7 ms·
Valkey Is Rapidly Overtaking Redis
- paxys 3y agoGood. I hope Redis Labs dies a slow death for stealing the project from the community.
- kawsper 3y agoThere's something wrong at Redislabs, it took them over a year to get RESP3 rolled out into their hosted service, you'd expect a rollout of that to be a bit quicker when they're the owner of Redis. It affected us when upgrading Sidekiq to version 7, which dropped support for older Redis, and their Envoy proxy setup didn't support HELLO and RESP3: https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/issues/5594 https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/issues/5594
- mperham 3y agoI was honestly shocked by this too, I never intended Sidekiq users to left in a lurch like this. It took them over three years from the RESP3 release before their service supported it. I figured any good SaaS should be dogfooding their own releases, but I guess not!
- pm90 3y agoThis is a very common but wrong assumption. The OSS and Cloud divisions of most companies are very different beasts. The engineers that staff them are different, and their focus is different. This has often lead to issues where the company that creates the project doesn’t always have the capability to support it at scale. TBH, while I don’t support that kind of behavior, the cloud providers probably provide the best SaaS support for most OSS projects, just because of the operational capabilities they have created.
- saghm 3y agoHaving not heard of any of this before now, I'm struggling to wrap my head around why this would be evidence that they're not good stewards of Redis-the-project (as opposed to their Redis service). If they had delayed the general release until their cloud could support it or tried to expedite their cloud release by moving resources over to the cloud services, I feel like that would be much more worrisome in terms of their stewardship of the project as a whole. If anything, it sounds like they basically chose to prioritize Redis in general over their own offering, which is exactly what I'd expect people in the community to want.
- skybrian 3y agoNothing was stolen. The license allows commercial forks. Also, nothing of value was lost. The new forks have all the source code.
- KronisLV 3y ago> Also, nothing of value was lost. The new forks have all the source code. What about the community fragmentation and the eventual rise of incompatibilities as the development will take on slightly different directions? E.g. what happened with MySQL and MariaDB.
- skybrian 3y agoIt’s a risk. It’s not clear what will happen. Maybe one fork will win, or maybe the competing forks will come up with a common standard (like browsers). An issue with databases is that unlike browsers, there’s not that much incentive to standardize, since most apps pick one and stick with it, and their users don’t care.
- xmprt 3y agoThe biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. Usually you want rebrands to be loud and well known and license changes to be silent and ignored until it's too late and people have adopted the new license. In this case, they loudly announced that they're making an unpopular change and it gave everyone the will to switch.
- ok_dad 3y agoI’m amazed that they thought that they could do this and get away with it. Redis is almost a foundational tool for modern caching architectures. Every company I’ve ever worked at used redis like candy to cache stuff that wasn’t important enough for the reliable but expensive and slow data stores. Additionally, the main features 99% of people want and need have been in redis for a decade. Even a fork that only fixed security bugs will have done better than Redis Labs after this debacle. It’s like if the author of nano, the text editor, would try this license change. I suspect this will be much like the {open/libre}office changeover. Maybe soon ‘apt get redis’ and others will be aliased to Valkey.
- crabmusket 3y ago> Even a fork that only fixed security bugs will have done better than Redis Labs after this debacle This describes Redict, not Valkey. I think it's actually great we have two forks, so they can focus on different things.
- willsmith72 3y agoI'm curious about the impact of the licence change on the average company. Were you self-hosting redis in all your companies, or how were you using it?
- ok_dad 3y agoI think that the uproar about license changes are less about actual license impact and more about the impact to the community and social framework that Redis has fostered as a project previously. People are switching because at this point they think they can’t trust Redis Labs not to do more dumb stuff later. Combine that with my previous assertion that redis is very important software at most companies, and the calculus leans in favor of using the fork because any further major license changes might necessitate it anyways, and it’s easier to do now than under the gun. It’s important to not do stuff that loses trust when you’re a company founded on a community.
- Thaxll 3y ago"Rapidly", so most people don't even know the story about Redis changes and I would say 99.99 never heard about Valkey.
- Osiris 3y agoI was aware of the license change but not of the forks. Now I am.
- llm_trw 3y agoWe are experiencing exponential growth in the last week, going from 1 user to 2.
- edvinbesic 3y ago100% week over week growth is nothing to sneeze at
- airstrike 3y agoRelevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- kgeist 3y agoAt the company, I mentioned Valkey, and no one had any clue what I was taking about (we use Redis).
- joshmanders 3y agoRedis (64.7k stars): Excluding merges, 8 authors have pushed 8 commits to unstable and 10 commits to all branches. On unstable, 173 files have changed and there have been 2,002 additions and 3,194 deletions. Valkey (12k stars): Excluding merges, 41 authors have pushed 147 commits to unstable and 181 commits to all branches. On unstable, 473 files have changed and there have been 10,635 additions and 9,663 deletions. You may as well just start mentally teaching yourself to alias redis to valkey.
- hipadev23 3y agoIs there any reason I don’t just stick with redis 7.2.4 instead of trusting redict/valkey to not inject some backdoor trash? I can avoid the corporate pivot and the random fork at the same time.
- wmf 3y agoOne is maintained and the other isn't. If you don't care about that you could definitely stick with the old version.
- hipadev23 3y agoRedis hasn’t materially changed since about 2.8 so tbh unmaintained is more than fine.
- kube-system 3y agoThis (and simliar) is pretty materially a good reason to update to something more modern: https://github.com/vulhub/vulhub/tree/master/redis/CVE-2022-0543 https://github.com/vulhub/vulhub/tree/master/redis/CVE-2022-...
- mrd3v0 3y agoThis new narrative makes it as if backdoors started existing the moment xz happened. As if that wasn't always a threat, and that xz more than anything did prove that free software is a lot more resilient than to suffer similar attacks that have happened and will continue to happen without public acknowlegement or as much publicity in unfree software/SaaS.
- justinclift 3y agoMaybe take a look at the other fork, Redict? https://redict.io https://redict.io
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- simonw 3y agoOne of the challenges Redis labs here have is that there's very little reason for their userbase to stay loyal to them. antirez retired from Redis development a few years ago. From https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors it looks like activity since he left has been mostly from people who didn't overlap with him much. Redis Labs have not shown themselves to be outstanding stewards of the project as far as I can tell. Why shouldn't people support the fork?
- sdesol 3y agoHere's some additional insights regarding Redis and Valkey https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef If you ignore comments and just look at people raising issues and pull requests, Valkey has more contributors https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=ignore&nb=all https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i... Full disclosure: This is my tool
- nijave 3y agoI'm wondering how much of this is related to initial setup and rebranding. Iirc OpenTofu had a 2-4 week surge in PRs just getting builds, infrastructure, and rebranding cleaned up so they could build Terraform on new CI under a new name.
- sdesol 3y agoI would say a lot right now. If you look at contributors with open or merged pull requests https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=ignore&issues=ignore&nb=all&prs=merged%2Copen&files=merged%2Copen&board=gitsense.insights https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i... Redis has 14 contributors vs 48 for Valkey. I think it is very unlikely that Valkey is adding a lot of new code right now, so the activity is probably related to the rebranding to Valkey.
- nijave 3y ago
- dade_ 3y agoLOL, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope. Man I despise that guy. After successfully navigating the Cisco Contact Center, UC and WebEx business into oblivion, he ends up at Five9 architecting the crash and burn Zoom acquisition that failed 'successfully', and now he pops up at Redis. Run away screaming as fast as you can.
- llm_trw 3y agoI'm curious. Do you have a summary which goes over that without having to read a dozen articles?
- donatj 3y agoI was literally waiting for a primary fork to emerge. Bye Felicia (Redis)
- rafaelturk 3y agoHopefully this will help resume work on a better High Availability code. Where one could have a cluster of 3 ValLey servers, with a superior HA protocol.
- rcconf 3y agoRedis holds such a special place in my heart. It was the definition of awesome, open-source software. It always felt like Redis was THE definition of open source. The fact that the license has changed is heart-breaking.
- Alifatisk 3y agoIt’s a understandable move, it’s the same reason as Elastic. AWS and other hosting companies ate their lunch, of course they want a piece of the pie to stay alive. That’s my take away from this anyway!
- Kwpolska 3y agoEven if there was no AWS product for managed Redis, how many businesses would bother paying Redis Labs and introducing extra latency to their cache server if they could easily set up their own instance on AWS (in EC2/ECS)? Configuring Redis is not rocket science.
- shepardrtc 3y agoSaw a presentation by them at this week's Open Source Summit. Seems like a lot of the major contributors to Redis have moved over to this project. And it seems like AWS is a major supporter of it. I suspect their Elasticache Redis will soon be Elasticache Valkey.
- andix 3y agoI would personally never contribute to a project with non-free license without getting paid. It's basically working for a company without pay.
- paxys 3y agoThe problem is that an open source project you contribute to can become non-free from under you at any point. This pattern is becoming more and more common now.
- wmf 3y agoThere are ways to prevent that which in retrospect we should have paid more attention to. For example, (L)GPL with no CLA cannot be changed later.
- andix 3y agoThat's the decade old philosophical fight about what to consider free software. GPL/GNU vs BSD. I think both opinions are fine, if you don't want your contributions to end up in a commercial product, you can't contribute to a project with BSD/MIT license. On the other hand most companies prefer to support projects with a permissive license over projects with copyleft (GPL). For many projects (except the big ones like GNU/Linux) copyleft seems to be more of a burden.
- btilly 3y agoIn retrospect, Redis Labs is about to learn a lesson that many have learned before. Community willingness to maintain popular software under the old license means that attempting to make free non-free will result in a fork taking over. As a prior example look at what happened a few years back when Oracle tried to make Hudson non-free. Now nobody has heard of Hudson, but everybody uses Jenkins. Which name was chosen for the sheer mockery value and reference to the then infamous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4. There are people who think we need the legal protection of the GPL. But there are others who trust in community pressures to make the right thing happen.
- throwaix 3y ago[flagged]
- renewiltord 3y agoIt's too dangerous to build a company around open source. You're trapped between AWS eating you or having to relicense and AWS eating you. Source-available from the beginning protects you from this. The problem with OSS stuff is that people are generally price-sensitive and you can't beat the platforms for this since they get the R&D for free. It's sort of how I don't hire junior people. When others have trained them up, I can just hire them for more. The other guys have to pay to train them so they hope to get some reward for that, but switching costs are low. I can just take pre-trained guys. And just like the pre-trained guys in this scenario, AWS can always offer a better deal. You need to moat your stuff in some way. Elastic License is ideal if you want to build a company around this. If you just want to make things for the good of mankind or whatever, you can use BSD/GPL/MIT/whatever, but you're doomed if you want to build a company around those licenses. Elastic made it by being quick to the jump. Others have followed. The only really successful model that's different has got to be Kong and RHEL and they've both been around a while. Kong's adoption is troubled because once you get successful, using their OSS thing is better than the enterprise because their pricing tiers go up. But they seem to have good enterprise sales team. Don't know about RHEL. But if I were starting a company around this stuff, I'd be very careful about having core tech be true OSS. Source-available yeah, but true OSS is too risky.
- kstrauser 3y agoAll well and good, except a lot of us here go out of our way not to build software on top of proprietary software. (It’s a pain in the neck to move between cloud providers, sure. You’re kinda stuck with that sort of lock-in. But RDS is popular only because it’s a hosted PostgreSQL. If you don’t like it you can switch to the real thing.)
- iczero 3y ago> It's too dangerous to build a company around open source. You could always just like, not do that? There is nothing preventing anyone from simply not open-sourcing their software. Complaining that "people can use your open source software" is like complaining about how trees split water
- Macha 3y ago
- skywhopper 3y agoI think the right way to frame this situation is how Corey Quinn did in the quote at the end of the article. Redis Labs is the party that forked Redis when they changed the license. Redis Labs may own the name, but the community maintainers are carrying on the original project, just under a new name.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoComments generally covering the situation well. The one thing I take as a bit of a potential bitter irony is that if Redis had had the level of support & contributions ValKey has, Redis Labs might have been able to keep doing what they were doing? Seemingly a bunch of companies are happy to start paying for open source, when weeks ago many were passive consumers.
- kstrauser 3y agoRedis Labs required would-be contributors to sign a CLA to hand over their copyright. If ValKey doesn’t require that, it alone could account for the difference. I wouldn’t sign a CLA to anyone other than maybe the FSF.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoRight, but that CLA stemmed directly from the decision that they needed to monetize better & change their licenses. Point remains: there's a more than small irony here that a company wasn't doing well/was struggling with open source, but could perhaps have done great if the help freshly created has been at all available when they were fully open source.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- metalspoon 3y ago> At the time of the fork, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope didn’t seem too worried. I have the feeling that CEOs are mostly stupid people.
- akagusu 3y agoThis article is just propaganda, as many others from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
- glub103011 3y ago[dead]