5 ms·

So glad this happened and is still going strong. RIP Redis (hopefully soon).

echelon 1y ago
Yes, making money is bad. Open source is only in service of the monopolies. Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. Screw the Redis authors and maintainers. Lesson to all DB startups: fair source your license. Put in anti-hyperscaler clauses into your licenses to preserve your ability to make money and be sustainable. You can let your customers have unlimited access to your code, but stamp out the ability for AWS or Google to offer managed versions. They need to pay you. Don't be Redis or Elasticsearch. For them it's too late. They went uber permissive and now their fate is sealed. They're hundred million dollar cash cows for the giants, and the main committers see none of that.
- sneak 1y ago
  No, nonfree licenses are bad. Nobody has any issue with people making money with free software. We have issue with people not respecting software freedoms. You seem to be intentionally conflating the two things. Why make source available at all if you are just going to release proprietary software? It’s open source cosplay at that point. Just make commercial proprietary software like a normal software company; don’t pretend you are open source just because your source code is readable on GitHub.
  - aloha2436 1y ago
    > Why make source available at all if you are just going to release proprietary software? Because there's years between one decision and the other, and in that time it turned out that because the software was open source they were structurally disadvantaged versus large cloud providers in being able to make money from it. It seems disingenuous to suggest that the open sourcing was in bad faith given it happened years and paradigms apart from the closed sourcing, even though I don't agree with the decision either.
    - growse 1y ago
      > It seems disingenuous to suggest that the open sourcing was in bad faith given it happened years and paradigms apart from the closed sourcing, even though I don't agree with the decision either. The problem here is that their actions are indistinguishable from an entity that is acting in bad faith. "Get loads of free labour, then claim ownership of it and try to monetize" is a business strategy.
- rvnx 1y ago
  I totally support antirez on this. He managed to exit with money for work that was beneficial to everyone and that stayed in the open, just as a separate fork. This is really fair. Redis had made my SRE life so much easier (in front were these horrors like memcached or Cassandra with ZK). If that means that the package is now named Valkey this is totally fine.
- motorest 1y ago
  > Yes, making money is bad. Open source is only in service of the monopolies. What a spin. Extortion following licensing rug pulls goes way beyond earning a living. Trying to blame victims by framing them as "monopolies" is somewhere between laughable and disingenuous. It's bold of you to make these claims in a time where everyone can verify both the licensing changes and how the whole developer community unanimously reacted to it. > Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. Screw the Redis authors and maintainers. If you pay attention, you will realize that all major Linux distros rushed to replace Redis with ValKey. Quite bold of you to claim that this licensing rug pull only affected villains. Enough with the nonsense. If you try to abuse your users and treat everyone as a fool, don't clutch your pearls when they just drop you without a second thought.
  - nothrabannosir 1y ago
    Are you referring to people who got something completely for free as "victims" because they didn't keep getting more things for free? It's an ironic take for a comment that uses words like "disingenuous" and "clutching pearls". Pick a lane: either emotive arguments are in, or out. Don't accuse someone of speaking nonsense in the same comment where you claim that ceasing to provide free updates to a free product is "abuse". It's one or the other.
    - motorest 1y ago
      > Are you referring to people who got something completely for free as "victims" (...) Anyone subjected to a bait-and-switch is a victim. It means nothing if the bait was free.
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      > Are you referring to people who got something completely for free as "victims" because they didn't keep getting more things for free? What about the third party dev who contributed to the code on the basis it was open source?
      - paulryanrogers 1y ago
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. No. Everyone deserves to, including AWS and the other hyperscalers. That is exactly what was decided by releasing it under the BSD license.
  - pas 1y ago
    and then with the new source available license a new decision was made, so for a little while AWS did not deserve to make money!? (after all when the old versions were released Antirez had no idea about how much AWS will make by running his better memcached! but, of course as Redis became a business with every new version they likely pondered this.) then apparently the community quickly found an Uno reverse card somewhere. (so the question has become moot.)
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  You are saying that like it is a bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, Valkey is a very healthy open source project with a wide range of companies and people contributing code to it and sponsoring development. None of these companies wield exclusive control over the project. And we all benefit from their work. And if I want, I can take their work and create a commercial product and try to sell it or make money of it. What's not to like there? I don't get the anti-capitalist stance here. If you want to contribute to redis, Redis Inc. will require you to sign a contributor license agreement: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md They'll be happy to take your work but the right to exploit it commercially is exclusive to them. That agreement (should you choose to sign it) gives them the right to take your contributions and re-license them under a proprietary license, or any license of their choosing. There's also no commitment that the code base will stay AGPL. That agreement gives them the right to do whatever. Agreements like that are very common with AGPL because it doesn't make much commercial sense to use that license without one. > Put in anti-hyperscaler clauses into your licenses to preserve your ability to make money and be sustainable. .. and permanently alienate the rest of the open source community from providing contributions to your project. That raises the question why you are open sourcing at all? Why would you cripple a community like that? Permissive licenses are successful because, well, they are permissive. It's why there are a lot of decades old OSS projects where the original developers and companies have long moved on, or in some cases, passed away. It doesn't matter. Because they have diverse communities that survive such things.
- CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
  The problem is: likely they would not have been successful (or as successful as they were) if they had chosen some not-free / not-really-open-source licence from the beginning. It's unclear to me what a really good option here is.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Your point is a bit moot if you consider that elasticsearch is built on top of an opensource project (lucene) for which they never gave any money. Also Antirez wasn't part of Redis for a significant amount of time. Bottom line: the company that own the brand of any open source project and receive money from support or features may not be constituted of the original authors nor is necessarily comprised of all the dev who have put a significant amount of work into it.
  - xorcist 1y ago
    While the general idea is right, maybe it's not the best example. Elastic did contribute quite a bit of code to Lucene to the point where it almost looked like a project of Elastic NV. It seems however the Apache Lucene project managed to stay untainted by it and is by any measure a very healthy and functioning open source project.
- BadBadJellyBean 1y ago
  I just don't like using a permissive open source license as a booster for your software and then changing it when others make money. Either start as a closed source/source available project or find another way to make money. This whole "but we wanted to do a cloud offering, it's not fair that AWS/Azure/GCE make one with our software and everyone is using theirs" is just so stupid to me. You wanted people to adopt your software. You used permissive licenses to convince people. People adopted your software probably because of the free nature of the software. Now you want to change that. Well that is just stupid. I think that is especially true for Redis. Redis is a good software. Many integrated it but it is not irreplaceble. The idea of a KV store is not that novel.

Yes, making money is bad. Open source is only in service of the monopolies. Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. Screw the Redis authors and maintainers. Lesson to all DB startups: fair source your license. Put in anti-hyperscaler clauses into your licenses to preserve your ability to make money and be sustainable. You can let your customers have unlimited access to your code, but stamp out the ability for AWS or Google to offer managed versions. They need to pay you. Don't be Redis or Elasticsearch. For them it's too late. They went uber permissive and now their fate is sealed. They're hundred million dollar cash cows for the giants, and the main committers see none of that.

sneak 1y ago
No, nonfree licenses are bad. Nobody has any issue with people making money with free software. We have issue with people not respecting software freedoms. You seem to be intentionally conflating the two things. Why make source available at all if you are just going to release proprietary software? It’s open source cosplay at that point. Just make commercial proprietary software like a normal software company; don’t pretend you are open source just because your source code is readable on GitHub.
- aloha2436 1y ago
  > Why make source available at all if you are just going to release proprietary software? Because there's years between one decision and the other, and in that time it turned out that because the software was open source they were structurally disadvantaged versus large cloud providers in being able to make money from it. It seems disingenuous to suggest that the open sourcing was in bad faith given it happened years and paradigms apart from the closed sourcing, even though I don't agree with the decision either.
  - growse 1y ago
    > It seems disingenuous to suggest that the open sourcing was in bad faith given it happened years and paradigms apart from the closed sourcing, even though I don't agree with the decision either. The problem here is that their actions are indistinguishable from an entity that is acting in bad faith. "Get loads of free labour, then claim ownership of it and try to monetize" is a business strategy.
rvnx 1y ago
I totally support antirez on this. He managed to exit with money for work that was beneficial to everyone and that stayed in the open, just as a separate fork. This is really fair. Redis had made my SRE life so much easier (in front were these horrors like memcached or Cassandra with ZK). If that means that the package is now named Valkey this is totally fine.
motorest 1y ago
> Yes, making money is bad. Open source is only in service of the monopolies. What a spin. Extortion following licensing rug pulls goes way beyond earning a living. Trying to blame victims by framing them as "monopolies" is somewhere between laughable and disingenuous. It's bold of you to make these claims in a time where everyone can verify both the licensing changes and how the whole developer community unanimously reacted to it. > Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. Screw the Redis authors and maintainers. If you pay attention, you will realize that all major Linux distros rushed to replace Redis with ValKey. Quite bold of you to claim that this licensing rug pull only affected villains. Enough with the nonsense. If you try to abuse your users and treat everyone as a fool, don't clutch your pearls when they just drop you without a second thought.
- nothrabannosir 1y ago
  Are you referring to people who got something completely for free as "victims" because they didn't keep getting more things for free? It's an ironic take for a comment that uses words like "disingenuous" and "clutching pearls". Pick a lane: either emotive arguments are in, or out. Don't accuse someone of speaking nonsense in the same comment where you claim that ceasing to provide free updates to a free product is "abuse". It's one or the other.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Are you referring to people who got something completely for free as "victims" (...) Anyone subjected to a bait-and-switch is a victim. It means nothing if the bait was free.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    > Are you referring to people who got something completely for free as "victims" because they didn't keep getting more things for free? What about the third party dev who contributed to the code on the basis it was open source?
    - paulryanrogers 1y ago
Aeolun 1y ago
> Only AWS and the hyperscalers deserve to make millions from Redis. No. Everyone deserves to, including AWS and the other hyperscalers. That is exactly what was decided by releasing it under the BSD license.
- pas 1y ago
  and then with the new source available license a new decision was made, so for a little while AWS did not deserve to make money!? (after all when the old versions were released Antirez had no idea about how much AWS will make by running his better memcached! but, of course as Redis became a business with every new version they likely pondered this.) then apparently the community quickly found an Uno reverse card somewhere. (so the question has become moot.)
jillesvangurp 1y ago
You are saying that like it is a bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, Valkey is a very healthy open source project with a wide range of companies and people contributing code to it and sponsoring development. None of these companies wield exclusive control over the project. And we all benefit from their work. And if I want, I can take their work and create a commercial product and try to sell it or make money of it. What's not to like there? I don't get the anti-capitalist stance here. If you want to contribute to redis, Redis Inc. will require you to sign a contributor license agreement: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md They'll be happy to take your work but the right to exploit it commercially is exclusive to them. That agreement (should you choose to sign it) gives them the right to take your contributions and re-license them under a proprietary license, or any license of their choosing. There's also no commitment that the code base will stay AGPL. That agreement gives them the right to do whatever. Agreements like that are very common with AGPL because it doesn't make much commercial sense to use that license without one. > Put in anti-hyperscaler clauses into your licenses to preserve your ability to make money and be sustainable. .. and permanently alienate the rest of the open source community from providing contributions to your project. That raises the question why you are open sourcing at all? Why would you cripple a community like that? Permissive licenses are successful because, well, they are permissive. It's why there are a lot of decades old OSS projects where the original developers and companies have long moved on, or in some cases, passed away. It doesn't matter. Because they have diverse communities that survive such things.
CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
The problem is: likely they would not have been successful (or as successful as they were) if they had chosen some not-free / not-really-open-source licence from the beginning. It's unclear to me what a really good option here is.
prmoustache 1y ago
Your point is a bit moot if you consider that elasticsearch is built on top of an opensource project (lucene) for which they never gave any money. Also Antirez wasn't part of Redis for a significant amount of time. Bottom line: the company that own the brand of any open source project and receive money from support or features may not be constituted of the original authors nor is necessarily comprised of all the dev who have put a significant amount of work into it.
- xorcist 1y ago
  While the general idea is right, maybe it's not the best example. Elastic did contribute quite a bit of code to Lucene to the point where it almost looked like a project of Elastic NV. It seems however the Apache Lucene project managed to stay untainted by it and is by any measure a very healthy and functioning open source project.
BadBadJellyBean 1y ago
I just don't like using a permissive open source license as a booster for your software and then changing it when others make money. Either start as a closed source/source available project or find another way to make money. This whole "but we wanted to do a cloud offering, it's not fair that AWS/Azure/GCE make one with our software and everyone is using theirs" is just so stupid to me. You wanted people to adopt your software. You used permissive licenses to convince people. People adopted your software probably because of the free nature of the software. Now you want to change that. Well that is just stupid. I think that is especially true for Redis. Redis is a good software. Many integrated it but it is not irreplaceble. The idea of a KV store is not that novel.