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Redis Inc seeks control over future of Rust redis-rs client library
- voidfunc 2y agoI have yet to hear a single positive story about this Redis Inc... it's like a giant company full of only assholes. Story after story is just "wow, these people all suck"
- MortyWaves 2y agoShame because I remember the original author being quite well regarded on places like here and Reddit.
- herrkanin 2y agoHe still is
- hshshshshsh 2y agoDid he start Redis Inc or got hired to work there? I remember something like that for a popular open source project.
- karmakaze 2y agoI agree. At the same time, they're just 'doing their job' working at a for-profit company controlling the brand of open-source (core?) software.
- idle_zealot 2y agoYes, you can simultaneously condemn individual behavior and the system that incentivizes it. Both are bad in this case.
- karmakaze 2y agoMy point is that the blame is on the system moreso than its expected outcome.
- acedTrex 2y agoThey have some of the same people from the elastic license debacle so this makes sense.
- paxys 2y agoRedis the project was essentially taken over by a company that had nothing to do with its development. Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) started Redis and developed it by himself from 2009 to 2015, gaining massive popularity and building a large community in the process. It was FOSS the entire time. A separate VC-backed company called Garantia Data used to make money by offering a hosted version of Redis. That company changed its name to Redis Labs in 2014 (and eventually just Redis), likely themselves violating antirez's Redis trademark at the time. They then hired antirez in 2015 and started officially sponsoring the project. From there began a slow transformation of Redis from a community run FOSS project to a proprietary locked down service. The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him and then finally kicked him out in 2020.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoexcellent summary (not kidding); thank you for it because i hadn't understood it until what you wrote
- seneca 2y ago> The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him How did that happen? He must have given/sold it to them, right? I remember him making an announcement that he was done with Redis and stepping away from involvement.
- reconditerose 2y agoThe only public record I've seen him talking about it was in https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/issues/544 https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/issues/544, where he mentioned having sold the copyright.
- paxys 2y agoImpossible to know as an outsider. They could have tricked him with false promises ("we'll take good care of the project and always put the community first, trust us"). Or he could have decided that the check was big enough and not really cared beyond that.
- cameronh90 2y agoPE/VC-backed bait-and-switch takeovers of "open source" projects have cost me a significant amount of time and money over the past few years. My rule of thumb now is that I now consider any project that has a pricing page OR requires copyright assignment/CLA to a for-profit company to be effectively proprietary and just using open source as a marketing technique. That doesn't mean I won't touch it, but like with proprietary software, I'll evaluate it against the risk that the price will probably be jacked up in the future.
- bluGill 2y agoThe important part is the contract the company signs for you. Contacts generally are enforceable in court and lawyers know of standard provisions for weird situations (what if the company goes bankrupt) QT has contracts with KDE around the open source version which gives KDE peace of mind. I use QT in a commercial product - we have some useful contract terms with QT that are not public and I can't talk about them.
- kstrauser 2y agoAlright gang, from now on, all community projects are named Sider.
- Pet_Ant 2y agoWell done, for those that missed it: "Sider" is "Redis" back-wards.
- jsploit 2y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607
- terminalbraid 2y ago> "companies do consider protecting their trademarks where their reputation is challenged" That's rich considering how they've been actively destroying their reputation by themselves.
- greenavocado 2y agoMy theory is Redis is trying to take control over all popular libraries that interface with it so it can break protocol level compatibility to force vendor lock-in
- bhouston 2y agoMy theory as well. I would almost bet on it. Redis is risking its reputation in order to solidify its revenue stream in the face is rising threats like Valkey, etc.
- skeledrew 2y agoWell it's either solidify revenue stream or likely go out of business. And what's a reputation if there's no business to attach it to?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mperham 2y agoThat would push everyone to valkey. They want to add proprietary features supported only by their server and client. That's the extend part of "embrace, extend, extinguish". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- gorjusborg 2y agoAll of this drama is already doing that.
- greenavocado 2y agoSome cash cows would remain stuck and they are ultimately the ones that would be milked for profit even if 95% of the community leaves
- papruapap 2y ago
- liveoneggs 2y ago8/10 uses of redis I have encountered in the world were people using it as a slower memcached. 1/10 are using it as a hope-for-the-best "queue" instead of rabbitmq, which is bullet-proof. The last 1/10 actually use it as a novel "database" but every one of those instances also has mysql or postgres, rendering it completely redundant. Redis itself was, for a while, a massive open security hole when the above people would put it on the open internet, where it would to quite useful to hackers as a free lua program runner.
- webstrand 2y agoIsn't it good for building and querying custom indexes? Doing that with mysql or postgres is very difficult or impossible depending on hosting solution. Or would you still prefer to build on top of memcached?
- liveoneggs 2y agoVIEWS and MATERIALIZED VIEWS probably are a better version of what you are talking about? If you are running slow queries and caching them into into a k:v store you can just do that with a TEMPORARY TABLE - sql databases are absurdly fast k:v stores. There are valid use cases for redis in its novel types and things but my comment was trying to express that seeing that usage, in my real life experience, has been rare.
- pokstad 2y agoValkey
- seabrookmx 2y agoIs there a mature valkey client for Rust? I'm willing to bet most people running Valkey, Dragonfly etc. on the server are still using the Redis clients.
- pokstad 2y agoJust fork the Rust client for Redis before any breaking changes were made.
- seabrookmx 2y agoI don't think there are any at the protocol level. At least not yet.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: Redis is trying to take over the all of the OSS Redis libraries https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607
- gpm 2y agoSeems like this was resolved with Redis Inc backing off prior to the HN post. From @mortensi roughly 4 hours prior to the post: https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecomment-2503578646 https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecommen... > Thanks everybody for the feedback. Speaking on behalf of Redis Inc., we want to find a way to collaborate to best support the community and our customers. The objective is to ensure predictable releases for a Rust client library, manage issues and escalations promptly, as well as support the best we have to offer without forking the library and competing with the client library project. After discussing this with @nihohit in this thread and based on the whole conversation, we want to work together. We have already identified initial areas from which we could start. > We have no issues keeping the project name as it is without a transition to Redis. We also have no problems with continuing to call this library "redis-rs". There is no intention to claim ownership of the client library's name, source code, or the crate’s package registry.
- tayo42 2y agoComments are all reasonable and there was no reason for the drama in the first place... Rust seems to just attract drama sometimes, the other client library owners dealt with the company without blowing up?
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago> Comments are all reasonable and there was no reason for the drama in the first place... As the author of that issue I'm assuming if there was drama, then it was up to me. However I did not intend on causing one, but to discuss this issue with active maintainers of the crate as well as to understand to which degree valkey support is needed by users for the crate. That this has created a discourse that goes beyond that was not intended.
- tayo42 2y ago> That this has created a discourse that goes beyond that was not intended. I think the thing started off fine and reasonable, but if you go down the comments it takes a turn towards cynical and antagonistic where people are assuming the worst. Which is basically the point of my comment, rust related things seems to have these weird blow ups. Some quotes > Redis team has the required Rust proficiency, nor that they actually care about maintaining this crate > Concepts of a plan eh? > Of course they don't have a list of missing features, it's not about features. It's about taking control of a ecosystem that's collasping under them because of widly percieved-as shady license rug pulling. In bold too > What you care about is your customers, not the community or any contributors. Then there's headlines like > Redis Inc seeks control over Rust Redis-rs library, talk of trademark concerns Its overall inflammatory, when the intention from the emails shown seem fine and the goals seem clear.
- svieira 2y agohttps://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecomment-2503578646 https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecommen... - looks to be mostly resolved at this point, with Redis Inc. simply going to step up its contributions to the open-source version without taking control. Thank you antirez, mitsuhiko, and mortensi for working to resolve this amicably!
- doctorpangloss 2y agoRedis Ltd. probably parent of Redis Inc. owns the trademark. It isn't complicated, they can go around and ask people to change the names of their stuff away from Redis. Is this in bad form? What does the guy have to do to convince you that he has to rename the library? It's tough cookies, but if he renames it, and the Redis Ltd. people fork the library and put the fork on crates.io under the redis name, that's what happens. The way it works just isn't whoever gets the name on crates.io first, irrespective of copyright. I'd think that if the situation were reversed - Random Guy On GitHub Complains About Distasteful Actor Taking Over His Trademark - you'd root for the guy no?
- SahAssar 2y agoredis-rs has been around since 2013, so before redis inc. was called anything related to redis (the were called Garantia data) or they hired the redis creator (in 2015) or bought the redis trademark (in 2018). That might not be legally relevant but it is certainly ethically relevant.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago> That might not be legally relevant but it is certainly ethically relevant. I don't know if it's ethically relevant. I'm sure there was someone named Matt Damon before the actor Matt Damon, and maybe that guy was even an actor, but I wouldn't say today's Matt Damon is ethically violating ancient history's Matt Damon. What is the right rule for abandonware? It can't be, whoever got there first. Anyway. I don't buy your timeline. Redis-rs comes after the name Redis, certainly, which these guys now own. It doesn't matter when these two events you picked out of a hat occurred.
- aurumque 2y agoThe real value of open source code is that it should be able to be fully decoupled from trademarks. Much like OpenTofu, we shouldn't be caring too much about what private entities are trying to do to disrupt the community. Fork the code, change the names, and move forward together. We don't need this noise. The code is already written and published. Consider the 'brand recognition' of such exciting tooling as: * fzf * tmux * ripgrep * exiftool * fdupes * etc.
- probablybetter 2y agoI have no need for Redis in my life. There is nothing unique it provides in 2024, and they have no special sauce I would consider getting hooked-on (locked into). I am trying to remember why their software became considered ubiquitous for caching and sessions, and I reckon many a framework is busy rectifying this choice, as we speak.
- breakfastduck 2y agoBecause its very stable, very fast and very well documented / supported.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PeterZaitsev 2y agoLets face it Redis Inc owns Redis trademark, same as it owned Redis software copyright and we should expect it will enforce it. The community took steps launching several Redis alternatives, including Valkey - the next step would be also to get rid of trademark in the connectors As there are number of vendors offering Redis compatible databases those days I think the best approach would be to come up with vendor neutral name for Redis protocol and when Redis, Valkey, DragonflyDB etc could be listed as supported products.