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Didn't antirez announce Redis was going (actual) open source again? https://antirez.com/news/151 https://antirez.com/news/151 If so, is it too little, too lat

Didn't antirez announce Redis was going (actual) open source again? https://antirez.com/news/151 https://antirez.com/news/151 If so, is it too little, too late, to turn back the tide? I remember Node.js almost fell apart after the short-lived Io.js fork era, but the community patched up. Is the same possible with Redis? I used to use it a lot, but haven't for the past few years, so I'm not able to get the same perspective on the community around these two projects.

motorest 1y ago
> If so, is it too little, too late, to turn back the tide? I think so too. At least to me the Redis rug pull forced Redis to be completely out of the picture, and moving forward valkey is the default option. Fool me once, shame on you.
- matsemann 1y ago
  I honestly think most people don't care. Yes, a HN bubble care, and might influence what a company chooses. But most people will just reach for Redis by default, none the wiser of all the drama in some small circles.
  - Kwpolska 1y ago
    Linux distros can help pick a winner. If installing Valkey is just `apt install valkey`, but Redis requires compilation/extra repos to get going, people will just choose Valkey. See also: MariaDB.
    - gkbrk 1y ago
      Or better, if installing valkey is both `apt install valkey` and also `apt install redis`. Which is exactly what some distros are doing.
    - fnord123 1y ago
      Is there a useful metric to see if that's really the case? Using the distos package manager means you're at the mercy of the packager for getting new versions. Docker is just as easy and doesn't suffer from this. And building from source gives you full control. Even when using test services, using docker works best since all the Devs will be on the same version instead of splitting between Debian, fedora, and brew versions.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > I honestly think most people don't care. I don't think this opinion is realistic or grounded in reality. Any company goes through license reviews when discussing which project to adopt. You may not care what software you run on a weekend project, but everyone working in a professional setting goes through a long bureaucratic song and dance act with legal representatives to verify if they can or cannot use a dependency.
williamstein 1y ago
Also, Redis is being opened sourced via the AGPL, whereas Valkey is BSD licensed (like Redis used to be). They are both officially open source licenses, but BSD is much, much more permissive.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  This will help the alternative far more than redis in the short term. But the long term absolutely belongs to the AGPL. It's simple: supporting a business without getting paid sucks ass. The second a project excludes commercial work they get 100x my attention.
  - meitham 1y ago
    Totally agree! If you don’t want AWS turning your project into a paid service without giving you a dime, you’ve got to pick a license that stops that. BSD doesn’t cut it!
  - networked 1y ago
    > It's simple: supporting a business without getting paid sucks ass. The second a project excludes commercial work they get 100x my attention. This stance is interesting to me because it reminds me of psychological experiments about utility versus fairness. I'd like to ask you a question in that spirit. If you could choose one of the following, which would you choose? 1. Noncommercial users gain 3× on some comprehensive metric of useful software with the source available (imagine the metric includes code quality, features, hardware support, choice, etc.), but businesses gain 10× 2. Noncommercial users gain 2×, and businesses gain 2× 3. Noncommercial users gain 1.1×, and businesses gain nothing 4. Noncommercial users gain nothing, and businesses gain nothing 5. Noncommercial users lose 3×, but businesses lose 10× Edit: Added option 3 and renumbered the options after.
  - lmz 1y ago
    Your attention as in "your work/contribution" or just "your use"? Because if it's "your work" they'll make you sign a CLA anyway so they can sell it on and you don't get paid.
  - 1y ago
ekianjo 1y ago
Why would you trust Redis again after what they did?
- y2244 1y ago
  Because if broke bad again, it could just be forked again so no risk?
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    Momentum is a very scary thing. I don’t want to be trained to install valkey-server instead of redis-server again (or vice versa)
    - WJW 1y ago
      How often do you (re)install redis-server for this to be a problem? It's just a thing you type once in a build script for me.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
    It's AGPL licensed now so forking it is fairly different to how it was when Valkey forked - it'll have to keep that license, and AGPL is one that quite a lot of companies don't want to touch (whether or not you think that judgement is 'correct').
  - hollowturtle 1y ago
    antirez is it you? ;)
  - jpetso 1y ago
    All of the cloud providers are already in on BSD-licensed Valkey, so which community is realistically going to take over AGPL Redis next time around? The much smaller group of Redict proponents? There's only so much manpower to go around and much of it is otherwise preoccupied now.
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Last I checked, Redis still had a CLA. In other words, they reserve the exclusive right to turn back into closed source. As long as they require that contributor agree to such terms, there’s no reason to trust that they won’t pull the same thing again.
WJW 1y ago
TBH I think 99% of users don't care who owns the project as long as they get their free KV store to stick data into. From a business perspective Redis falls into this really awkward niche where its does like 50 different things but most people only use 5% of that and have no desire to use the fancy stuff like Sentinel and Streams. What's worse: when any software tool wants to start charging money for their product, the options for users are not just "stop using Redis" or "start paying". There are also the options "switch to a competitor", "rewrite it yourself with just the functionality you need" and (for OSS projects) "fork the last open source version then maintain it yourself so you don't have to pay the overhead of the OSS company". It seems to me Redis sits in a super awkward spot where forking or rolling your own is preferable to many business users. Much more so than (say) postgres, because the cheap-and-dirty version of redis is "just" a hashmap with a network interface.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  It reminds me of MOOS, for the core functionality.
- tyre 1y ago
  For which users is it worth forking, adding features, and maintaining it is preferable? That sounds like a high amount of effort for something that is probably non-core for that business’s users (i.e. the company is not an infra/platform company). Paying money can easily be worth the time and distraction of maintenance. Similar to AWS. Many companies _could_ rent rackspace or linode or even ec2 instances and run on top. Services built on top like ECS and RDS are so much simpler to manage. That time, money, and focus goes elsewhere: building for users.
  - WJW 1y ago
    I mean exactly companies like AWS and Azure, who are basically in the business of renting out hardware with custom software pre-installed. Paying licensing fees for hundreds of thousands of Elasticache users might very well be more expensive than having a 3-4 people team maintaining their own Redis fork.

motorest 1y ago

> If so, is it too little, too late, to turn back the tide? I think so too. At least to me the Redis rug pull forced Redis to be completely out of the picture, and moving forward valkey is the default option. Fool me once, shame on you.

matsemann 1y ago
I honestly think most people don't care. Yes, a HN bubble care, and might influence what a company chooses. But most people will just reach for Redis by default, none the wiser of all the drama in some small circles.
- Kwpolska 1y ago
  Linux distros can help pick a winner. If installing Valkey is just `apt install valkey`, but Redis requires compilation/extra repos to get going, people will just choose Valkey. See also: MariaDB.
  - gkbrk 1y ago
    Or better, if installing valkey is both `apt install valkey` and also `apt install redis`. Which is exactly what some distros are doing.
  - fnord123 1y ago
    Is there a useful metric to see if that's really the case? Using the distos package manager means you're at the mercy of the packager for getting new versions. Docker is just as easy and doesn't suffer from this. And building from source gives you full control. Even when using test services, using docker works best since all the Devs will be on the same version instead of splitting between Debian, fedora, and brew versions.
- motorest 1y ago
  > I honestly think most people don't care. I don't think this opinion is realistic or grounded in reality. Any company goes through license reviews when discussing which project to adopt. You may not care what software you run on a weekend project, but everyone working in a professional setting goes through a long bureaucratic song and dance act with legal representatives to verify if they can or cannot use a dependency.

williamstein 1y ago

Also, Redis is being opened sourced via the AGPL, whereas Valkey is BSD licensed (like Redis used to be). They are both officially open source licenses, but BSD is much, much more permissive.

MangoToupe 1y ago
This will help the alternative far more than redis in the short term. But the long term absolutely belongs to the AGPL. It's simple: supporting a business without getting paid sucks ass. The second a project excludes commercial work they get 100x my attention.
- meitham 1y ago
  Totally agree! If you don’t want AWS turning your project into a paid service without giving you a dime, you’ve got to pick a license that stops that. BSD doesn’t cut it!
- networked 1y ago
  > It's simple: supporting a business without getting paid sucks ass. The second a project excludes commercial work they get 100x my attention. This stance is interesting to me because it reminds me of psychological experiments about utility versus fairness. I'd like to ask you a question in that spirit. If you could choose one of the following, which would you choose? 1. Noncommercial users gain 3× on some comprehensive metric of useful software with the source available (imagine the metric includes code quality, features, hardware support, choice, etc.), but businesses gain 10× 2. Noncommercial users gain 2×, and businesses gain 2× 3. Noncommercial users gain 1.1×, and businesses gain nothing 4. Noncommercial users gain nothing, and businesses gain nothing 5. Noncommercial users lose 3×, but businesses lose 10× Edit: Added option 3 and renumbered the options after.
- lmz 1y ago
  Your attention as in "your work/contribution" or just "your use"? Because if it's "your work" they'll make you sign a CLA anyway so they can sell it on and you don't get paid.
- 1y ago

ekianjo 1y ago

Why would you trust Redis again after what they did?

y2244 1y ago
Because if broke bad again, it could just be forked again so no risk?
- Aeolun 1y ago
  Momentum is a very scary thing. I don’t want to be trained to install valkey-server instead of redis-server again (or vice versa)
  - WJW 1y ago
    How often do you (re)install redis-server for this to be a problem? It's just a thing you type once in a build script for me.
- CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
  It's AGPL licensed now so forking it is fairly different to how it was when Valkey forked - it'll have to keep that license, and AGPL is one that quite a lot of companies don't want to touch (whether or not you think that judgement is 'correct').
- hollowturtle 1y ago
  antirez is it you? ;)
- jpetso 1y ago
  All of the cloud providers are already in on BSD-licensed Valkey, so which community is realistically going to take over AGPL Redis next time around? The much smaller group of Redict proponents? There's only so much manpower to go around and much of it is otherwise preoccupied now.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

Last I checked, Redis still had a CLA. In other words, they reserve the exclusive right to turn back into closed source. As long as they require that contributor agree to such terms, there’s no reason to trust that they won’t pull the same thing again.

WJW 1y ago

TBH I think 99% of users don't care who owns the project as long as they get their free KV store to stick data into. From a business perspective Redis falls into this really awkward niche where its does like 50 different things but most people only use 5% of that and have no desire to use the fancy stuff like Sentinel and Streams. What's worse: when any software tool wants to start charging money for their product, the options for users are not just "stop using Redis" or "start paying". There are also the options "switch to a competitor", "rewrite it yourself with just the functionality you need" and (for OSS projects) "fork the last open source version then maintain it yourself so you don't have to pay the overhead of the OSS company". It seems to me Redis sits in a super awkward spot where forking or rolling your own is preferable to many business users. Much more so than (say) postgres, because the cheap-and-dirty version of redis is "just" a hashmap with a network interface.

dgfitz 1y ago
It reminds me of MOOS, for the core functionality.
tyre 1y ago
For which users is it worth forking, adding features, and maintaining it is preferable? That sounds like a high amount of effort for something that is probably non-core for that business’s users (i.e. the company is not an infra/platform company). Paying money can easily be worth the time and distraction of maintenance. Similar to AWS. Many companies _could_ rent rackspace or linode or even ec2 instances and run on top. Services built on top like ECS and RDS are so much simpler to manage. That time, money, and focus goes elsewhere: building for users.
- WJW 1y ago
  I mean exactly companies like AWS and Azure, who are basically in the business of renting out hardware with custom software pre-installed. Paying licensing fees for hundreds of thousands of Elasticache users might very well be more expensive than having a 3-4 people team maintaining their own Redis fork.