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I contributed a minor (but imho still neat :p) improvement to Redis under its original license, and personally moved to using redict when the unexpected license

by c0l0 1y ago

I contributed a minor (but imho still neat :p) improvement to Redis under its original license, and personally moved to using redict when the unexpected license change to SSPL was announced - and I was feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase. (Had they switched to AGPL right away, I'd have been perfectly fine with that change from a moral perspective, ftr.) I have a great deal of respect for antirez and recgnize him as a kind and benevolent member of the FOSS community, but no matter what Redis, Inc. announced or does, they have lost my trust for good, and I will continue to use Redis forks for as long as they exist.

homebrewer 1y ago
The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull, so you should have expected it instead of feeling betrayed. I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 1y ago
  [dead]
- echelon 1y ago
  All advantage accrues to hyperscaler "managed" versions. That's so much more fucked than a rug pull. Amazon gets to make millions off of the thing you built. "Equitable source" licenses with MAU / ARR limits, hyperscaler resale limits, and AGPL-like "entire stack must be open" clauses is the way to go. It's a "fuck you" to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in particular and leaves you untouched. Open source today is hyperscaler serfdom. Very few orgs are running Redis on bare metal, and a equitable source license can be made to always support the bare metal case.
  - tough 1y ago
    It's sad as an open source lover how money fucks it all
    - echelon 1y ago
      If you open source something, the rich trillion dollar companies just steal it. If you're okay with that, that's cool. But they'll profit off of your work and labor. And the worst part is that at scale, the advantages of the sum total of open source is used to compete with you and put price pressure on your salary and career options. To rephrase that, the hyperscalers are in a position to leverage open source to take advantage of market opportunities you cannot, and they can use that to compete with your business or competing businesses that might otherwise pay you better. Open source needs anti-Google/Amazon/Microsoft clauses.
      - tough 1y ago
        doesn't the Affero GPL v3 cover this? have seen some projects use it, I think it limits the server run parts of the software etc
        echelon 1y ago
        Yes, it does! The "problem" with AGPL3 is that it has no carve-out for companies smaller than Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. If you use AGPL, you have to open source your entire stack. Not everyone thinks infectious copyleft / free software is a problem. But it will mean that if you use AGPL3, every part of your stack has to be open. That doesn't work for everyone. This is why "equitable source" / "fair source" is gaining traction. You can use a license like Apache and add in clauses with MAU/ARR/Hyperscaler limits that allows practically everyone else to use your software.
        papashell 1y ago
        AGPL doesn’t require you to open source the entire stack. Only the changes you made to the AGPL software if you interact with over a network AGPL does not and has not prevented hyperscalers from creating managed services for software licensed with it That’s why mongo created the server side public license, which does require open sourcing the entire stack. MongoDB was AGPL before that
- pcthrowaway 1y ago
  You do realize the owners of the copyright can relicense it under any terms they want, even if it's a copyleft license like GPL, right?
  - arghwhat 1y ago
    Unless a CLA transfers copyright to the project owner, the copyright owners are every historical contributor to the project. Each contribution is owned by the contributor alone and they alone are able to grant rights to it. A CLA often tries to mitigate this by making contributors give the project owners special rights at the time of contribution. (Note that even if relicensed, this itself can never revoke licenses granted for prior versions unless that license specifically had revocation written into it.)
    - pcthrowaway 1y ago
      Yes, a project can only be relicensed if a CLA assigning licensing rights (not ownership) is signed by all contributors, or if all code is owned by the entity relicensing it. Whether it's under a copyleft license, a permissive license, or even a proprietary license is irrelevant.
- dharmab 1y ago
  There are good legal reasons to avoid the GPL; there are open legal questions about whether the GPL and its variants are enforceable.
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    your comment is logically defective if that's your "good legal reason" to avoid the GPL, then it's just as much a "good legal reason" not to open source your work at all: if the GPL is not enforceable, that would mean you have used a non-copyleft license, which according to you is the thing you want to avoid for good legal reasons.
    - dharmab 1y ago
      I didn't say you should avoid non-copyleft licenses? Indeed, all of my own OSS projects are non-copyleft.
      - fsckboy 1y ago
        loosely speaking: you said "avoid gpl". reason? "unenforceable". eliminating gpl from consideration, thus you advocate non-copyleft licenses instead. with me so far? but gpl's "unenforceability" could only mean it turns into a non-copyleft license, one which you say one should not use, so if one shouldn't use gpl because in reality it is a non-copyleft license, then you must be against non-copyleft licenses. just to state it again for clarity: "don't use gpl because copyleft is unenforceable so gpl is just MIT underneath, and I repeat, don't use it" is a recommendation not to use MIT license.
        dharmab 1y ago
        Please link to where I said not to use copyleft licenses. Check the usernames carefully. Note that I don't agree that GPL and MIT are equivalent, or that GPL becomes a non-copyleft open source license if not enforceable. IANAL but it might revert to the regular copyright law for wherever you publish software, not an open source license.
- KZerda 1y ago
  A copyleft license like the AGPL didn't stop MongoDB from rugpulling. I'd argue that the AGPL, and the copyright assignment that tends to go with it, makes it easier to rugpull because forking entities would be at an extreme disadvantage in keeping the lights on compared to the closed-sourcing company. A non-copyleft license, on the other hand, makes it much easier for a forking company to cover all the same niches as the original company, making a rugpull that much more difficult.
  - NewsaHackO 1y ago
    ? How did MongoDB rug pull?
    - kmeisthax 1y ago
      MongoDB used to be AGPLv3. A year after their IPO they realized "aww shit, Wall Street wants continuous growth, being profitable isn't enough" and decided to migrate to a completely new license, SSPL, that's designed to put everything surrounding the software in scope of the copyleft. The implication being that if Amazon were to offer MongoDB they'd also have to release all of AWS RDS[0] as a thing you could just download and use. The community did not like this one bit, but MongoDB doesn't need to care about what the community thinks because they had CLA'd all their contributors. That is, if you wanted something in MongoDB upstream, you had to give MongoDB full copyright ownership over the software. Which exempts them from copyleft[1]. One of the critical parts of copyleft is the "no further restrictions" rule; otherwise copyleft is just proprietary with extra steps. [0] I don't remember if they were hosting MongoDB as part of RDS or something else. [1] As we've seen with the Neo4J lawsuit, copyright licenses cannot tie the hands of the copyright owner. The only way for copyleft to work is to create a Mexican standoff of contributors who will sue each other to death if any one of them decides to relicense without unanimous community consensus.
      - _msw_ 1y ago
        AWS never offered the AGPLv3 licensed version of the MongoDB server as part of any managed service. There were large cloud providers in China that _did_ offer MongoDB as a service. They also provided the corresponding source code [1]. Despite signs that they were complying with the obligations of the license, they had the SSPL drafted anyway. Because once it was clear that software as a service was a compelling model, it was no longer appealing to give everyone the permissions needed to offer the software as part of a service (as AGPLv3 was always designed to do). Changing the license seemingly worked, as a partnership was eventually announced [2]. [1] https://github.com/Tencent/CMONGO https://github.com/Tencent/CMONGO [2] https://www.mongodb.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/tencent-cloud-and-mongodb-launch-global-cloud-partnership https://www.mongodb.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/tenc...
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull That’s an exaggeration. The vast majority of permissively licensed projects have never “rug pulled” and never will. It might be one possible reason to choose such a license but it’s very far from the only one.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Microsoft made one called Garnet, I wouldn't say its a fork though, its basically compatible with Redis and implemented mostly in C#. It supports the RESP wire protocol from Redis for ease of compatibility. https://github.com/microsoft/garnet https://github.com/microsoft/garnet
- cess11 1y ago
  You do see how that's even worse, right?
  - jayofdoom 1y ago
    I don't see how it's worse? https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/blob/main/LICENSE It's MIT licensed?
    - Alupis 1y ago
      Microsoft has a habit of "fake" open source. Particularly on Github. By "fake", I mean Microsoft largely treats their Open Source codebases like they are closed-source, in-house proprietary codebases that they happen to let members of the public look at. They'll accept a PR once in a while, but mostly it appears Issues and PR's are used as a free alternative to UserVoice. Every decision is made behind closed doors (probably a MS Teams call actually), and you'll notice how top-heavy their staff is on these projects (half a dozen employees with "Manager" in their title on any given repo). Beggars can't be choosers, and I'm glad they are dipping their toes into the FOSS water... but I don't really get FOSS vibes from their projects on Github.
      - neonsunset 1y ago
        Garnet has a discord server and has been actively accepting community PRs, so I don’t know what kind of nonsense you are on about. What is it with .NET that compels you to lie? Also FOSS and open contribution are different things, as sibling comment notes.
weinzierl 1y ago
I think we need to get back to state where we take software licenses serious in letter and in spirit. The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal Yes, of course. > and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for. Er, no, that's an unsubstantiated leap.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    Not sure why Redis is blamed for the "rug pull". They didn't relicense the old versions. They just said "sorry guys, we don't want to support this project under those terms anymore". They are under no obligation to do that, legal or moral. Don't like it? No problem, fork it and maintain it yourself (as many did). But don't demand of others to continue to support the project under those terms if they do not want to. This is FOSS working as intended. All those people that contributed, did so to the FOSS version. Their contributions live on in all the forks, both FOSS and proprietary (by Amazon & co., and Redis before today). So not sure where "betrayal" supposedly happened. Maybe when Amazon used their contributions too?
- md3911027514 1y ago
  I mean isn't lying bad? They literally made public statements saying they "will always remain BSD." https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/ https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/
  - tough 1y ago
    People and companies are allowed to change opinions, why would anyone blame Redis or Elastic instead of Amazon for taking it all?
    - 1y ago
antirez 1y ago
Anyway: thanks for having contributed to Redis :)
- revskill 1y ago
  Not quite. Company can easily change license at any time. No string attached.
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    I believe AGPL + time + contributors makes that very difficult. It also means that if you have a commercial product that uses Redis you need to open source your stuff though, so not net better imu. Please correct me if I am wrong.
    - gkbrk 1y ago
      Nope, looks like they still require a CLA for code contributions, which means they can release it under whatever license they want. https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md
      - osigurdson 1y ago
        Hmmm. Yes, agree.
    - eikenberry 1y ago
      It all depends on if they have a CLA or not. Have CLA == continued easy rug pull, No CLA == rug pull gets harder over time.
    - cdelsolar 1y ago
      No, it doesn’t mean you need to open source your commercial product if it uses Redis. AGPLV3 doesn’t work like that. You need to open source your changes to Redis if you make any, and if your product is distributed through a network.
elAhmo 1y ago
Likewise. Respect for antirez and all of that he is doing, but his hiring back feels like just trying to lure developers back after ridiculous move by the Redis corporation. Given there are viable alternatives out there, I see no reason why someone should invest any time in Redis (we are using Valkey as a replacement).
- antirez 1y ago
  Nothing wrong in checking other alternatives, but Redis the company didn't call me to rejoin. I approached them to do something like an evangelist and bring back some kind of community vision inside. Then... if you can code, you end coding often times, and instead of doing the evangelist I wrote the Vector Set data type :D Just to clarify that me rejoining was not some kind of "winning back the community plan". I wrote at large about all that, even clearly stating that even the paycheck is modest (to avoid that kind of conflict of interest of the economical motivation).
- fastball 1y ago
  I use Redis in basically every project, and this "ridiculous" move had literally zero impact on my usage of Redis, so maybe that is a bit hyperbolic. SSPL is not as bad as the OSS community pretends it is (unless you're a hyperscaler).
lolinder 1y ago
Yeah, we just did this whole ride with Elastic [0]: company changes the license out from under the community, community revolts, company gives up and changes it back. Both companies even pulled the same "it worked" excuse ("while it was painful, it worked", "this achieved our goal"). Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later and both companies have shown themselves to be untrustworthy stewards. They came groveling back when it turned out that community goodwill really did matter after all, but this is definitely a "fool me twice, shame on me" situation. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  This seems to be accelerating. I guess the era of lighting investment money on fire and pretending that the flames equal success is coming to an end. Unless of course you are an AI startup.
- jaapz 1y ago
  Interestingly their CEO states that AWS an Google forking redis and maintaining it separately was their "goal" all along. Because fragmentation is apparently good?
  - badlucklottery 1y ago
    > Because fragmentation is apparently good? I think it's more "they are no longer piggybacking off our work for free". I also think what they actually wanted was that plus "...and they paid us".
    - tedivm 1y ago
      The reason the ValKey fork happened so fast is that AWS was already sponsoring developers for the open source redis project.
      - SweetLlamaMyth 1y ago
bobsoap 1y ago
I agree. That ship has sailed, at least for the foreseeable future. We switched to Valkey and it's our choice for a couple upcoming projects as well. To switch back now after this whole ordeal would make no sense at all.
tasuki 1y ago
> contributed a minor improvement to Redis under its original license [...] feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase How does this work legally? You write some code, contribute it under a certain license... and... a company can just re-license your code under any license they like?
- lolinder 1y ago
  They require a Contributor License Agreement [0] whereby you grant them the copyright to your contribution. Which means they become the ultimate decision-maker for all contributions and can relicense however and whenever they wish. [0] https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-license-agreement/ https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-...
  - colordrops 1y ago
    A contributor license agreement that does anything besides put your code under the project's standard OSS license is a huge red flag.
    - assassinator42 1y ago
      I took a bit of umbrage with LineageOS for this. CyanogenMod required a CLA to assign them copyright to Cyanogen Inc, only for them to basically kill the project. They forked it as LineageOS only to still require a CLA.
  - porker 1y ago
    IMO the anger people direct at source available licences would be better directed at CLAs. They're what hands the power away. Don't contribute to projects with CLAs people without reading them carefully and understanding what can happen! Then you won't be surprised if a project is relicensed because you know you signed an agreement to let them do that.
  - tasuki 1y ago
    Mhm, so all the contributors to Redis ever have signed the Contributor License Agreement? It's certainly possible, but I'd be a little surprised.
andix 1y ago
If you contributed before the license change/fork, you've also contributed to valkey and redict ;)
gigatexal 1y ago
I get the feeling. I also live in the real world and know that nobody except for a few (most notably RedHat) have figured out how to make sustainable money in open source. These closed licenses didn’t come out of nowhere. They came in response to places like AWS using the open source license to make a mint with a project — and doing so legally (it’s there in the license to do so) — but then the project suffers. So the license change is done to prevent that so the project — ostensibly — can survive. It makes sense. And so does wanting to live up to the promises of open source. It’s a tough situation for sure.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jeswin 1y ago
If anyone betrayed the spirit of Open Source, it is those who were trying to siphon off the entire commericial value of these projects while contributing little back to the project. Companies have to pay people to work on it. Hell, they are even entitled to profit from it. A world with commerically viable Open Source is way better than without it. Ditching OSS companies for trying to survive 90% of revenues going to $1T cloud vendors is counter productive.
maxloh 1y ago
I am wondering why did you choose Redict over Valkey? The latter seems to be more popular.
microflash 1y ago
Due to license rug pull, I started an org wide movement from Redis to Valkey early this year and now there’s no turning back. It also does not help Redis that Valkey is cheaper offering by AWS (at least through Elasticache).
Snakes3727 1y ago
I contributed heavily to a project during its early days and spent almost 2.5 years helping it grow. For awhile i was one of the most active contributors. Then there was talk of turning the project into an actual business, and myself and a few of the original contributers were offered extremely poor paying jobs. That no one took. Then they got a CEO, investors and we were basically forced out of the project unless we joined the company. I distinctly remember being in a call where we were told they would be relicensing it eventually and launching a SaaS. To protect our work from being used by large companies. I laughed and pointed out the irony in that call that you were doing the same thing. After that they changed their policy such they do not accept outside PR's. It has killed any interest in supporting open source projects outside personal stuff.
- jjmarr 1y ago
  If you're the most active contributor, you could've just forked it yourself, launched it as a SaaS, and been the CEO.
  - your_challenger 1y ago
    Not everyone wants to be a CEO. Some people just wanna write some good code and contribute to the world.
  - Snakes3727 1y ago
    I just wanted to make a tool to help developers. Then when the SaaS launched they instead focused on adding $$$ features instead of fixing bugs, and started heavily pushing their SaaS anytime you used the tool. They ended up switching to a terrible model with a previous release where if you were a business or in anyway making money you now needed to pay for licenses and it was comically expensive. The reality is I could have forked it but I don't have the time and patience to deal with everything that comes from a massive project.
- jamespo 1y ago
  Come on, at least give us a hint what it is!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
spyc 1y ago
Lost trust for sure. Who knows if Redis would be AGPL now if Valkey did not exist.

by c0l0 1y ago

homebrewer 1y ago

The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull, so you should have expected it instead of feeling betrayed. I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.

kjrfghslkdjfl 1y ago
[dead]
echelon 1y ago
All advantage accrues to hyperscaler "managed" versions. That's so much more fucked than a rug pull. Amazon gets to make millions off of the thing you built. "Equitable source" licenses with MAU / ARR limits, hyperscaler resale limits, and AGPL-like "entire stack must be open" clauses is the way to go. It's a "fuck you" to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in particular and leaves you untouched. Open source today is hyperscaler serfdom. Very few orgs are running Redis on bare metal, and a equitable source license can be made to always support the bare metal case.
- tough 1y ago
  It's sad as an open source lover how money fucks it all
  - echelon 1y ago
    If you open source something, the rich trillion dollar companies just steal it. If you're okay with that, that's cool. But they'll profit off of your work and labor. And the worst part is that at scale, the advantages of the sum total of open source is used to compete with you and put price pressure on your salary and career options. To rephrase that, the hyperscalers are in a position to leverage open source to take advantage of market opportunities you cannot, and they can use that to compete with your business or competing businesses that might otherwise pay you better. Open source needs anti-Google/Amazon/Microsoft clauses.
    - tough 1y ago
      doesn't the Affero GPL v3 cover this? have seen some projects use it, I think it limits the server run parts of the software etc
      - echelon 1y ago
        Yes, it does! The "problem" with AGPL3 is that it has no carve-out for companies smaller than Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. If you use AGPL, you have to open source your entire stack. Not everyone thinks infectious copyleft / free software is a problem. But it will mean that if you use AGPL3, every part of your stack has to be open. That doesn't work for everyone. This is why "equitable source" / "fair source" is gaining traction. You can use a license like Apache and add in clauses with MAU/ARR/Hyperscaler limits that allows practically everyone else to use your software.
        papashell 1y ago
        AGPL doesn’t require you to open source the entire stack. Only the changes you made to the AGPL software if you interact with over a network AGPL does not and has not prevented hyperscalers from creating managed services for software licensed with it That’s why mongo created the server side public license, which does require open sourcing the entire stack. MongoDB was AGPL before that
pcthrowaway 1y ago
You do realize the owners of the copyright can relicense it under any terms they want, even if it's a copyleft license like GPL, right?
- arghwhat 1y ago
  Unless a CLA transfers copyright to the project owner, the copyright owners are every historical contributor to the project. Each contribution is owned by the contributor alone and they alone are able to grant rights to it. A CLA often tries to mitigate this by making contributors give the project owners special rights at the time of contribution. (Note that even if relicensed, this itself can never revoke licenses granted for prior versions unless that license specifically had revocation written into it.)
  - pcthrowaway 1y ago
    Yes, a project can only be relicensed if a CLA assigning licensing rights (not ownership) is signed by all contributors, or if all code is owned by the entity relicensing it. Whether it's under a copyleft license, a permissive license, or even a proprietary license is irrelevant.
dharmab 1y ago
There are good legal reasons to avoid the GPL; there are open legal questions about whether the GPL and its variants are enforceable.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  your comment is logically defective if that's your "good legal reason" to avoid the GPL, then it's just as much a "good legal reason" not to open source your work at all: if the GPL is not enforceable, that would mean you have used a non-copyleft license, which according to you is the thing you want to avoid for good legal reasons.
  - dharmab 1y ago
    I didn't say you should avoid non-copyleft licenses? Indeed, all of my own OSS projects are non-copyleft.
    - fsckboy 1y ago
      loosely speaking: you said "avoid gpl". reason? "unenforceable". eliminating gpl from consideration, thus you advocate non-copyleft licenses instead. with me so far? but gpl's "unenforceability" could only mean it turns into a non-copyleft license, one which you say one should not use, so if one shouldn't use gpl because in reality it is a non-copyleft license, then you must be against non-copyleft licenses. just to state it again for clarity: "don't use gpl because copyleft is unenforceable so gpl is just MIT underneath, and I repeat, don't use it" is a recommendation not to use MIT license.
      - dharmab 1y ago
        Please link to where I said not to use copyleft licenses. Check the usernames carefully. Note that I don't agree that GPL and MIT are equivalent, or that GPL becomes a non-copyleft open source license if not enforceable. IANAL but it might revert to the regular copyright law for wherever you publish software, not an open source license.
KZerda 1y ago
A copyleft license like the AGPL didn't stop MongoDB from rugpulling. I'd argue that the AGPL, and the copyright assignment that tends to go with it, makes it easier to rugpull because forking entities would be at an extreme disadvantage in keeping the lights on compared to the closed-sourcing company. A non-copyleft license, on the other hand, makes it much easier for a forking company to cover all the same niches as the original company, making a rugpull that much more difficult.
- NewsaHackO 1y ago
  ? How did MongoDB rug pull?
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    MongoDB used to be AGPLv3. A year after their IPO they realized "aww shit, Wall Street wants continuous growth, being profitable isn't enough" and decided to migrate to a completely new license, SSPL, that's designed to put everything surrounding the software in scope of the copyleft. The implication being that if Amazon were to offer MongoDB they'd also have to release all of AWS RDS[0] as a thing you could just download and use. The community did not like this one bit, but MongoDB doesn't need to care about what the community thinks because they had CLA'd all their contributors. That is, if you wanted something in MongoDB upstream, you had to give MongoDB full copyright ownership over the software. Which exempts them from copyleft[1]. One of the critical parts of copyleft is the "no further restrictions" rule; otherwise copyleft is just proprietary with extra steps. [0] I don't remember if they were hosting MongoDB as part of RDS or something else. [1] As we've seen with the Neo4J lawsuit, copyright licenses cannot tie the hands of the copyright owner. The only way for copyleft to work is to create a Mexican standoff of contributors who will sue each other to death if any one of them decides to relicense without unanimous community consensus.
    - _msw_ 1y ago
      AWS never offered the AGPLv3 licensed version of the MongoDB server as part of any managed service. There were large cloud providers in China that _did_ offer MongoDB as a service. They also provided the corresponding source code [1]. Despite signs that they were complying with the obligations of the license, they had the SSPL drafted anyway. Because once it was clear that software as a service was a compelling model, it was no longer appealing to give everyone the permissions needed to offer the software as part of a service (as AGPLv3 was always designed to do). Changing the license seemingly worked, as a partnership was eventually announced [2]. [1] https://github.com/Tencent/CMONGO https://github.com/Tencent/CMONGO [2] https://www.mongodb.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/tencent-cloud-and-mongodb-launch-global-cloud-partnership https://www.mongodb.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/tenc...
School-Cotton 1y ago
> The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull That’s an exaggeration. The vast majority of permissively licensed projects have never “rug pulled” and never will. It might be one possible reason to choose such a license but it’s very far from the only one.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Microsoft made one called Garnet, I wouldn't say its a fork though, its basically compatible with Redis and implemented mostly in C#. It supports the RESP wire protocol from Redis for ease of compatibility. https://github.com/microsoft/garnet https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

cess11 1y ago
You do see how that's even worse, right?
- jayofdoom 1y ago
  I don't see how it's worse? https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/blob/main/LICENSE It's MIT licensed?
  - Alupis 1y ago
    Microsoft has a habit of "fake" open source. Particularly on Github. By "fake", I mean Microsoft largely treats their Open Source codebases like they are closed-source, in-house proprietary codebases that they happen to let members of the public look at. They'll accept a PR once in a while, but mostly it appears Issues and PR's are used as a free alternative to UserVoice. Every decision is made behind closed doors (probably a MS Teams call actually), and you'll notice how top-heavy their staff is on these projects (half a dozen employees with "Manager" in their title on any given repo). Beggars can't be choosers, and I'm glad they are dipping their toes into the FOSS water... but I don't really get FOSS vibes from their projects on Github.
    - neonsunset 1y ago
      Garnet has a discord server and has been actively accepting community PRs, so I don’t know what kind of nonsense you are on about. What is it with .NET that compels you to lie? Also FOSS and open contribution are different things, as sibling comment notes.

weinzierl 1y ago

I think we need to get back to state where we take software licenses serious in letter and in spirit. The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal Yes, of course. > and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for. Er, no, that's an unsubstantiated leap.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  Not sure why Redis is blamed for the "rug pull". They didn't relicense the old versions. They just said "sorry guys, we don't want to support this project under those terms anymore". They are under no obligation to do that, legal or moral. Don't like it? No problem, fork it and maintain it yourself (as many did). But don't demand of others to continue to support the project under those terms if they do not want to. This is FOSS working as intended. All those people that contributed, did so to the FOSS version. Their contributions live on in all the forks, both FOSS and proprietary (by Amazon & co., and Redis before today). So not sure where "betrayal" supposedly happened. Maybe when Amazon used their contributions too?
md3911027514 1y ago
I mean isn't lying bad? They literally made public statements saying they "will always remain BSD." https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/ https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/
- tough 1y ago
  People and companies are allowed to change opinions, why would anyone blame Redis or Elastic instead of Amazon for taking it all?
  - 1y ago

antirez 1y ago

Anyway: thanks for having contributed to Redis :)

revskill 1y ago
Not quite. Company can easily change license at any time. No string attached.
- osigurdson 1y ago
  I believe AGPL + time + contributors makes that very difficult. It also means that if you have a commercial product that uses Redis you need to open source your stuff though, so not net better imu. Please correct me if I am wrong.
  - gkbrk 1y ago
    Nope, looks like they still require a CLA for code contributions, which means they can release it under whatever license they want. https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md
    - osigurdson 1y ago
      Hmmm. Yes, agree.
  - eikenberry 1y ago
    It all depends on if they have a CLA or not. Have CLA == continued easy rug pull, No CLA == rug pull gets harder over time.
  - cdelsolar 1y ago
    No, it doesn’t mean you need to open source your commercial product if it uses Redis. AGPLV3 doesn’t work like that. You need to open source your changes to Redis if you make any, and if your product is distributed through a network.

elAhmo 1y ago

Likewise. Respect for antirez and all of that he is doing, but his hiring back feels like just trying to lure developers back after ridiculous move by the Redis corporation. Given there are viable alternatives out there, I see no reason why someone should invest any time in Redis (we are using Valkey as a replacement).

antirez 1y ago
Nothing wrong in checking other alternatives, but Redis the company didn't call me to rejoin. I approached them to do something like an evangelist and bring back some kind of community vision inside. Then... if you can code, you end coding often times, and instead of doing the evangelist I wrote the Vector Set data type :D Just to clarify that me rejoining was not some kind of "winning back the community plan". I wrote at large about all that, even clearly stating that even the paycheck is modest (to avoid that kind of conflict of interest of the economical motivation).
fastball 1y ago
I use Redis in basically every project, and this "ridiculous" move had literally zero impact on my usage of Redis, so maybe that is a bit hyperbolic. SSPL is not as bad as the OSS community pretends it is (unless you're a hyperscaler).

lolinder 1y ago

Yeah, we just did this whole ride with Elastic [0]: company changes the license out from under the community, community revolts, company gives up and changes it back. Both companies even pulled the same "it worked" excuse ("while it was painful, it worked", "this achieved our goal"). Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later and both companies have shown themselves to be untrustworthy stewards. They came groveling back when it turned out that community goodwill really did matter after all, but this is definitely a "fool me twice, shame on me" situation. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797

citizenpaul 1y ago
This seems to be accelerating. I guess the era of lighting investment money on fire and pretending that the flames equal success is coming to an end. Unless of course you are an AI startup.
jaapz 1y ago
Interestingly their CEO states that AWS an Google forking redis and maintaining it separately was their "goal" all along. Because fragmentation is apparently good?
- badlucklottery 1y ago
  > Because fragmentation is apparently good? I think it's more "they are no longer piggybacking off our work for free". I also think what they actually wanted was that plus "...and they paid us".
  - tedivm 1y ago
    The reason the ValKey fork happened so fast is that AWS was already sponsoring developers for the open source redis project.
    - SweetLlamaMyth 1y ago

bobsoap 1y ago

I agree. That ship has sailed, at least for the foreseeable future. We switched to Valkey and it's our choice for a couple upcoming projects as well. To switch back now after this whole ordeal would make no sense at all.

tasuki 1y ago

> contributed a minor improvement to Redis under its original license [...] feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase How does this work legally? You write some code, contribute it under a certain license... and... a company can just re-license your code under any license they like?

lolinder 1y ago
They require a Contributor License Agreement [0] whereby you grant them the copyright to your contribution. Which means they become the ultimate decision-maker for all contributions and can relicense however and whenever they wish. [0] https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-license-agreement/ https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-...
- colordrops 1y ago
  A contributor license agreement that does anything besides put your code under the project's standard OSS license is a huge red flag.
  - assassinator42 1y ago
    I took a bit of umbrage with LineageOS for this. CyanogenMod required a CLA to assign them copyright to Cyanogen Inc, only for them to basically kill the project. They forked it as LineageOS only to still require a CLA.
- porker 1y ago
  IMO the anger people direct at source available licences would be better directed at CLAs. They're what hands the power away. Don't contribute to projects with CLAs people without reading them carefully and understanding what can happen! Then you won't be surprised if a project is relicensed because you know you signed an agreement to let them do that.
- tasuki 1y ago
  Mhm, so all the contributors to Redis ever have signed the Contributor License Agreement? It's certainly possible, but I'd be a little surprised.

andix 1y ago

If you contributed before the license change/fork, you've also contributed to valkey and redict ;)

gigatexal 1y ago

I get the feeling. I also live in the real world and know that nobody except for a few (most notably RedHat) have figured out how to make sustainable money in open source. These closed licenses didn’t come out of nowhere. They came in response to places like AWS using the open source license to make a mint with a project — and doing so legally (it’s there in the license to do so) — but then the project suffers. So the license change is done to prevent that so the project — ostensibly — can survive. It makes sense. And so does wanting to live up to the promises of open source. It’s a tough situation for sure.

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jeswin 1y ago

If anyone betrayed the spirit of Open Source, it is those who were trying to siphon off the entire commericial value of these projects while contributing little back to the project. Companies have to pay people to work on it. Hell, they are even entitled to profit from it. A world with commerically viable Open Source is way better than without it. Ditching OSS companies for trying to survive 90% of revenues going to $1T cloud vendors is counter productive.

maxloh 1y ago

I am wondering why did you choose Redict over Valkey? The latter seems to be more popular.

microflash 1y ago

Due to license rug pull, I started an org wide movement from Redis to Valkey early this year and now there’s no turning back. It also does not help Redis that Valkey is cheaper offering by AWS (at least through Elasticache).

Snakes3727 1y ago

I contributed heavily to a project during its early days and spent almost 2.5 years helping it grow. For awhile i was one of the most active contributors. Then there was talk of turning the project into an actual business, and myself and a few of the original contributers were offered extremely poor paying jobs. That no one took. Then they got a CEO, investors and we were basically forced out of the project unless we joined the company. I distinctly remember being in a call where we were told they would be relicensing it eventually and launching a SaaS. To protect our work from being used by large companies. I laughed and pointed out the irony in that call that you were doing the same thing. After that they changed their policy such they do not accept outside PR's. It has killed any interest in supporting open source projects outside personal stuff.

jjmarr 1y ago
If you're the most active contributor, you could've just forked it yourself, launched it as a SaaS, and been the CEO.
- your_challenger 1y ago
  Not everyone wants to be a CEO. Some people just wanna write some good code and contribute to the world.
- Snakes3727 1y ago
  I just wanted to make a tool to help developers. Then when the SaaS launched they instead focused on adding $$$ features instead of fixing bugs, and started heavily pushing their SaaS anytime you used the tool. They ended up switching to a terrible model with a previous release where if you were a business or in anyway making money you now needed to pay for licenses and it was comically expensive. The reality is I could have forked it but I don't have the time and patience to deal with everything that comes from a massive project.
jamespo 1y ago
Come on, at least give us a hint what it is!

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spyc 1y ago

Lost trust for sure. Who knows if Redis would be AGPL now if Valkey did not exist.