is probably that since Terraform is almost necessarily going to run on a cloud service that is already being paid for, the user might not care that a bit gets added to the bill. Redis? I'm not sure. Like you say, they don't want Big Tech to slap a UI on it and profit. And, really, once they start competing on price (which they might sooner rather than later to keep people from going back to on-prem) you can guess they might use something that's free so they don't have to pay the license on a per-server instance.
cube2222 3y ago
Hey, tech lead of OpenTofu here! I might be in a bubble of course, but from what I've seen, I've been positively surprised by the uptake of OpenTofu so far! I do also expect OpenTofu 1.7 to be more interesting for people to migrate to, as it'll include a bunch of OpenTofu-exclusives.
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  I work for a large enterprise and we use terraform open source atm, but I can pretty much guarantee we move to OpenTofu once the dust settles a little more.
styfle 3y ago
Don’t forget the Node.js and io.js fork. That’s one where the fork basically became the blessed branch and the two communities merged back together.
karmakaze 3y ago
The Hudson/Jenkins reference is interesting in that Hudson was soon later abandoned (i.e. donated to Eclipse Foundation). For Redis there could be space for both, but if I want anything larger than a single instance I'd just sooner use MS Garnet[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39752504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39752504
davidw 3y ago
Yes, a real fork isn't just a new repository, it's recreating the community that drives an open source project around the new codebase.
weinzierl 3y ago
I think Hudson -> Jenkins is not really a fitting example here, because it was more of a rename caused by Oracle owning the Hudson trademark. While Oracle halfheartedly indicated to continue Hudson on its own, from what I remember it was pretty clear from the start that Jenkins was the new Hudson.
jedmeyers 3y ago
What AWS/GCP/Azure provide with managed Redis is much much more than just a UI. There are a lot of technical issues that come with running Redis reliably in the cloud. I’d say UI work is probably 5% of that at most.
sdesol 3y ago
I'm actually surprised by how well received Valkey is right now, given that they forked not too long ago. Below are GitHub engagement insights for the two projects: https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&nb=all https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&nb=all For a longer case study, you might be interested in Elastic and OpenSearch https://devboard.gitsense.com/opensearch-project?id=e766e5814f https://devboard.gitsense.com/opensearch-project?id=e766e581... Both projects are quite healthy, but Elastic is still clearly more popular.
kyriakos 3y ago
What's the situation with Opensearch which came from elastic after license changed so it stops getting get abused by aws.
- sdesol 3y ago
  OpenSearch is doing quite well, but Elastic is still more dominate based on my GitHub insights tool.
paxys 3y ago
> because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to ... Important to note that the "people" in this case is the company that bought the rights to the Redis trademark from the original creator and then took on $350M in VC funding. The community that created and supported Redis since its inception was not involved in the decision, and isn't getting any of the benefit.
paxys 3y ago
That project was dead in the water once they decided to name it "OpenTofu".
ChuckMcM 3y ago
Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them. I can. Free software is, at its core, wage theft. It is truly unfortunate that so many people don't understand "big picture" economics, not the $2 for a loaf of bread economics, but the creation of value, it's consumption, and allocating resources to maximize creating the "right kind" of value. Most programmers "get" that writing code has value, hell tech companies will pay $5,000/week in total compensation just to do that, of course "coding for money" isn't the same as "coding on something you love", or are invested in, or does something you want. But here is the detail that so many miss, it is still $5,000/week "worth" of value. Whether or not someone is paying you to do it, there is still value there. And when you think about it is it all that surprising that putting that value into a thing doesn't make it something others might value too? Others who don't have the chops or the time to make it themselves? THAT is economics. And there are so many people who can see that value just sitting there and say, "Hmm, I bet I know someone who would value that, and I could get them to pay me some of that value in cash money in exchange for hooking them up." And it's game on buddy. And what is that game? Stealing the 'value' that would have been returned as a wages to a coder if they had been hired and keeping it for themselves. You might as well decorate your front lawn with $100 bills and put up a sign that says, "These bills are decoration I forbid you from using them to go buy things for yourself." Sure some folks would respect that sign but a whole lot more would say, "Uh, good luck with that, and thanks for the cash." If you write code for "free", no matter what license you try to put it under that "prevents" people from profiting off of it, they are gonna profit. You can either make it possible for them to profit and cut you in on some of that, or you can decide for yourself that you're okay with all of that value you created funding someone else's lifestyle.
deanCommie 2y ago
> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process Then build that UI yourself and sell it and make millions of dollars per day yourself, noone is stopping them. Ah but you see there are 2 problems: 1/ "UIs" are harder than people think, especially by those that use that term derisively like you did. There are PLENTY of popular products that are basically just UI on existing data. 2/ AWS/GCP/Azure aren't slapping UIs. They're offering "managed operations" for these products. What is it? And sure, Hackernews is likely to scoff at that - we know how this site feels about dropbox -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 But if it didn't offer value, people wouldn't pay for it. Redis engineers are good at building a key value storage. AWS/GCP/Azure engineers are good at building managed operations. Combine them together and you've got the best of both worlds. AWS/GCP/Azure aren't making money off Redis, they're making money off their experience in operating cloud infrastructure. And the free market wants to pay them to do so.

NewJazz 3y ago

You think opentofu is a flop?

dainiusse 3y ago

I think it is too early to evaluate Terraform/OpenToFu. They're diverging now and it looks like OpenToFu are bringing on some wanted features.

noodlesUK 3y ago
I agree. It has only been a few months since the split. I have noticed more and more uptake of OpenTofu amongst colleagues, and I've personally switched. The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod.
- waiwai933 3y ago
  That works while OpenTofu and Terraform files are compatible - but once they no longer are, presumably you'd have to standardise on one or the other.
  - xmprt 3y ago
    The point is that once they are no longer compatible, people would standardize on the one that they're familiar with which is most likely the one that's running on their machine.
    - NegativeLatency 3y ago
      There are enough pretty annoying and long standing terraform issues that if opentofu started picking them off I'd consider switching. You can kinda see this with vim and neovim where both are continuing to exist and benefit each other.
      - wlonkly 3y ago
        Encrypted state files are either done or coming soon. That's going to be a big one, since Hashicorp used that as a selling point for Terraform Cloud.
    - waiwai933 3y ago
      But currently, people are equally comfortable with both; the CLI commands are exactly identical between the two, save for the name of the binary itself. In any org where both are in use, if people are forced to choose at some point, they will have to balance many other factors besides familiarity, such as features and confidence in the platform.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  > The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod. "It works on my machine!" "Then we'll ship your machine" Docker: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*Ibnwjo9LtUFxRY1MZgOcvg.png https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*Ibnw...
  - kdmccormick 3y ago
    Lol plain old VMs have been shipping your machine since well before Docker was around.
    - TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
      And in some cases, unfortunate git commands will ship your machine too!
- hiatus 3y ago
  > The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod. I disagree—I think support of deployment tooling (like Atlantis) is the bigger proof. If you are running terraform on your local machine it is likely a very small company.
Thev00d00 3y ago
There is no incentive for users of tf to move, consumers are not impacted by the licensing changes. Opentofu hasn't shipped a 1.7 stable with removed blocks yet, whilst terraform is already on 1.8 with provider functions
- cube2222 3y ago
  Hey, tech lead of the project here! Just to clarify, provider-defined functions are coming in OpenTofu 1.7, along with e2e state encryption. Generally, I recommend not comparing version numbers of Terraform and OpenTofu post-1.6. Implementing the e2e state encryption was non-trivial, and we wanted to make sure we get it right, so that's why the release took us a while. We also got a slight additional delay due to needing to handle the C&D letter OpenTofu got from HashiCorp[0], but that's all sorted now. The beta for 1.7 however is coming out this week, with the stable release planned in the next ~3 weeks. [0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/our-response-to-hashicorps-cease-and-desist/ https://opentofu.org/blog/our-response-to-hashicorps-cease-a...
  - vertis 3y ago
    I'm definitely in the camp that has moved my tiny company infra to opentofu. Thanks for all your hard work.
    - cube2222 3y ago
      That’s awesome! Appreciate the kind words :)
      - vertis 3y ago
        In the very early days of Terraform, when it was 2 months or so old I helped a little. How many people did (so much more than me) with all these projects to be later betrayed by relicensing. > git log --pretty=format:"%h %an %ad %s" --date=short | grep "Luke Chadwick" dcd6449245 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add documentation for elb health_check 0eed0908df Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add health_check to aws_elb resource 96c05c881a Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Update documentation to include the new user_data attribute on aws_launch_configuration 15bdf8b5f9 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add user_data to aws_launch_configuration 8d2e232602 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-29 Update documentation to reflect the addition of associate_public_ip_address to the aws_instance resource 974074fee9 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-29 Add associate_public_ip_address as an attribute of the aws_instance resource

asia92 3y ago

Remember the joke that was ayojs?

geek_at 3y ago

Best example for a successful fork is gitea. It's so incredible what they have achieved since the fork from gogs

notyoutube 3y ago
(And then gitea was forked into forgejo, which is used by codeberg, iiuc)
- rhdunn 3y ago
  I'm using Gitea locally. I haven't come across forgejo before. It seems to be forked on the basis of providing a fully open source solution (it states that some Gitea enterprise features are not present). Do you know what the main differences are and whether it is worth switching?
  - Macha 3y ago
    There are two main differences: 1. Gitea, Inc replaced the prior community leadership structure with one controlled by Gitea, Inc and have pivoted into being primarily about a hosted code SaaS they launched this year that didn't exist for the first 7 years of the project. They could do it because they had 2 of the 3 seats on the community stewardship organisation at the time to vote for it, but that wasn't always true. For a lot of people, Gitea's primary motivation was for the self-hosted and fully open use case, but now it's not clear that that will remain any more of a priority for Gitea Inc as it is for e.g. Gitlab 2. There were also some contributors who were interested for the sake of decentralising code forges (and not just git), and so were big into the forgefed project which was an activitypub based federation protocol. Gitea Inc were officially on board with that, but the contributors felt they weren't helpful enough to actually implementing that with missteps like letting grant funding from NLNet expire. The contributors from groups 1 and 2, and Codeberg banded together to make Forgejo after the Gitea change. Until the latest release (just last month) Forgejo was one way pulling all changes from Gitea, but they've diverged enough that they're now hard forks. Both have active development, but Forgejo's main unique focus is the federation stuff, while Gitea's was enhancing their CI offering. But while Gitea may have more development effort, being funded by a commercial organisation rather than volunteers and a non-profit, I think they have a long way to catch up to Gitlab in that front, so it feels like they've dropped their unique factor to try chase Gitlab.

ramesh31 3y ago

>Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." They are generally a good thing, save for the poor souls that will end up maintaining a project that was started with them while they were still active. The success of the fork doesn't matter so much as the direction it inevitably pulls the original project. The io.js drama gave us a huge step forward with NPM once their hand was forced. Hopefully some good ideas come of this too.

vdfs 3y ago

> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it If it wasn't open-source it won't be as popular as it is in the first place, Redis is also using ton of open source software or libraries for free. Not defending AWS/GCP/Azure, I actually got my software used when i was young by a large company for free (not even a mention- Still using it i think, 5M+ Play Store Downloads), but that is the spirit of open source

snotrockets 3y ago
Redis actually has very few external dependencies compared to most modern FOSS: IIRC, it only need libc and OpenSSL (the latter only if you build TLS) on your system, and provide their forked copies of Jemalloc, LUA, fpconv, HiRedis, Linenoise and Hdr_Histogram.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  those vendored dependencies are still libraries that redis couldn't use if those libraries weren't open source for example, something like jemalloc is highly nontrivial
hcrean 3y ago
Open Source is, by and large, intended by the creator to donate their ideas to benefit humanity as a whole; many people feel that using their thing to help strengthen an (ethically questionable) monopoly is acting against that core goal.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  I think it's less about strengthening a monopoly and more about zero sum business models. If AWS/Azure/GCP/et al. ran a cloud version of X and the main company supporting the open source project was a going concern, I doubt many would have a problem with the entire scheme. However, in reality, every enterprise support dollar that goes through a third party cloud-managed offering is one that doesn't go to the first party. In which case, what dollars are left to pay the independent company that creates and supports the software? Granted, there are a lot of nuances to the above, but I think it's generally fair to say that third-party cloud companies are making more off managed open source offerings than they're paying to contribute to them.

stefan_ 3y ago

I remember when we had the libav fork. Turns out 10 bickering idiots pronouncing the freedom revolution were ultimately not half as productive as one Michael Niedermayer.

merb 3y ago
tbf, ffmpeg‘s api and thus libav is so obscure that it would be impossible to fork it and create a nice looking api, without bothering people. I vaguely remember the news about the Microsoft guy that was called out on twitter and I’ve read the issue and looked at some cli/api parameters and was stunned. So much possible flags. I hope that I will never need to deal with it. But still kudos for all the maintainers. It works and has probably support for all codes and all options of these codes.

snotrockets 3y ago

> Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them. I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed it in a way that doesn't allow such. You can't recall a gift because you don't like how the recipient is using it. Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again.

slashdev 3y ago
With the noise people make when you don't use an OSI open-source license, little wonder. But when Redis started I think we didn't yet boardly understand the limitations of OSI licenses in the era of big tech cloud computing. To people starting projects today, you have no excuse, we know better. Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free. OSI Open-source business models are dead. Don't make that mistake.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  They're not dead, just mostly dead. You can probably set up a decent privately-funded venture to deal in OSI software. The problem comes (as it always does) when the founders think they're the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and deserve a nine-or-ten-figure net worth for making a few nice, but ultimately not earth-shattering, software tools. Then they have to enshittify to get ready for the IPO.
  - snotrockets 3y ago
    nit: s/founders/executives/ (sometimes they are the same, but not always)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Pet_Ant 3y ago

Comma2976 3y ago

The hyperscalers weren't selling Terraform though, Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings. I'd say Elasticsearch is still the comparison to make here for a product that clouds just resold, then again, Redis the company didn't build Redis the software and their latest marketing smells more of VC hawkery than any reasonable pitch

alex_lav 3y ago
> Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings. Would love some data in support of this statement. Not saying you're wrong necessarily, just it feels like a perception vs. reality comment potentially.
- pbronez 3y ago
  Easiest to check out the list of companies sponsoring OpenTofu https://opentofu.org/supporters/ https://opentofu.org/supporters/ For more details, you could listen to: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1471446 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1471446
  - alex_lav 3y ago
    A list of companies sponsoring OpenTofu confirms that TF was "losing" to tools like TerraGrunt and SpaceLift? Sorry I don't follow.
- Comma2976 3y ago
  Don't have any data I must say, just a series of discussions here and elsewhere over the years, voicing either appreciation for the platforms above or displeasure with the logistics/price of TFcloud, e.g. with one I remember https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eaq8bh/terraform_emterprise_changing_pricing_model/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eaq8bh/terraform_em... The vast majority of projects that I've come across at work just had the tf CLI wrapped in a CI/CD pipeline + some bucket, but the managed competitors seemed to come up more often (compared to other tools/platforms) when people wanted to use/were using something as a service. Perhaps it's really just a perception thing, I never checked their financials edit: I think I went off-track from the point. The point was that the ones selling managed versions were not the hyperscalers, but people building wrappers and similar around it. The other commenter with the list of fork-backers illustrates that nicely.

zer00eyz 3y ago

>> Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Whats funny about this one is as follows: 1. The license: BSD? LGPL? Do both... nothing says that you cant make the product available under both licenses. You prevent another rug pull... 2. The platform: Do both, Run the thing on GitHub like it always has been and back it up to the other platform. If MS makes GitHub into the next source forge... then you're already half way out. 3. The name: Not a hill any one should die on. Pick three, ask amazon legal to clear them or FSF legal to clear them and vote. Redict and valkey are both fucking stupid names... Yea you might have to live with storage mcstoreface but that would be better than either of the current options. As for FOSS drama... Lacking any clear leadership, peoples ability to self organize is limited. These sorts of things happen all the time (systemd, x vs waylaid, how many unix forks?) The winning side is almost always the one with clear leadership.

lenerdenator 3y ago

Part of the bet is probably that since Terraform is almost necessarily going to run on a cloud service that is already being paid for, the user might not care that a bit gets added to the bill. Redis? I'm not sure. Like you say, they don't want Big Tech to slap a UI on it and profit. And, really, once they start competing on price (which they might sooner rather than later to keep people from going back to on-prem) you can guess they might use something that's free so they don't have to pay the license on a per-server instance.

cube2222 3y ago

Hey, tech lead of OpenTofu here! I might be in a bubble of course, but from what I've seen, I've been positively surprised by the uptake of OpenTofu so far! I do also expect OpenTofu 1.7 to be more interesting for people to migrate to, as it'll include a bunch of OpenTofu-exclusives.

dimitrios1 3y ago
I work for a large enterprise and we use terraform open source atm, but I can pretty much guarantee we move to OpenTofu once the dust settles a little more.

styfle 3y ago

Don’t forget the Node.js and io.js fork. That’s one where the fork basically became the blessed branch and the two communities merged back together.

karmakaze 3y ago

The Hudson/Jenkins reference is interesting in that Hudson was soon later abandoned (i.e. donated to Eclipse Foundation). For Redis there could be space for both, but if I want anything larger than a single instance I'd just sooner use MS Garnet[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39752504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39752504

davidw 3y ago

Yes, a real fork isn't just a new repository, it's recreating the community that drives an open source project around the new codebase.

weinzierl 3y ago

I think Hudson -> Jenkins is not really a fitting example here, because it was more of a rename caused by Oracle owning the Hudson trademark. While Oracle halfheartedly indicated to continue Hudson on its own, from what I remember it was pretty clear from the start that Jenkins was the new Hudson.

jedmeyers 3y ago

What AWS/GCP/Azure provide with managed Redis is much much more than just a UI. There are a lot of technical issues that come with running Redis reliably in the cloud. I’d say UI work is probably 5% of that at most.

sdesol 3y ago

I'm actually surprised by how well received Valkey is right now, given that they forked not too long ago. Below are GitHub engagement insights for the two projects: https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&nb=all https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&nb=all For a longer case study, you might be interested in Elastic and OpenSearch https://devboard.gitsense.com/opensearch-project?id=e766e5814f https://devboard.gitsense.com/opensearch-project?id=e766e581... Both projects are quite healthy, but Elastic is still clearly more popular.

kyriakos 3y ago

What's the situation with Opensearch which came from elastic after license changed so it stops getting get abused by aws.

sdesol 3y ago
OpenSearch is doing quite well, but Elastic is still more dominate based on my GitHub insights tool.

paxys 3y ago

> because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to ... Important to note that the "people" in this case is the company that bought the rights to the Redis trademark from the original creator and then took on $350M in VC funding. The community that created and supported Redis since its inception was not involved in the decision, and isn't getting any of the benefit.

paxys 3y ago

That project was dead in the water once they decided to name it "OpenTofu".

ChuckMcM 3y ago

Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them. I can. Free software is, at its core, wage theft. It is truly unfortunate that so many people don't understand "big picture" economics, not the $2 for a loaf of bread economics, but the creation of value, it's consumption, and allocating resources to maximize creating the "right kind" of value. Most programmers "get" that writing code has value, hell tech companies will pay $5,000/week in total compensation just to do that, of course "coding for money" isn't the same as "coding on something you love", or are invested in, or does something you want. But here is the detail that so many miss, it is still $5,000/week "worth" of value. Whether or not someone is paying you to do it, there is still value there. And when you think about it is it all that surprising that putting that value into a thing doesn't make it something others might value too? Others who don't have the chops or the time to make it themselves? THAT is economics. And there are so many people who can see that value just sitting there and say, "Hmm, I bet I know someone who would value that, and I could get them to pay me some of that value in cash money in exchange for hooking them up." And it's game on buddy. And what is that game? Stealing the 'value' that would have been returned as a wages to a coder if they had been hired and keeping it for themselves. You might as well decorate your front lawn with $100 bills and put up a sign that says, "These bills are decoration I forbid you from using them to go buy things for yourself." Sure some folks would respect that sign but a whole lot more would say, "Uh, good luck with that, and thanks for the cash." If you write code for "free", no matter what license you try to put it under that "prevents" people from profiting off of it, they are gonna profit. You can either make it possible for them to profit and cut you in on some of that, or you can decide for yourself that you're okay with all of that value you created funding someone else's lifestyle.

deanCommie 2y ago

> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process Then build that UI yourself and sell it and make millions of dollars per day yourself, noone is stopping them. Ah but you see there are 2 problems: 1/ "UIs" are harder than people think, especially by those that use that term derisively like you did. There are PLENTY of popular products that are basically just UI on existing data. 2/ AWS/GCP/Azure aren't slapping UIs. They're offering "managed operations" for these products. What is it? And sure, Hackernews is likely to scoff at that - we know how this site feels about dropbox -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 But if it didn't offer value, people wouldn't pay for it. Redis engineers are good at building a key value storage. AWS/GCP/Azure engineers are good at building managed operations. Combine them together and you've got the best of both worlds. AWS/GCP/Azure aren't making money off Redis, they're making money off their experience in operating cloud infrastructure. And the free market wants to pay them to do so.