3 ms·

I'm sorry, but how is this a good answer? If you really only care about "two/three users in the world" and don't want users to worry about legal implications, w

by jchw 2y ago

I'm sorry, but how is this a good answer? If you really only care about "two/three users in the world" and don't want users to worry about legal implications, why not explicitly write that in the license? It doesn't matter how good your intentions are, in the long run, it's not you or Redis, inc. we have to trust, it's anyone who potentially inherits the rights of these licensed IPs, at which point the courts will not rule on what your feelings are of what the license was meant to do but instead what was actually written and agreed to. That's why an existing, well-understood and symmetrical copyright license is going to beat out weirdo "business" licenses any day, and why they will never be considered OSI-compliant, which is fine, because if we all really hated big tech they're already allergic to the AGPL anyway. I know I'm not going to score any points by disagreeing with you here of all places, but I genuinely wonder if you really do believe this or if you mostly just don't care to actually confront the reality. This whole thing could be a nothingburger forever, or, alternatively, Redis, Inc. could some day be acquired by Oracle. Absolutely no way for any of us to know for sure. Unfortunately, that leaves me with little other option but to stick to the forks.

jcgrillo 2y ago
> Redis, Inc. could some day be acquired by Oracle This is truly the nightmare scenario, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out when such a thing happens. Not saying specifically with these two companies, but so far these licenses aren't particularly tested, and it seems we just can't really know what will actually happen without running the experiment.
- stephenr 2y ago
  TBH oracle have been better stewards of MySQL since they bought Sun than Redis the company has been of Redis for the last five or so years.
  - jchw 2y ago
    I personally have wondered if Oracle's behavior with MySQL is partly motivated by the fact that if they try to rug-pull it will most likely just push all of the cloud providers over to MariaDB anyways, which has been doing just fine, and I think is already supported by Amazon RDS anyways. Ultimately I am totally fine with a fork-heavy ecosystem, the only thing I would erase if I could is the normalization of signing CLAs, as I think they make the normally-symmetrical prospect of contributing to open source projects highly asymmetrical, and the consequences are not always so obvious to people.
    - stephenr 2y ago
      MariaDB is one of the biggest ironies to me: it was started because people claimed Oracle was going to do Oracle things with it, and somehow make it not open any more. What actually happened is: - Oracle has just made MySQL better, and continues to release new tooling (e.g. mysql router) for it under the same license (gpl2). - MariaDB releases the bare minimum database engine under the GPL, and uses closed licenses for the tooling which is, to quote them: "an essential element to any production database environment".
      - jchw 2y ago
        I wouldn't really put too much weight into the marketing speak, MariaDB feels like the same MySQL offering that always existed, at least to me (and I do run it in production, albeit only on a small scale.) And MariaDB has done plenty of work that is available in the open source product: performance improvements, new storage engines and so on. The only thing that's surprising is that MySQL continued to do the same. I don't think what MariaDB is doing today is what everyone was really worried about Oracle doing. Rather, Oracle simply never did what everyone thought they would. Personally, I think MariaDB keeps them honest, and if MariaDB ceased to exist as a serious alternative there is a good chance the lawnmower would fire back up. Though who knows. Maybe Oracle is different. However, I would prefer not to waste the openness of my mind. I reckon if they thought they could pull the rug they would do so.
        stephenr 2y ago
        I wasn't suggesting it's the exact same scenario, but it definitely seems a little disingenuous to create a fork of something that you chose to sell, and complain (https://web.archive.org/web/20201003111459/https://www2.computerworld.com.au/article/457551/dead_database_walking_mysql_creator_why_future_belongs_mariadb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201003111459/https://www2.comp...) about it becoming "open core", only to then make everything you do a paid product with the one exception. That's before we get into his claims about maintaining drop-in compatibility "as long as MySQL has a larger user base than MariaDB".
    - 2y ago
necubi 2y ago
A cynical view is that it's not just 2-3 providers, its any competition to their cloud-hosting business. See for example the recent wordpress drama, which concerns a small competitor. SSPL and related licenses are ambiguous and scary enough to ward off anyone potentially competing with the copyright owner, and I doubt that's seen as a downside.
- collingreen 2y ago
  This is a really good example of why software with a license that is basically "this could hurt you but, like, trust me bro" isn't worth building with/extending/learning. It feels a LOT like a landmine waiting to detonate. Even if I'm doing completely non commercial work I never ever ever will want to productize in any way I'd rather build my skills and familiarity with something portable (and I don't want to have to remember when I can and can't safely use each part of my stack). Anything else is just asking for a future nightmare. The oracle and wordpress stuff recently are devastating. Can you imagine having to grind your entire company to a halt looking for anything that uses anything that uses anything that uses redis/java/whatever? I'm an engineer. I can't justify a fixed amount of upside for an unbounded downside if I ever get on some stranger's bad side for whatever reason.

by jchw 2y ago

jcgrillo 2y ago

> Redis, Inc. could some day be acquired by Oracle This is truly the nightmare scenario, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out when such a thing happens. Not saying specifically with these two companies, but so far these licenses aren't particularly tested, and it seems we just can't really know what will actually happen without running the experiment.

stephenr 2y ago
TBH oracle have been better stewards of MySQL since they bought Sun than Redis the company has been of Redis for the last five or so years.
- jchw 2y ago
  I personally have wondered if Oracle's behavior with MySQL is partly motivated by the fact that if they try to rug-pull it will most likely just push all of the cloud providers over to MariaDB anyways, which has been doing just fine, and I think is already supported by Amazon RDS anyways. Ultimately I am totally fine with a fork-heavy ecosystem, the only thing I would erase if I could is the normalization of signing CLAs, as I think they make the normally-symmetrical prospect of contributing to open source projects highly asymmetrical, and the consequences are not always so obvious to people.
  - stephenr 2y ago
    MariaDB is one of the biggest ironies to me: it was started because people claimed Oracle was going to do Oracle things with it, and somehow make it not open any more. What actually happened is: - Oracle has just made MySQL better, and continues to release new tooling (e.g. mysql router) for it under the same license (gpl2). - MariaDB releases the bare minimum database engine under the GPL, and uses closed licenses for the tooling which is, to quote them: "an essential element to any production database environment".
    - jchw 2y ago
      I wouldn't really put too much weight into the marketing speak, MariaDB feels like the same MySQL offering that always existed, at least to me (and I do run it in production, albeit only on a small scale.) And MariaDB has done plenty of work that is available in the open source product: performance improvements, new storage engines and so on. The only thing that's surprising is that MySQL continued to do the same. I don't think what MariaDB is doing today is what everyone was really worried about Oracle doing. Rather, Oracle simply never did what everyone thought they would. Personally, I think MariaDB keeps them honest, and if MariaDB ceased to exist as a serious alternative there is a good chance the lawnmower would fire back up. Though who knows. Maybe Oracle is different. However, I would prefer not to waste the openness of my mind. I reckon if they thought they could pull the rug they would do so.
      - stephenr 2y ago
        I wasn't suggesting it's the exact same scenario, but it definitely seems a little disingenuous to create a fork of something that you chose to sell, and complain (https://web.archive.org/web/20201003111459/https://www2.computerworld.com.au/article/457551/dead_database_walking_mysql_creator_why_future_belongs_mariadb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201003111459/https://www2.comp...) about it becoming "open core", only to then make everything you do a paid product with the one exception. That's before we get into his claims about maintaining drop-in compatibility "as long as MySQL has a larger user base than MariaDB".
  - 2y ago

necubi 2y ago

A cynical view is that it's not just 2-3 providers, its any competition to their cloud-hosting business. See for example the recent wordpress drama, which concerns a small competitor. SSPL and related licenses are ambiguous and scary enough to ward off anyone potentially competing with the copyright owner, and I doubt that's seen as a downside.

collingreen 2y ago
This is a really good example of why software with a license that is basically "this could hurt you but, like, trust me bro" isn't worth building with/extending/learning. It feels a LOT like a landmine waiting to detonate. Even if I'm doing completely non commercial work I never ever ever will want to productize in any way I'd rather build my skills and familiarity with something portable (and I don't want to have to remember when I can and can't safely use each part of my stack). Anything else is just asking for a future nightmare. The oracle and wordpress stuff recently are devastating. Can you imagine having to grind your entire company to a halt looking for anything that uses anything that uses anything that uses redis/java/whatever? I'm an engineer. I can't justify a fixed amount of upside for an unbounded downside if I ever get on some stranger's bad side for whatever reason.