[HN Gopher] The race to replace Redis
___________________________________________________________________
The race to replace Redis
Author : chmaynard
Score : 689 points
Date : 2024-03-28 22:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| mooreds wrote:
| I'd be more interested in the race to build a business model that
| works with open source and venture funding, myself.
|
| A grand unified theory of software goods funding, if you will.
| leetrout wrote:
| Yep. Been wondering where this is headed with the recent YC
| batch posts claiming they are gonna be all opensource and make
| money on cloud offering
| crabmusket wrote:
| Why specifically venture funding?
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Because of the expected revenue and growth that comes with
| it.
| 1over137 wrote:
| Because this is HN, lots of VC fanboys here.
| mooreds wrote:
| My thesis is that when you don't have the pressure of VC
| funding (gotta hit the revenue numbers you promise to
| investors sooner or later), alignment between the business
| and the OSS community isn't as tough to find.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I'd agree with that. Your message sounded to me like you
| thought VC funding was desirable for software projects. I
| wonder why we can't just fund software like a regular
| business- why look for venture returns?
| mooreds wrote:
| That works great! I think the best money to get to run a
| business comes from customers. Bootstrapping is great.
|
| However, just like fewer homes would be owned if you
| didn't have mortgages, less software companies would
| exist without VC. It's basically a subsidy from the rich,
| endowments and pensions, to the rest of us (consumers
| because we get stuff for free, developers because it
| increases the demand and thus salaries for us).
|
| I think VC is a net benefit to the world in terms of
| software delivered and companies built. I think OSS is a
| net benefit to the world because of the explosion of
| possible ideas and the leverage it lets developers have
| as they build on it.
|
| I would love to see these two huge innovations in
| building software work together well. Haven't seen it
| yet, hence my original comment.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| This is indeed interesting.
|
| The historically 'good' open source companies like Sun got
| bought but the ones that weren't like Oracle. The selling
| support model alone does not seem evolutionarily fit for the
| market.
|
| Now we have these VC-backed 'open source' companies that have a
| playbook wherein they appear open source at first. But when you
| dig deeper, you find that the heart of the thing is a closed
| binary.
|
| The investors are going to want to be paid back somehow. And
| the business model of VC means that one of two things happens:
|
| 1. The company finds a way to 100x the return. Which, if you're
| a customer, might be a scary prospect.
|
| 2. The company makes an amount somewhat lower and, while it
| would be a good business for a non-VC company, they're
| considered a zombie by their investors. So, they are killed
| leaving you as a customer in a bad position.
|
| I therefore trust non-VC backed companies substantially more to
| keep alignment with their customers long-term.
|
| A workable model could be for instead companies that have
| legally-enforceable promise not to enshitify their closed
| sourced product. So that the product will always be aligned
| with the paying customer. The customer cannot be made the
| product at a future date.
| arp242 wrote:
| Sun was mainly a hardware business; you bought their
| workstations and servers. And oh, they also had this unix-y
| thing that came with that. Later software did become a bit
| more important with Java and MySQL and all of that, but it
| was still primarily hardware company.
|
| I think it's pointless to even compare it to the Redis
| company; just about everything is different.
| mooreds wrote:
| For sure. It's the difference between commoditizing your
| complement[0] and trying to build a business on something
| anyone can run for free.
|
| 0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-
| letter-v/
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think something like https://bigtimelicense.com/ is a good
| start.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Their definition of "fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory
| terms" seems... incredibly vague, and with a big chicken-and-
| egg problem for the first license.
|
| > If the licensor advertises license terms and a pricing
| structure for generally available commercial licenses, the
| licensor proposes license terms and a price as advertised,
| and a customer not affiliated with the licensor has bought a
| commercial license for the software on substantially
| equivalent terms in the past year, the proposal is fair,
| reasonable, and nondiscriminatory.
| kemitchell wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-
| discriminat...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Which says "While there are no legal precedents to spell
| out specifically what the actual terms mean..."
| kemitchell wrote:
| I wonder if software really deserves its own economics.
|
| If you haven't read Hal Varian's _Information Rules_ , I highly
| recommend it. Check the publication date, then read it anyway,
| then reflect on the publication date when you're done. I found
| it very worthwhile.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Yes, this is a great read. After that many years it still
| influences me. However it is not that kind of book you read
| before going to bed. It requires intense studies to take
| something out of it.
| zoilism wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, I downloaded it & started
| reading and yes it's a treasure trove.
| llm_trw wrote:
| You go homeless so Bezos can make his yacht a foot longer.
|
| I find it amazing how much money is being spent to ensure open
| source code doesn't end up in the hands of users and how many
| people are blaming the ones trying to increase user freedom.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Good to read that on HN. A fair share of HN Readers and
| supporters belong to that crowd ...
| coldtea wrote:
| Maybe we instead need a model where FOSS is not about profits
| for anybody, and is just a passion of love, from a large
| community of amateurs doing it for the technology and fun.
|
| Projects could still be funded by community users, but "venture
| funding"? That's how projects turn to shit.
| jacooper wrote:
| That's works for small stuff like self hosted images, but
| will never work for anything actually reliable.
| prepend wrote:
| Doesn't it work for the Linux kernel? And https? And lots
| of other stuff?
| t888 wrote:
| No. A lot of that work is sponsored.
| sethherr wrote:
| The vast majority. Only 7.7% is unpaid:
| https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/
| bruce511 wrote:
| Which is not inherently surprising.
|
| Developers need a salary to pay the bills. Let's say that
| covers the first 40 hours of the week.
|
| Those who are searching for significance outside their
| day job offer free labor as their "hobby". Maybe 10 hours
| a week?
|
| For projects that want to move forward with some velocity
| it makes sense to make some of that development into paid
| day-jobs.
|
| As projects get very large, there's a fair amount of
| overhead in just "keeping up". That erodes the 10 hours
| quickly. Further reducing the time to contribute.
|
| So where is all this cash to pay employees coming from?
| Certainly not end users (as anyone who's tried funding an
| OSS project from users knows.) No, it comes from
| commercial companies (MS, Amazon et al) or venture
| capital.
|
| This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS
| development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are
| the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say
| RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux
| economy system only exist at the level they do -because-
| of big tech.
|
| Of course, I painting with a broad brush, and there are
| exceptions, but the point remains. It's turtles all the
| way down, and those turtles are not funded by users.
| coldtea wrote:
| Those turtles didn't need to use funding pre-doc-com-
| boom, they were passion projects and people with time
| devoted to the "cause" of FOSS.
|
| > _This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS
| development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are
| the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say
| RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux
| economy system only exist at the level they do -because-
| of big tech_
|
| Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level
| they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and
| not enthusiast and user focused.
|
| Even ourselves, as devs, evaluate FOSS as to whether it's
| "useful" for our corporate/startup needs. This wasn't
| exactly the case, or at least not the main case for a
| FOSS project.
|
| Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a
| desktop shell for corporate installs...
| t888 wrote:
| The 'cause' of oss? I doubt many people ever were
| dedicated to a cause outside of GNU diehards. For most
| other people it was about curiosity or fun, a hobby etc.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Or, as is the point of this article, simply a job. (And
| likely -most- OSS developers are just paid employees. )
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> Those turtles didn't need to use funding pre-doc-com-
| boom, they were passion projects and people with time
| devoted to the "cause" of FOSS.
|
| Except they kinda did. The foundations of FSF are born by
| academics working at institutions, getting paid salaries.
| The were devoting time certainly, and certainly in the
| case of RMS with passion and cause, but that work was
| definitely funded - usually by the university.
|
| >> Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the
| level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused,
| and not enthusiast and user focused.
|
| I think we can drop the term "enthusiast". It implies
| tiny niche group with little practical value. I'm
| thinking of classic car "enthusiasts" who spend all their
| time under the car, and precious little driving it.
|
| So let's talk about users. Users want full-featured
| reliable software. I would suggest all software, if
| successful, is user focused. (To he honest, I'm not sure
| what you have in mind with "corporate focused".) Firefox,
| to pick one project at random will seemingly live or die
| based on the individual user experience.
|
| Equally take databases - there are s plethora of options
| to suit every use case. Need big powerful fast enterprise
| scale - Postgres is for you. Need small footprint with
| easy install - try Firebird. And a gazillion others.
| Surely such quality is a good thing?
|
| >> Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a
| desktop shell for corporate installs...
|
| Um. Sure it was. It was designed to offer a gui desktop
| on top of Linux. Who did they think would use it if not
| Linux distributions? Given that for decades "the year of
| Linux on the desktop" was a meme, I'm not sure it's fair
| to claim that distributions using Gnome to create
| desktops for business users was a surprise.
| treyd wrote:
| I agree, but what I think is curious about the whole
| situation is that you can also see it strictly as a market
| failure.
|
| It's a very pure example where parties in competition each
| that have a use for some kind of software can shortsightedly
| develop their own versions of it in-house, but that
| duplicates a lot of effort. They'd be better off getting
| together with their competitors and collaborating on a shared
| version that suits their needs, avoiding duplicating effort
| and all benefiting from each others' contributions. They
| could do this by direct collaboration or by funding an
| independent organization that fulfills their needs.
|
| Sure, this can go badly if there's a large difference in
| scale between the different parties and some can muscle
| others around. But it and similar models do work out at the
| scale of the Linux Foundation, Khronos, down to Mastodon,
| GitLab, Blender, Krita, Forgejo, even arguanly projects like
| Bitcoin Core.
|
| There isn't the structures to facilitate this kind of regime
| shift. But there should be.
| umanwizard wrote:
| In such a world most of the open source software you're used
| to wouldn't exist (or would be much less complete) and you'd
| be forced to work with and use proprietary systems most of
| the time.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _In such a world most of the open source software you're
| used to wouldn't exist_
|
| As part of that world, I also want livable wages and work-
| life balance for developers, so they can work on their
| passion FOSS off-call. And for students and programming
| enthusiasts to be more passionate about FOSS. Like in the
| 90s before the corporates took over FOSS.
|
| If some FOSS still wouldn't exist then, I'm fine with that.
| mch82 wrote:
| Universal basic income & bug/feature bounties, for example.
| harpratap wrote:
| This is very good use case of micro-transactions. If AWS makes
| $100 off Redis, they should be pay back X% to Redis project,
| from which the money is distributed to contributors based on
| how important their contributions were. Also Redis project is
| also supposed to pay back to the software components and 3rd
| party libraries it uses, so C project gets a fair share of the
| pie contributed back to them as well.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| FLOSS-5: freedom to contribute 5% of profit if powering a cloud
| service.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Such a business model exists and it's extremely well proven,
| and it powers the majority of major open source software: build
| a proprietary product or service, and open source any component
| that is more of a cost than it is a unique selling point of
| your system.
|
| Do you need a faster compiler, or a better OS, or some cluster
| operator just to get your widget factory working? Don't build
| those in house, instead find others with the same problems and
| create an open source project together to work on them.
|
| But don't try to sell open source software. It's essentially
| impossible to do that, it has been tried time and time again
| and success is rare, and huge success is basically unheard of
| (RedHat being probably the one single exception).
| mooreds wrote:
| > Such a business model exists and it's extremely well
| proven, and it powers the majority of major open source
| software: build a proprietary product or service, and open
| source any component that is more of a cost than it is a
| unique selling point of your system.
|
| Sure, it is the commoditize your complement strategy [0]. But
| that doesn't help get complex open source products to market,
| it only helps with tooling.
|
| Maybe you are right and there's no way to directly pair the
| freedoms of OSS with the capitalism of VC backed startup.
|
| 0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-
| letter-v/
| bawolff wrote:
| Just because people want to make money off something doesn't
| neccesarily mean they deserve to.
| tison wrote:
| For the first time, I know our (Apache Kvrocks, an alternative to
| Redis on Flash) committer Binbin Wang committed nearly 25% of the
| commits to the newer Redis version.
|
| You can find his contributor for both at:
|
| * https://github.com/apache/kvrocks/graphs/contributors
|
| * https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors
| tison wrote:
| And here is an interesting conversation when Binbin came to the
| Kvrocks community:
| https://github.com/apache/kvrocks/pull/1581#issuecomment-163...
|
| * Me: @enjoy-binbin Out of curiosity, do you have a fuzzer to
| test out Kvrocks? Your recent great fixes seem like a combo
| rather than random findings :D
|
| * Binbin: They were actually random findings.I may be sensitive
| to this, doing code review and found them (also based on my
| familiarity with redis)
| masklinn wrote:
| Yeah some folks are built different. I've a colleague who
| once every few weeks opens random files and notices weird
| patterns, I've no idea how his mind works but boy does it
| work.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Why does the fix work like that - only checking for this one
| scenario when you decrement by type max? [1]
|
| In Solidity, where it's a serious security risk, before the
| language performed overflow checks itself, library authors
| would perform the arithmetic operation and then e.g. check if
| the result is larger than the original value in the case of a
| positive subtrahend [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/apache/kvrocks/pull/1581/commits/dc514
| 0dd...
|
| [2] https://github.com/KingdomStudiosIO/contracts/blob/51873b
| 574...
| esafak wrote:
| There's also DragonflyDB
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Yeah but if you're going to the trouble of switching, probably
| pick something that actually outperforms Redis/Redis Cluster.
| Which basically leaves you with Garnet.
|
| Redict is a pointless endeavor. Just stick with Redis 7.2
| before the licensing change. Maybe change the binary name if it
| makes folks feel better.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what Redict is? Plus a license change to
| prevent what happened to Redis from happening again.
| dralley wrote:
| DragonflyDB doesn't have a better licensing situation.
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| Dragonfly isn't open source nor free software. Rather a
| pointless switch if you ask me.
| worldsoup wrote:
| it is free and source available...it's BSL which is slightly
| more permissive than SSPL that Redis adopted
| ralusek wrote:
| Am I insane or can't a company just fork it from before the
| license change? I mean, what even needs to change in it? I assume
| 95% of people were just using it for the features it's had since
| the beginning anyway.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > Am I insane or can't a company just fork it from before the
| license change?
|
| The article mentions half a dozen such forks. So not insane,
| maybe just a bit lazy ;).
| MenhirMike wrote:
| The question - just like always in cases like this - is which
| forks will get long-term support. So just like with Terraform,
| it's probably a good option to stay on the last open source
| Redis version and wait to see how things shake out, assuming
| that there are no critical security vulnerabilities in that
| version of Redis. Alternatively, be prepared to jump around
| between a few forks if one turns into a dead end. Or move to
| something else altogether, but that's a much bigger
| undertaking.
| west0n wrote:
| Neal Gompa opened a discussion on the Fedora development list,
| noting the license change and the need to remove Redis from
| Fedora.
|
| Gompa also raised the issue on openSUSE's Factory discussion
| list.
|
| After Docker was phased out, various distributions have adopted
| the compatible Podman as a replacement for Docker. It seems that
| a similar story is unfolding with Redis.
| jacooper wrote:
| Docker was only phased out in red hat distros because they
| don't like it and want to push Podman. Others still have docker
| packaged in their repos.
| dralley wrote:
| A bit reductionist. IIRC the main reason Docker was phased
| out because Red Hat wanted to push rootless, daemonless
| containers, which required CGroups v2, which Docker didn't
| want to support for the longest time. Since both versions of
| CGroups can't be enabled simultaneously, and no distro wanted
| to go without Docker (or at least Docker-like) functionality,
| CGroups v2 was left in permanent stasis, and so Red Hat
| started Podman to break the deadlock. There were a laundry
| list of other technical disagreements (mostly around
| security) but that was the primary one.
|
| And then once Red Hat distros switched over to CGroups v2,
| which Podman enabled them to do, it meant that Docker
| wouldn't really work all that well anymore until they
| eventually switched to CGroups v2 also (which they eventually
| did a few years later). So that's why it got removed from the
| repos, at least originally.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| It's not in Debian and their wiki straight up directs you to
| podman with a nice big scary warning about dockers root
| issue.
|
| https://wiki.debian.org/Docker
|
| Docker is dyeing on linux podman will be the only one that
| remains.
| aragilar wrote:
| It's in Debian: https://packages.debian.org/sid/docker.io
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| huh well I'll be damn I thought this had already been
| resolved back to the mailing list it seems.
| francislavoie wrote:
| That version is so old. I just use Docker's own apt repo
| to not fall behind.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The page suggests podman in a small info box (one that
| people might skip, because it feels like the Wikipedian
| "this article has issues" box), but it also tells you how
| to install real Docker. Docker has name brand recognition,
| and even if it wasn't in Debian's official repos, it would
| be installed from Docker's own repos. This wiki isn't
| popular enough for this to matter anyway, people are likely
| googling for "docker debian" and are finding instructions
| for real Docker. I don't feel like Docker is dying.
|
| And besides, that issue with root feels overblown in the
| era of single-user systems and servers as cattle.
| noirscape wrote:
| No? Sorry if that's a bit cynical, but Docker is only dying
| in the opinion of distro maintainers. By this metric, it's
| been dying for the past 8 years, but everyone is still
| talking about Docker, not podman.
|
| A related problem I've seen from other complaints made
| elsewhere is that podman does things just slightly
| different enough than Docker that it's not a true drop-in
| replacement.
|
| We've seen that before; where distro maintainers declared
| software too dangerous/prematurely dead for a while. All it
| resulted in was community hosted repositories for the old
| software. (Read: this is why avconv failed.)
| bogwog wrote:
| Yeah I don't think Docker is the type of tool the typical
| engineer cares enough about to go out of their way to
| learn something new, no matter how much better or simpler
| it may be. I guess it's like git; even though most devs
| only have a surface level knowledge, dethroning it would
| require convincing people to learn a new system, and
| that's not gonna happen no matter how good it is.
|
| Red Hat at least had the muscle to force podman onto some
| people, but not everyone.
| packetlost wrote:
| idk, I actively dropped docker as soon as I reasonably
| could. podman is an _objectively_ better tool by nearly
| every metric and it has an almost exact 1:1 CLI tool, so
| there 's not really a learning curve besides a few
| configuration differences
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Sometimes I get the feeling all the folks touting podman
| as a drop-in replacement for docker are doing it in bad
| faith.
|
| Every few years I try to replace my containers managed
| through docker-compose and it's always a sure miss.
| Before podman gained official support for the docker-
| compose spec, there was an unofficial podman-compose
| project that sort of worked save for a few podman
| incompatibility bugs here and there.
|
| So I was delighted to try out the "official" docker-
| compose for podman. Quickly learned that there's no such
| package, the official podman-compose is just the same
| docker compose package, you just use it with podman the
| same way you would with docker. Despite this glaring
| inconsistency I decided to give podman a try (if you are
| going to install docker compose on your system might as
| well just use docker). Noped out when I tried to create a
| VPN with a podman container and it was failing requiring
| me to enable a kernel module (TAP or TUN can't remember
| exact error) to create a vpn.
|
| Anyone who says podman is a drop-in replacement for
| docker never used docker much for anything more than
| running hello-world. I would only recommend podman over
| docker for someone who's new to containers and has never
| heard of docker before.
| packetlost wrote:
| > Noped out when I tried to create a VPN with a podman
| container and it was failing requiring me to enable a
| kernel module (TAP or TUN can't remember exact error) to
| create a vpn.
|
| Those are pretty standard kernel modules for enabling
| userspace networking, which if you were using podman in
| rootless mode you need (along with another userspace
| networking package, slirp4netns). "Drop in replacement"
| does not mean there's not configuration to get it set up,
| it means it has the same APIs as another system.
|
| I've been using containers for almost 10 years and with
| almost no fanfare switched to podman 100% like a year
| ago. Just because you expected to have to do _nothing at
| all_ doesn 't mean it doesn't work.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Podman doesn't expose an interface for enabling kernel
| modules. The error message is intentionally intended to
| discourage users from doing administration on systems,
| just like the other similar messages you'll get about
| trying to use "privileged" ports (<1024).
|
| Am sure you can get over the kernel module tun creation
| and other limitations by using something like
| --privileged but at that point, why not just use docker
| if you are going to run containers "insecurely".
|
| And for the sake of this argument, drop-in replacement
| means I can take my tools and move them over to the
| alternative with little to no extra work needed on my
| part.
| dralley wrote:
| >Am sure you can get over the kernel module tun creation
| and other limitations by using something like
| --privileged but at that point, why not just use docker
| if you are going to run containers "insecurely".
|
| Because at least you can tell that it's insecure, rather
| than insecurity being the default?
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Secure defaults and containers is kind of an oxymoron.
|
| Also the "secure" defaults don't matter much if you have
| to manually jump through hoops in sysctl and modprobe to
| get things to work. Infact I could even argue that this
| introduces the risk of having an insecure server by
| misconfiguration.
| nijave wrote:
| Also containerd and cri-o fit in here somewhere, too.
|
| I could be convinced Docker-on-headless-servers has been
| dying a while but the desktop variants are alive and well
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| docker-cli is still open source (Apache 2.0) and being
| distributed in most flavors of Linux. Docker the company does
| not own all the source code. But like redis they are free to
| build their own non open source products around this code
| base.
| cpach wrote:
| NB: Docker Engine is open source. (Docker Desktop is not.)
| fweimer wrote:
| Moby is open source. The licensing situation for Docker
| Engine is unclear.
| cpach wrote:
| How so?
| folkrav wrote:
| https://docs.docker.com/engine/#licensing >The Docker
| Engine is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
| See LICENSE for the full license text.
|
| The linked license file is moby's
| https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/LICENSE
| fweimer wrote:
| Docker Engine is the name for the compiled binaries,
| right? The licensing situation for them must be more
| complicated than suggested by that LICENSE file.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > need to remove Redis from Fedora
|
| I don't get it; does the new license prohibit it from being
| distributed thus, or is this a philosophical "need"?
| flexagoon wrote:
| Fedora only includes free software in it's repos:
|
| > If it is proprietary, it cannot be included in Fedora.
| (Binary firmware is the only exception to this)
|
| https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden_items
|
| Proprietary software is distributed through the unofficial
| RPM Fusion repo
| dtjohnnymonkey wrote:
| I always wanted to try Pelikan Cache, but it's hard to take a
| risk when there is Redis. Maybe now it's more palatable.
| s-ta wrote:
| From HN a few days ago: https://github.com/microsoft/Garnet
|
| A Microsoft Research, open source, performant, almost RESP
| compatible alternative (according to them)
| Yasuraka wrote:
| There is also Valkey, a fork from just before the change backed
| by AWS, Google, Oracle who are paying a few former core devs
|
| https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
|
| And not to forget Redict, also a fork, that is maintained by
| drew devault
|
| https://codeberg.org/redict/redict
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Engineers have to eat too.
|
| Nothing wrong with charging for support.
|
| I love passion projects as much as anyone, but there is a reason
| they are hobbies, and people need to keep a day job. Eventually
| it does get tiring to do support for free.
|
| Edit:
|
| Ok. I was talking OSS generally. I guess Redis is being bad actor
| if they are taking OSS work and running away with it to get the
| money, and not compensating the contributors. That is very wrong.
| I don't know history on Redis and assumed it was the contributors
| that founded the company.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I agree. People here always seem to react badly to companies
| that provide something for free and now want to make a bit of
| money. It's weird because they themselves work in tech and have
| to earn a living to put food on the table. Having no way of
| making money isn't sustainable.
| smt88 wrote:
| The problem here is that this isn't putting food on the table
| for the people who actually built the software.
|
| It's a company surprising everyone by pocketing the money
| from other people's hard, unpaid work.
| freeAgent wrote:
| The license change is only for future versions, though. The
| work already put in remains open source.
| blackoil wrote:
| I think the main issue is bait and switch. You start with a
| license, get lots of external contributors who are working for
| free, get ecosystem built around it for free and then change
| because you want to be paid.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I'm not sure how nefarious this Redis move was. I guess I was
| assuming any move from 'free', to 'paid', will be met with
| some outcry regardless of how seamless they can pull it off.
| Or in other words, it is always a messy transition?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The issue is they took the name with them. If they forked
| it with a new name no one would have cared.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Bait and switch sounds wrong in this context. It's not like
| they planned this whole thing fifteen years in advance.
| struant wrote:
| Does it matter if you intended to do something nefarious
| all along, or if you just now saw an opportunity to be
| nefarious? All that matters is that you are doing something
| nefarious.
| itake wrote:
| My issue is the OSS contributors that were not paid for their
| work, but their work will be monetized now.
| wmf wrote:
| That's been going on for 30 years with proprietary BSD forks.
| That's what they signed up for.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| I'd love to be corrected here, but my understanding is that the
| enterprise support and pro features model can be a pretty good
| business.
|
| Big deployments generally need really good support and help to
| overcome scaling challenges. Who better than the library
| maintainers to offer that, and your customers have deep
| pockets.
|
| Then on top of that, you run a business which basically creates
| proprietary Pro and Enterprise versions of a product which has
| tooling to operate the project at scale or in high uptime
| environments.
|
| Then you offer your own cloud versions of the product as well
| (which I think Redis has been doing).
|
| But in none of these cases are you creating a disincentive for
| anybody to use/adopt your product. You're simply creating value
| around the pain points.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Then don't make an open source hobby if you want to pay the
| bills with it. Or accept you're going to have to be a
| consultant for the project to make $$. I don't expect jack shit
| back for my open source contributions nor do I care if Amazon
| uses it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Isn't this the reason why AGPL has started to get more popular?
| Everyone has to play by the very strict rules _except_ the
| copyright holder, who can do whatever they want, but the
| community still benefits from the core software being open
| source.
|
| The BSD license in particular seems like a particularly bad way
| to run a business.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Absolutely! And the haters of that license either do not
| understand it or have their user-hostile intentions.
|
| Or plan to make money with other people's love and free-time.
| verdverm wrote:
| I see more of a shift to open core.
|
| Many large orgs just say no to viral licenses, and in choosing
| AGPL, you put blockers to adoption.
|
| Open core releases some of the project under permissive
| license, and keeps some private or under a permissions license.
|
| We are all still trying to figure out how we can have
| sustainable open source where people can be paid to work on it
| full time
| wmf wrote:
| The shift to open core was ten years ago. Open core failed
| and is being replaced with pseudo open source.
| verdverm wrote:
| Open core only became a word people said 10 years ago, it's
| on the rise as a business model from what I can tell.
|
| Do you have suggestions for alternative funding/support
| models? What is open core being replaced by from your
| perspective?
| wmf wrote:
| Open core is being replaced by "selling exceptions" to
| AGPL/SSPL/BUSL/FSL. See MongoDB, Elastic, Hashicorp,
| Redis, etc.
|
| Personally I prefer the Adam Jacob trademark business
| model but it's not that proven and it can't be
| retrofitted.
| pininja wrote:
| https://medium.com/@adamhjk/introducing-the-community-
| compac... for folks wondering what Adam's buisness model
| is about
| verdverm wrote:
| OP, OpenSearch, OpenTofu all seem to indicate the jury is
| still out on this one. I still see many smaller projects
| using open core. Three I started using recently ( llama-
| index, langfuse, qdrant ) are in this category.
|
| There is certainly a difference between AGPL and BUSL
| style licenses. One of the new projects I'm using as some
| of their code with a BUSL style, but still open core
| primarily
| lukaszwojtow wrote:
| If AGPL blocks adoption then "large orgs" can buy commercial
| license (assuming software is dual-licensed).
| verdverm wrote:
| They can, but the issue is how much effort does that
| require for a random dev in the org to go through to try
| out a project?
|
| It's not a technical blocker, it's a psychological blocker
| lukaszwojtow wrote:
| I get it. If there are alternatives that overall would be
| better (including their technical merits and how easy it
| is to introduce them to a commercial company) then use
| them. No one is forced to buy dual-license.
| sakjur wrote:
| If you're happy with paying a few maintainers, a support
| staff, and some salespeople the cash flow necessary for being
| a successful endeavor is a whole lot different than if you've
| raised $350 million.
|
| Maybe the problem lies more with overreaching and trying to
| cash out?
| verdverm wrote:
| For sure, there is a problem in startup culture that looks
| down upon lifestyle companies. Devtools and developer
| focused products often get caught up in this.
|
| At the same time, founders take money to build their idea
| into something more than they could do with a small team.
| An big companies are risk averse, having a small staff or
| being susceptible to "hit by a bus" failure is often a deal
| breaker
| sakjur wrote:
| That's very true. Business is very much a balancing act
| in that sense. Sometimes raising money is the reason you
| succeed, but it can equally well be why you fail
| (especially if you'd be happy running a smaller company
| but take on investors that want you to be hungrier).
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The whole move to new "open-core" licenses started with the
| most famous (infamous?) AGPL project - MongoDB. The AGPL is
| _not_ what companies like this want (Mongo, Elastic, Redis
| etc). They don 't want AWS's code: AWS is already providing
| that. They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.
| thayne wrote:
| > They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.
|
| But the switch from AGPL to SSPL didn't do either of those
| things.
|
| AWS still built DocumentDB to compete with Mongodb, and
| didn't use any SSPL _OR AGPL_ code in the implementation (at
| least according to their FAQ[1]). And AFAIK AWS isn 't paying
| mongo any royalties.
|
| [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/faqs/
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, I was using AWS more as a catch-all term for cloud.
| They never actually offered a managed MongoDB service, but
| other like IBM and Oracle did (or still do?). I'm not sure
| what impact this had exactly, whether those services were
| discontinued or if they are now paying Mongo for them - but
| surely they had a significant impact one way or the other.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But the switch from AGPL to SSPL didn't do either of
| those things.
|
| Well, yeah, its mostly a bad plan, because while it can
| block competition with your code, it doesn't block
| substitution with _other_ code that provides the same
| function, and if you aren't one of the big cloud providers,
| competing in the same _function_ market with bundled
| services from the big cloud providers, whether or not it is
| the same underlying code, is the _actual_ problem you face
| when your monetization is based around "sell a hosted
| service".
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Then they shouldn't have open sourced it in the first place.
| leoedin wrote:
| Yeah, it feels like this pattern of "ship an open source
| product, get popular, try to backtrack" ignores the fact
| that the only reason you got popular in the first place was
| the open source aspect.
|
| Would anyone have given mongo a look if it was a fully
| proprietary technology? They would have gone bust years
| ago.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| They dont't want AWS royalties. They wanna be able to command
| higher margins. Since AWS has lower costs and prices, Redis
| can't compete with good margins. The royalties are just a way
| to increase AWS costs, so that they raise their prices and
| give Redis the ability to keep high prices and margins, while
| still remaining attractive to customers (which don't have a
| cheaper choice anymore).
| konschubert wrote:
| They want to make money with the software they built.
| jeltz wrote:
| No,they want to make money with software they did not
| build. The Redis company did not build Redis nor are they
| the biggest contributor.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| They want to make ludicrous profits on the software
| others have built for them.
|
| There's nothing wrong with making money and being
| profitable. But they have to justify investments taken
| with greed. This license change is motivated by greed,
| not by "making money" fairly.
| freeAgent wrote:
| You are privy to Redis, Inc's financials? You seem pretty
| confident that they are profitable.
| chii wrote:
| > They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.
|
| but at the same time, they want people to be able to use the
| software for free (esp. at the start), to kick-start the
| network effect.
|
| In other words, open-core business models want to have their
| cake and eat it. If you are able to make lots of money off
| said software, we want a piece of it after the fact. But we
| dont want to take on the risk of actually looking to build a
| business and compete on the same.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| some kind of GPL + no CLA = good. If you contribute to GPL
| Redis, the Redis company cannot relicense your work, because
| they own it as much as you do.
|
| GPL + CLA = bad. If you contribute to GPL Redis and transfer
| the copyright to your contributions to the Redis company, they
| can switch to whatever license they want.
|
| SSPL + no CLA = interesting, I would love to see the Redis
| company open source their hosting stack because they are
| accepting external contributions.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's too simplistic to call these "good" or "bad".
| jsmeaton wrote:
| I'm usually pretty ambivalent when a company decides to move to a
| license like BUSL. Sure it's not "free" - but practically it only
| affects the likes of AWS from freeloading while making
| extraordinary profits. Especially true when a given company
| started the project. I understand why some hold strong feelings
| on the principles of OSS. My perspective is we'll have fewer nice
| things if we allow the likes of AWS to cannibalise successful
| services.
|
| But I feel no such sympathy for Redis nee Labs. It was never
| their project. They took over stewardship and then effectively
| stole the project for themselves. They're not even the dominant
| contributor to the core product.
| anonthrow wrote:
| I agree with your points min general but want to share my
| experience and maybe some counterpoint.
|
| Being a customer of the redis labs' hosted solution, we noticed
| several issues:
|
| - RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's
|
| - RLs solution is not even close to elasticache in its ability
| to scale
|
| - when issues occur the organization internally moves
| incredibly slowly so simple issues can turn into prolonged
| outages
|
| Moving to this licensing model will make it possible for them
| to better invest in these things. That said, given the quality
| of their offering and lack of investment in the actual redis
| platform, why would anyone continue to use redis after the
| license change? The cloud providers can fork off their own
| version and never look back!
|
| I think they're shooting themselves in the foot here.
| pm90 wrote:
| > RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's
|
| Its not cost effective if the service causes extended outages
| as you mentioned later.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Seems similar to what Elastic did few years ago [1]. I kinda
| understand their motivation. It's not theirs originally, but
| they had antirez working on it for 5 years as their employee.
| They are making some contributions [2], I wish GH had a way to
| see such an insight by company affiliation. On the other hand,
| AWS and likes can easily fork pre-license-change version and
| spin it into its own product. However, I am fairly certain that
| AWS Elasticache is already such a thing - their own fork that
| diverged enough from the upstream and they are not eager to
| share.
|
| So I view it as every major cloud provider with redis offering
| has its own fork. Except that Redis Labs also owns the original
| name. But it can go on as a stand alone project, like MariDB
| was spawn off after MySQL acquisition by Oracle.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors?from=2019...
| AntonyGarand wrote:
| AWS did not launch their own spinoff alone, but instead
| joined the Valkey project by the Linux Foundation[0],
| alongside many other major contributors:
|
| > Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS),
| Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting
| Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support
| the long-term health and viability of the project so that
| everyone can benefit from it.
|
| Seems like a good alternative to a single company's spinoff:
| Many major providers working on this same project should
| result in everyone benefiting from it.
|
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-
| launc...
| YeBanKo wrote:
| I don't have any inside knowledge, but I can't believe that
| they don't have an internal fork of Redis for Elasticache.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Wasn't AWS a major contributor to Redis? How are they
| "freeloading"?
| 420698008 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure ElastiCache has been around longer than Redis
| Labs too, so it's not like AWS undercut them, plus RL got a
| ton of free market research from it
| jsmeaton wrote:
| In this case that's true and why I said I don't think it
| applies here. Typically it does though.
|
| Open source services are in a weird spot. They spend tonnes
| of money developing it and big providers are able to
| cannibalise as soon as something becomes popular at very
| little cost to themselves.
|
| I think we do need something between fully free and fully
| closed where cloud providers pay some kind of licensing. It's
| a problem worth solving.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Somehow no one has mentioned KeyDB so:
|
| https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB
|
| [EDIT] whoops, didn't read the article, went immediately to
| comments for recommendations since that's what HN is good at IMO.
| Signez wrote:
| Well, it's talked about lenghtly in the article.
| manacit wrote:
| It's mentioned in the first paragraph of the article, and
| "KeyDB" is featured 14 more times throughout the rest of it.
| secondcoming wrote:
| KeyDB is flaky garbage
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Whoaaaa I'd love some details on this reaction, do you have
| any stories or anecdotes to share? I have to say I've never
| hit its limits so I've never lost trust in it
| secondcoming wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=secondcoming#398656
| 6...
| pimsn3000 wrote:
| Please explain
| secondcoming wrote:
| We got hit by [0] and so had to pin to an older version (we
| didn't raise the issue).
|
| Also, just look at the amount of open bugs and their age
| [1]
|
| They also recommend using swap for some reason, however if
| your memory usage reaches the point where swap is being
| used the performance is so bad that the machine may as well
| be dead.
|
| It's been nothing but trouble, which is a shame because the
| changes they've done to redis have crossed my mind too.
| We'll probably move to Scylla.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB/issues/465
|
| [1] https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB/issues
| brody_hamer wrote:
| It wasn't clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will
| remain free to use in their "community edition", which will
| continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!)
|
| So we as developers don't have to scramble to replace redis in
| our SAAS apps and web based software.
|
| This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by
| providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of
| compensation to the redis developers.
|
| Redis' blog post: https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-
| source-available-li...
| dkuntz2 wrote:
| Well, except for the fact that "redis" the organization didn't
| create redis and isn't even the main developer of redis. The
| origin of Redis the company is literally as a hosting provider
| for the open source redis that they didn't create.
| objektif wrote:
| This is what I am confused about so what right do they have
| to enforce AWS from selling Redis when they do not own it?
| mythz wrote:
| The licensing change only applies to their future versions
| which they own all contributions of which AWS won't be
| allowed to leech off anymore.
| vasco wrote:
| AWS leeches as much as Garantia Data no?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| If you own copyrights you're not the leech.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since
| 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from
| Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from
| Amazon.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| I wonder if there is a qualitative analysis of the
| commits. Aka, it changed a line of comment vs it
| introduced a new feature or refactored and increased long
| term viability, etc.
| vasco wrote:
| If you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some
| point. Other than that unless you are one of the
| contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of
| leeching.
| exe34 wrote:
| Is buying the same as leaching now? Words really do get
| diluted to the point of meaningless...
| gkbrk wrote:
| It is if the thing they bought had contributions from
| many other people but pretty much all of them got nothing
| for it.
| ufocia wrote:
| We don't know what they got. Perhaps some of them were
| paid to create the contributions. And, in any case,
| that's OK. The contributors knew or should have known the
| impact of the license. They could've picked a more
| restrictive/free license, depending on your point of
| view. I guess they can still revoke the license. They
| have not given up their copyrights and the license is
| arguably not irrevocable.
| exe34 wrote:
| I'm sure their lawyers will be looking into it, you
| probably don't need to be concerned!
| vasco wrote:
| How does buying a copyright to a name, literally just
| being able to call it "Redis" equate to purchasing the
| code contributions that individual contributors make?
| They bought the rights to the name, not the project, the
| project was open-source until the license change and
| belongs to society as a whole.
| exe34 wrote:
| The project still belongs to society as a whole! You can
| fork it too! You just can't profit off their future work.
| vasco wrote:
| I agree, I didn't make any argument against that, I just
| don't see the difference between <party with money that
| bought a name and sells the free work of others> and
| <party with money that didn't buy a name and sells the
| free work of others>. My only argument here is that
| there's not much difference between AWS and Garantia Data
| from my limited understanding of the situation.
| ufocia wrote:
| It does not belong to the society (whatever that's
| supposed to mean). It is not in the public domain as far
| as we know.
| exe34 wrote:
| It was bsd licensed. The code that you received before is
| still covered by the bsd license. You can pretty much do
| anything you want with that code except misrepresent
| yourself as the author.
|
| Public domain isn't the only form of free software. You
| can literally use it in exactly the same way as you did
| before. Nothing has been taken away from you.
|
| Does this address your concern?
| ufocia wrote:
| Your confusing copyrights with trademarks. The project
| belongs to the authors (perhaps in shares depending on
| the jurisdiction where it is being copied/derived) not
| the society. The options that were licensed under BSD
| generally remain licensed under BSD unless someone
| revoked that license. It does not seem that the latter
| has happened.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Often, as that's what rentiers are. Generally bad for
| society. And have captured many regulatory processes and
| got tons of tax breaks for producing nothing.
|
| One of the well known flaws of capitalism, in the 'bad,
| but everything else is worse' sense.
| ufocia wrote:
| Not that capitalism is the perfect economic scheme, but
| rentiers exist in many economic regimes. Communism
| probably has more rentiers than capitalism, i.e. many
| people take more than they contribute.
| mythz wrote:
| AWS are the largest leeches of OSS, syphoning off most
| the profits and contribute relatively nothing back
| towards the OSS projects they rent seek from.
|
| The "Free for all except mega cloud corps" license
| changes are to disrupt this status quo which currently
| sees the mega cloud corps with impenetrable moats from
| capturing most of the value of OSS products others spend
| their resources into building, AWS are then able to use
| their war chest profits to out resource, and out compete
| them, using their own code-bases against them.
|
| It's unfortunate organizations need to resort to
| relicensing stop this predatory behavior, but its clear
| in AWSs 20+ year history they're not going to change
| their behavior on their own.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Except Redis was never meant to be "owned" by this
| company. They are both predatory.
| ufocia wrote:
| It is not owned by the company. You are free to create
| your own fork of the code with all the attendant
| benefits, including monetization, if applicable.
| objektif wrote:
| I think you are right about AWS leeching OSS.
| happymellon wrote:
| > AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.
|
| Doesn't AWS employ Madelyn Olson? I mean, AWS have paid
| for Redis development.
|
| Not exactly a leech.
| mythz wrote:
| Yep still the biggest leachers. Token hires and flowery
| PR campaigns doesn't entitle them to most of the profits
| of other vendors products or absolve them of their
| predatory behavior.
|
| But they wont be able to leech Redis's future
| contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a
| fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the
| short-term.
| happymellon wrote:
| Err, after this license change Redis Inc will be the
| biggest leechers considering they didn't contribute the
| majority of the code.
|
| > Yep still the biggest leachers
|
| Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever
| they want. That's not leeching.
| mythz wrote:
| Redis Labs was a long time sponsor for the full-time
| development of Redis then later compensated the creator
| of Redis for their rights to Redis Technology and
| branding who was ended up retiring from technology to
| write Sci-Fi books. By contrast AWS takes most of the
| profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back,
| making them the biggest leacher and the primary
| motivation for the relicensing to prevent mega corps with
| unfettered access to their future contributions that AWS
| repackages to compete against them.
|
| So whilst their previous license allowed AWS to leech off
| them, it's now been relicensed to prevent them from
| profiting off their future investments without
| compensating anything back.
| jakupovic wrote:
| During an all-hands around 2008 I asked AWS leadership
| whether AWS was going to open source their technologies
| the answer was we're thinking about it. 16 years later it
| has not happened, nor it will given the record ;(
| objektif wrote:
| How does one buy rights to an open source technology?
| tracker1 wrote:
| You buy the trademark/name from the original author. I'm
| the case of GPL or other assigned work licenses, you sell
| the baseline copyright and they can change it.
| nindalf wrote:
| AWS, along with Google and others have created a fork
| already. It's very rude of you to call someone a token
| hire when they're high up in the contributors list (#7
| all time). Denigrating their work for no reason other
| than to "win" an internet argument.
|
| We'll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never
| created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also
| never created redis). Both contributed to its
| maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We'll see which
| fork wins out.
| mythz wrote:
| > It's very rude of you to call someone a token hire when
| they're high up in the contributors list (#7 all time).
|
| I've called AWS's hiring of a single developer a token
| hire that they then go on to write flowery PR posts about
| to camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS
| vendors.
|
| For concrete numbers they contributed 165/12111 commits
| for a total of a 1.36% of the commits.
|
| Whilst that qualifies as a valuable contribution to any
| project, it's also dwarfed by the 350M investment in
| Redis Labs and doesn't absolve AWS from being a called a
| "leacher" by helping themselves to the majority of the
| profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back.
| nindalf wrote:
| > dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs
|
| It's funny that you would use commits to quantify
| investment from AWS, but you'd use $ to buy shares in
| future profits to quantify investment from redis labs.
| Why not use the same yardstick for both?
|
| Either way, it _doesn't matter_. Not one bit. Everyone
| who put in effort into redis did it knowing the license.
| There's nothing wrong in relicensing future commits.
| There's nothing wrong with forking. There's nothing wrong
| in using whichever fork works better for you.
|
| You're insisting up and down that AWS and others were
| leeching because they didn't own the copyright to redis.
| I've never heard this interpretation of OSS before, but
| sure maybe you're right. But we'll see which fork comes
| out on top a year from now.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS
| vendors
|
| If you don't want others to monetize your work, don't
| license it under a license permitting them exactly that.
| mythz wrote:
| hence the relicensing
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| It's hard to argue that a use permitted by the original
| license is ,,predatory".
| evanelias wrote:
| That's fair in isolation, but one can justifiably argue
| that a _repeated pattern of behavior_ is clearly
| predatory.
|
| Specifically: have the major cloud providers _ever_
| created a successful FOSS database, cache, or fulltext
| search index project _from the ground up_? By this I
| mean, a FOSS project with its own protocol, own community
| from scratch, not a fork or a re-implementation or based
| on another FOSS project, nor a late-stage company
| acquisition.
|
| I'm struggling to think of even a single example. Even
| for broader infrastructure (not just db/cache/search),
| there's few examples, only Kubernetes comes to mind
| rapidly.
|
| If the cloud providers are widely practicing "FOSS for
| thee but not for me" with respect to creation of new
| infrastructure projects, that's predatory and
| unsustainable.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > That's fair in isolation, but one can justifiably argue
| that a repeated pattern of behavior is clearly predatory.
|
| Yes, but there's another explanation. Repeating the same
| mistake countless times and expecting a different outcome
| is naivety.
| evanelias wrote:
| To repeat a comment by another user upthread: hence the
| relicensing.
|
| I suppose I'm not understanding the point of your
| position. Software authors cannot fix a licensing mistake
| by changing the past, but they can use a different
| license moving forwards.
| lukaszwojtow wrote:
| Yes, they paid. And they can use the code they paid for.
| But it doesn't give them right to leech of any future
| code written by someone else IN THE FUTURE.
| happymellon wrote:
| And considering Redis Inc hasn't contributed the majority
| of the code, they won't be able to leech off other
| people's code because why on earth would anyone
| contribute to this trainwreck!
|
| It's lose/lose!
| jamespo wrote:
| Not for redis the company if they follow mongodb's
| trajectory
| chii wrote:
| Calling it leech isn't right, because what makes aws any
| different from another user? Just because they're selling
| the hosting, doesnt make it any different to a regular
| user.
|
| Code contributions from amazon would've been leeched by
| other parties using redis as well - something which
| amazon is accepting (and probably encouraging).
| nebulous1 wrote:
| From what I understand they acquired the rights to redis
| from antirez sometime after employing him. I assume he
| received money for this.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Trademark, and it's licensed under BSD.
|
| Basically Redis Inc is the one making the fork, which
| retains the Redis name since they purchased it from
| antirez.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| Not only that, AWS has been offering redis-as-a-service
| longer than the "Redis" organization has been.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| But if the shoe were on the other foot, AWS wouldn't
| hesitate to rip the carpet from under anyone.
| chii wrote:
| It doesnt matter if they would've or not. Presumed
| innocent until proven guilty (via action). Using this as
| an argument doesn't work to justify redis inc's actions.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I believe that Redis has an agreement of sorts with Salvatore
| Sanfilippo / Antirez, the creator of Redis.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Amazon / Google / Microsoft made a massive mistake by not
| hiring Antirez, it's chump change for them to throw him
| $1-2M a year at him so he can work on Redis for them full
| time.
| mariusor wrote:
| Has anyone asked Filippo if he still wants to work on
| Redis "for them" though? The fact that he stepped down
| suggests he doesn't.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon /
| Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that
| and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.
|
| Again, it's chump change, these companies drop that kinda
| money all the time in aquihires..
| chipdart wrote:
| > He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon /
| Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that
| and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.
|
| It sounds like a very bad deal for the likes of Amazon et
| al. The likes of Amazon offer Redis alongside memcache
| just because cloud adopters might want to use a memory
| cache service,but there is no value in buying trademarks
| for it.
|
| I mean, just take a quick look how Amazon offers managed
| RDBMS, and how the specific DB is just an afterthought
| behind a compatible interface.
|
| People seem to think that just because some company has
| cash that they should mindlessly spend it on things that
| add absolutely no value.
| emmp wrote:
| He worked there for 5 years. It probably didn't feel
| "random" for him.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Same with many open source creators.
|
| Plus some great projects don't even get (monetary)
| contributions from large corporations. I think because it
| could weaken their legal position.
| evanharwin wrote:
| This makes me think - is it actually _bad_ for Amazon
| /Google/Microsoft, that they now have to pay a licensing
| fee to Redis?
|
| I feel like there's an argument that these kind of
| licensing terms are almost beneficial to 'big cloud'
| because the cost/effort of all of these arrangements
| might dissuade smaller companies from trying to compete
| in the hosting and managed-services business.
| pas wrote:
| they don't have to pay. they offer a Redis-compatible
| service. whatever it is, nobody knows, and almost nobody
| cares. (sure, in practice they just forked it. but it was
| not AGPL-like when the fork happened, so ... c'est la
| vie)
| drewda wrote:
| Microsoft announced on the same day as the Redis license
| change that Azure's managed Redis offering will continue
| to run against the latest releases:
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-
| update-...
|
| Meaning that Microsoft is "paying to play" with Redis
| Ltd... while I have not seen any announcements from AWS
| or GCP.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I do wonder if Microsoft kicked this all off by telling
| Redis Ltd that they were willing to pay beforehand.
| jacurtis wrote:
| Yes, this seems likely since there is almost no way that
| an announcement from Microsoft would happen so quickly.
| There were months of back and forth of licensing meetings
| prior to this with Redis Labs and Microsoft.
|
| Microsoft would never just announce something like this
| on a whim.
| BartjeD wrote:
| Microsoft has its own redis alternative:
| https://github.com/microsoft/garnet
| alex_duf wrote:
| I mean I love redis, but Amazon Google and Microsoft all
| probably have readily available in memory key/value
| stores at hand. Throw a little money and they can make it
| redis compatible, so we wouldn't have to re-write any
| code.
|
| Redis is great as an off-the shelf component, but it's
| not exactly rocket science to re-implement for a big
| corporation. So redis doesn't really have any leverage in
| my opinion.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| It's all about branding and name recognition: they all
| profit from Redis via their cloud offerings. They have a
| strong incentive to support it and to have it as a viable
| open source project. Similar to other key opensource
| infrastructure.
|
| Then their cloud-specific solutions are the up-sell (and
| lock-in).
| RajT88 wrote:
| Not just that - there's a significant ecosystem around
| Redis. A huge number of client libraries and tools.
|
| Which is why Microsoft's new drop-in replacement works
| with all those things. It could gain traction - who
| knows.
| chipdart wrote:
| > It's all about branding and name recognition
|
| I don't think so. The only thing they need to let their
| customers know is that they offer a memory cache service
| that is compatible with this or that interface. Whether
| it's Redis, memcache, Garnet, or whatever it might be, it
| matters nothing at all. All they need to do is ensure
| clients can consume their service, and that is it.
|
| This whole thing sounds like a desperate cash grab that
| fails to argue any point on why it's in anyone's best
| interests to spend small fortunes on nothing at all.
| jacurtis wrote:
| AWS has been pushing MemoryDB, which is redis compatible
| storage, works with the redis clis and supports Redis
| features.
|
| I suspect in the long run, Amazon will eventually "pay"
| the licensing fee for customers that demand "Redis". But
| they will push everyone else towards their in-house fork
| of Redis that they brand MemoryDB or whatever. You will
| pay more for the Redis licensed version and AWS will
| steer you away from it, but it will be there if you are
| adamant.
|
| This is already happening with Aurora, which has Postgres
| and Mysql compatible versions. If your company is big
| enough for special pricing, then you know they want you
| on Aurora. The pricing discounts for Aurora are insane
| (50%+) compared to what you might get on a traditional
| Postgres of equivalent size (20%). They will probably do
| this with MemoryDB and Redis eventually. Redis is
| available if you really need it. But this other thing
| that they maintain is discountable to half the cost of
| the other one and it becomes a pretty obvious choice.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Already done. We are talking about a key/value store
| here. I don't get what all the histrionics is about.
| manfre wrote:
| They have engineering resources to maintain a fork, which
| they've made. https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
| mondomondo wrote:
| Good products == low valuations it would have stunned the
| investors if they focused of quality instead of
| marketing.
| wvh wrote:
| This. Why not support the projects a company uses in ways
| that go beyond the traditional ways of hiring employees
| in the form of physical bodies that defy traffic jams to
| spend large parts of their day in a physical building?
| There are some larger companies that employ open-source
| or third-party developers of course, but it seems to me
| that if your product is built around a technology or
| framework, it would make sense to invest directly in that
| project - share a developer resource as it were - instead
| of hiring an extra person in-company and make sure your
| use case and reliance is covered in the future.
|
| Both the internet and open-source enable alternative
| employment and funding models that up until now might
| have not have been sufficiently explored.
| bloppe wrote:
| This is actually pretty common. My company did exactly
| that with an Apache project founder. I know of several
| others. They still work on their own project, but have to
| shift priorities.
|
| Sounds like that's basically what happened here, too,
| except not with Google. I'm not sure why.
| sneak wrote:
| *one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn't
| mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis.
|
| It's a community effort and this is just as rude to the
| community that built it as they are claiming SaaS vendors
| are being to them by not "giving back".
|
| This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing free
| software is about as logically sound as expecting
| compensation from someone when you give them a gift.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing
| free software is about as logically sound as expecting
| compensation from someone when you give them a gift.
|
| Ironically this happened because the community was using
| the BSD license instead of the GPL, when the former
| allows someone to fork the code _under a different
| license_.
|
| If the big cloud providers wanted to stick it to them,
| they would create their own fork of the code under the
| GPL and make substantial contributions to it so that one
| becomes the main one.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Yep. Precisely. Licenses are working as expected. People
| that spin this as "stealing" are simply showing their own
| lack of understanding.
| plufz wrote:
| I think everybody here understand that you legally can
| fork bsd code under a new license. I think you and them
| differ in what you think is morally correct to do for an
| open source maintainer in the specific context of the
| redis project.
|
| (I don't know enough to be in either camp.)
| antirez wrote:
| When I chose BSD for Redis, I did it _exactly_ for these
| reasons. Before Redis, I mostly used the GPL license.
| Then my beliefs about licensing changed, so I picked the
| BSD, since it 's an "open field" license, everything can
| happen. One of the things I absolutely wanted, when I
| started Redis, was: to avoid that I needed some piece of
| paper from every contributor to give me the copyright
| and, at the same time, the ability, if needed, to take my
| fork for my products, create a commercial Redis PRO, or
| alike. At the same time the BSD allows for many branches
| to compete, with different licensing and development
| ideas.
|
| When authors pick a license, it's a serious act. It's not
| a joke like hey I pick BSD but mind you, I don't really
| want you to follow the terms! Make sure to don't fork or
| change license. LOL. A couple of years ago somebody
| forked Redis and then _sold_ it during some kind of
| acquisition. The license makes it possible, and nobody
| complained. Now Redis Inc. changes license, and other
| parties fork the code to develop it in a different
| context. Both things are OK with the license, so both
| things can be done.
|
| A different thing is what one believes to be correct or
| not for the future of some software. That is, if I was
| still in charge, would I change license? But that's an
| impossible game to play, I'm away from the company for
| four years and I'm not facing the current issues with AWS
| impossible-to-compete-with scenario. I don't know and I
| don't care, it does not make sense to do such guesswork.
| What I know for sure is that licensing is a spectrum. I
| release code under the MIT or BSD, but that's just me. I
| understand other choices as well. What I don't understand
| is making the future of open source in the hands of what
| OSI says it's correct and wrong. Read the terms of the
| license, and understand if you are fine with them.
| plufz wrote:
| I totally agree. Still I hope that many great projects
| under BSD and MIT will keep being actively developed
| under that very license, but I also enjoy the freedom of
| knowing that I can do more or less what I please with the
| code.
| evanelias wrote:
| > *one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn't
| mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called
| Redis.
|
| This is a false equivalency. No one is defining "creator"
| as "wrote all of the thing". When describing a
| project/product as a whole, there's a clear, massive
| difference between "creator" and "contributor".
|
| Let's say you get a small patch merged into the Linux
| kernel, would you then call yourself "one of the creators
| of Linux"? The vast majority of people would not find
| this remotely acceptable!
|
| How about proprietary software and employment
| arrangements. Let's say a Microsoft intern gets a few
| lines of code merged into SQL Server. Would you call them
| "one of the creators of SQL Server"?
|
| Extending this logic to other words, would you say a
| company with N employees actually has N founders? No,
| because these words mean different things.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I continue to have mixed feelings about this kind of thing.
|
| A (very) long time ago the Apache developers could have gone
| down this route.
|
| > You can only run Apache under very specific circumstances!
|
| Or memcached:
|
| > You are only allowed to run a memcached server if you're only
| caching your own website!
|
| We see how nonsensical this is
| wmf wrote:
| More like you can run Apache except in specific
| circumstances. People will put up with a lot if there's no
| alternative.
| ufocia wrote:
| The alternative is to write it yourself or commission it,
| so let's be honest, it is about the cost. When you don't
| know what something is about, it's about money
| crasshit wrote:
| > without paying any sort of compensation to the redis
| developers.
|
| Redis organization doesn't pay any sort of compensation to
| developers who contribute to redis source code. I do not see
| any difference here.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Doesn't Redis Labs employ paid contributors? Does Amazon
| donate their contributions back to the community?
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| According to the linked article, Amazon has contributed 5%
| of the contributions to Redis, while Redis, the company,
| has contributed 20%.
| jpc0 wrote:
| I'm not for or against in this case. I'm anti what Redis
| the company is doing but I don't give a crap otherwise.
|
| Are we really counting contribution based on LoC? Haven't
| we over the decades decided that isn't valid? Guess every
| person that makes this claim should once again have their
| performance based on LoC...
|
| Some simple examples, I'm not saying this is the case
| though. What if most of Amazon's contributions are high
| impact contributions where most of Redis orgs are simply
| maintenance or feature pushes. What if the same is true
| for a 1% contributor?
|
| By your own statement doesn't Tencent then have a larger
| claim to redis that Amazon or Redis does?
| sverhagen wrote:
| > Are we really counting contribution based on LoC?
|
| I think they didn't include the LoC in the article as
| anything other than a broad estimate of contributions,
| perhaps for lack of any better measurements.
| cloudboogie wrote:
| Right, now count in contributions from other cloud
| providers: tensent, huawei, alibaba and you'll find out
| that they contributed much more, than actual redis-
| employed developers
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Does Amazon donate their contributions back to the
| community?
|
| If they contributed to 5% of the code, and the code is
| open-source, then yes?
| coredog64 wrote:
| > without paying any sort of compensation to the redis
| developers.
|
| AWS employee Madelyn Olson was a committer on Redis since 2019.
| Since 2020, she was on the core team of maintainers.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Here's what she wrote about the above article:
|
| > If you're looking for a primer on what is going on with
| Redis and why its license change matters, this is the article
| to read. As someone close to the situation, this is the best
| summary I've seen.
| a2800276 wrote:
| Where?
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| LinkedIn
| ufocia wrote:
| > This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by
| providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of
| compensation to the redis developers.
|
| But the developers licensed the software at no charge. What
| kind of compensation are they entitled to then?
|
| Sounds like a case of sellers remorse/take-backsies one of the
| problems that open source was aiming to solve.
| bramblerose wrote:
| They are not entitled to compensation over their previous
| work, but you/me/AWS are also not entitled to their _future_
| work.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| But when you see that currently Redis is mainly developed
| by Chinese companies or AWS all of this is rather ironic.
| jamespo wrote:
| 5% of contributions is not "mainly" from AWS
| ufocia wrote:
| Not sure what you meant. Is it wrong for Chinese
| companies or AWS to develop Redis or is it great, or
| something in-between?
|
| I wonder how many bellyachers here contributed to Redis
| vs. just leeched. (Not a rhetorical question.) How many
| are just in the peanut gallery (just like I).
| ufocia wrote:
| Absolutely!
| ensignavenger wrote:
| AWS was directly funding Redis development, from the article,
| they are one of the top contributors, they even employed one of
| the core redis maintainers full time to work on Redis.
| esquire_900 wrote:
| Which is peanuts compared to the 350 million that the VCs
| invested. You're totally right, but I think the internal
| financial pressure is higher.
| gklitz wrote:
| Ah, so it's not about open source and moral
| responsibilities. It's about the responsibility we all owe
| to VCs to ensure they make money. Gotcha.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Isn't that the deal we sign up for when we take VC money?
|
| I like free money as much as the next guy, but VC isn't
| it.
| Macha wrote:
| Who's we though? The former Garantia data did, but redis
| users didn't.
|
| (And also I'd argue most of redis' value to users was
| already in place before the VC backed company got
| involved)
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| You're right of course.
|
| From my point of view managed databases only really make
| sense for toy projects, if you're using these things at
| scale it's much more economical to buy some servers and
| hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis.
| But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish
| for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is
| fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.
| zilti wrote:
| Yes, it is ludicrous. My company uses hosted databases
| and "droplets" from DigitalOcean. Their pricing is
| absolutely absurd. I always wondered how they stay in
| business, but now I know.
| chii wrote:
| > From my point of view managed databases only really
| make sense for toy projects
|
| it is more expensive to buy managed, but you offload
| work. I would imagine toy projects are more cash
| constrained, and makes more sense to rent cheap servers
| and roll your own.
|
| On the other hand, larger scale projects would rather pay
| to offload the work of managing and scaling redis.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| In my experience using redis, one of its better
| attributes is how easy it is to manage and scale. I've
| never scaled it to say, Facebook levels, but at that
| scale, I'm not sure managed services make much sense
| either.
| ufocia wrote:
| All the Redis users have is a license to use and an
| expectation. An expectation is a belief that Santa will
| bring presents, that's all.
|
| Where the value is or was is pure sophistry. You don't
| have a crystal ball, just like everyone else.
|
| All this discussion is envious bellyaching from those
| that are probably leeches themselves. They just want the
| free gravy train running for themselves.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| And the license allows them to fork it. Which is what
| they are doing. Open Source working exactly as it should.
| I just want to be sure the facts are understood. Amazon
| has many faults and there are plenty of reasons to
| dislike and not use them. But leeching off of Redis Labs
| is not one of them.
| stephenr wrote:
| > that redis will remain free to use in their "community
| edition",
|
| I mean, they've already changed licensing for parts of the
| project twice in 6 years. I have zero faith that they won't
| pull a Vader and change the terms of the agreement again.
|
| > continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!)
|
| I'd guess that > 99% of any "improvements" Redis the company
| make, will affect < 1% of users.
|
| As has been pointed out numerous times, it's essentially "done"
| in terms of functionality - but as a VC funded company they
| have to constantly do "something", so they'll keep adding niche
| upon niche features, giving the resume padders at other VC
| companies something sparkly and new to spend their budgets on.
|
| Meanwhile 99% of people just need a fast key/value store, and
| maybe half of those need it to be distributed/replicated, and
| maybe a third need it to run some kind of scripting (Lua) to do
| "in-db" operations atomically.
|
| With the addition of native TLS several years ago redis is, for
| 99% of users "functionally complete".
|
| Sure, new TLS versions will come along and need support, kernel
| or library features they use will adapt or have improvements,
| etc, but I think you're vastly over estimating the amount of
| "improvements" to expect that will impact the vast, vast
| majority of users.
|
| > preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-
| a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis
| developers
|
| Look I hate AWS more than most people would find reasonable,
| and even I'll admit they're not the "bad guys" in this
| scenario.
|
| The project was released as BSD licensed, so AWS could if they
| wanted, fork it, and offer a service based on that, and make
| any fixes/improvements just in their service offering.
|
| They didn't. They had _paid staff_ contributing back to the
| redis project, for a number of years. This was literally the
| goldilocks project of the OSS world:
|
| Numerous massive tech companies who all have the financial
| ability to simply run their own fork, and the legal right to do
| so (due to BSD-3), willingly contributing to the maintenance of
| the project.
|
| As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis (and
| HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the tech
| community in general: if an OSS project you rely on transfers
| control from it's founder(s) to a company, you probably need to
| consider continuing with a fork from the last open version,
| because apparently "(try to) monetise popular open source" is
| the newest way to win the douchebag villain award given to MBAs
| at VC funded companies.
| fmajid wrote:
| KeyDB, the multithreaded fork of Redis, is already way faster
| as a KV store.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Agreed. This a good engineering effort over at Snap. It
| does clustering too.
|
| https://docs.keydb.dev/docs/cluster-tutorial/
|
| I wished they'd release some of their "Pro" stuff and/or
| internal-only features.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis
| (and HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the
| tech community in general: if an OSS project you rely on
| transfers control from it's founder(s) to a company, you
| probably need to consider continuing with a fork from the
| last open version, because apparently "(try to) monetise
| popular open source" is the newest way to win the douchebag
| villain award given to MBAs at VC funded companies.
|
| Or, even simpler, if the project is not contributed to some
| open source foundation, and does not have copyleft license -
| it's a trap.
| ufocia wrote:
| Contributing to a foundation may be a trap too. If you
| assign your copyrights to a foundation, in many
| jurisdictions you no longer have control of the code you
| wrote. That means they could license the code in a way that
| you wouldn't do.
| crote wrote:
| Yes, but that's where the "foundation" part comes in. If
| it's one whose charter explicitly states that it exists
| to support open-source software development, it is
| legally unable to do otherwise.
| mort96 wrote:
| Whether it's gratis or not isn't the issue. Some people used
| Redis not only because it's free of cost, but also because it's
| open source. It's not anymore.
| ufocia wrote:
| The copies that were created under BSD still are. Go fork and
| multiply. You can even make your contributions GPL or
| commercially licensed.
| fastball wrote:
| It is open source up until Redis 7.4. Why does it matter to
| you (someone that cares about it being open source) if future
| versions created by this specific company are not? You (or
| someone else) can fork it and continue the work in an open
| manner. AFAIAC that is the literal purpose of open source.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't understand what your point is. I'm saying that it
| doesn't matter that the community edition is still free of
| charge, because it's the fact that it's not open source
| anymore that's the issue. What part of that are you
| responding to?
| jamespo wrote:
| I suppose they're getting at why was it important that
| Redis was open source to you? Under the assumption
| someone else would be responsible for free updates?
| kyriakos wrote:
| Isn't this the same with Elastic? Or that was a different
| situation?
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Yeah. As usual whenever something like this happens, there's an
| endless supply of blatantly misleading FUD by open source
| license purists. Let's not pretend that Redis has become
| unusable by....all but a few organisations selling hosted Redis
| solutions. The people who are "rushing" to replace Redis are
| probably doing so in a way that isn't on their boss's radar,
| and it'll stay that way because their bosses would probably
| tell them to go do more important things.
| ufocia wrote:
| They're not purists. They are zealots.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Would be nice if Redis wasnt eating Lua's lunch and would make
| a big (public) donation to
| https://www.lua.org/donations.html#donation (Maybe they do, but
| it wasn't something i could find evidence of)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The problem with this is, it's virtually impossible to compete
| against the FOSS trunk that your now-closed-source software
| branched off of, or FOSS clones of it. Low-end proprietary
| UNIXes got wiped out by GNU/Linux and the BSDs, for example.
|
| Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and
| resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already
| exists. They'll do so because it is to their advantage to not
| charge for the license fees Redis now wants.
| fransje26 wrote:
| How to saw off the branch you are sitting on..
|
| > Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent
| and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that
| already exists.
|
| And they most possibly will. Goodbye, and thank you for the
| fish!
| gymbeaux wrote:
| AWS also forked ElasticSearch into their "OpenSearch" DBaaS. It
| caused some issues at my last job because OpenSearch limited us
| to a particular version of the NEST .NET library that was missing
| some newer functionality. Real bummer and feels like a step in
| the wrong direction given all we've accomplished in tech over the
| last 20 years.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| OpenSearch infuriates me to no end.
|
| It lacks so many improvements and advancements since the
| ancient version it was forked at, but because AWS already has
| an org's payments details, teams often refuse to look at
| Elasticsearch.
|
| Even basic things like autocompleting queries have been WIP for
| half a decade now:
|
| https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/sample-code/...
|
| https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/...
|
| The superiority AWS was slinging when they "bravely" took the
| mantle looks terrible in retrospect
| busterarm wrote:
| Teams should refuse to look at Elasticsearch. It's license is
| SSPL and they ship free and non-free features in the same
| binary. It's a ticking time bomb to run it in your company.
|
| Also you can just keep your data in postgres and use paradedb
| and stop having to deal with dramatically more expensive
| infrastructure and the JVM.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Ah yes, battle-tested Elasticsearch is a ticking time bomb
| for not wanting to get their lunch eaten by Jeff Bezos.
|
| Just use this pre-V1 public beta software I stumbled upon
| instead.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| The reality is that open search will be (if it is not
| already) more widely deployed and "battle tested" with
| bugs that production use raise resolved in it.
|
| The narrative that opensearch is some kind of unsafe
| abandonware is clearly nonsense when you read the commit
| log: https://github.com/opensearch-
| project/OpenSearch/commits/mai...
|
| All I can say is, sure, if you want elastic use elastic.
|
| ...but opensearch is fine. I use it and have no problem
| with it.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| How did you go from
|
| "It lacks so many improvements and advancements since the
| ancient version it was forked at"
|
| to "opensearch is some kind of unsafe abandonware"?
|
| Would love to learn the thought process here.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > Just use this pre-V1 public beta software I stumbled
| upon instead.
|
| ...but I mean, I'm not really up for playing the
| "pedantically correct about what he/she said" game with
| you.
|
| Instead how about you comment on the point I'm actually
| making, which is:
|
| opensearch is perfectly fine for most people.
|
| For most people, there is no meaningful distinction
| between elastic and opensearch.
|
| Opensearch is a healthy project which regularly receives
| updates and is widely used in production in large
| deployments.
|
| If you have any meaningful or compelling argument why any
| of those three things is _not true_ by all means, I'd
| love to hear about it.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| No one's asking you to play any games: I'll settle for
| reading before you comment.
|
| > Also you can just keep your data in postgres and use
| paradedb and stop having to deal with dramatically more
| expensive infrastructure and the JVM.
|
| That was the comment I replied to. If you thought
| OpenSource was pre-V1 public beta software I'm not sure
| why you're even opining on this.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > If you have any meaningful or compelling argument why
| any of those three things is not true by all means, I'd
| love to hear about it.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Feel free to read the other comments you ignored.
| busterarm wrote:
| paradedb is mainly just a package of established/battle-
| tested postgres extensions like bm25 and pgsparse all on
| top of cloudnative-pg.
| xenago wrote:
| Opensearch has been great so far, no issues ever since
| deploying the very initial forked version. Neither of those
| links seem like dealbreakers, am I missing something? Is the
| idea that opensearch is not usable in production because of
| missing autocomplete?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Don't put words in my mouth out of desperation.
|
| > Is the idea that opensearch is not usable in production
|
| No one said it's not usable in production.
|
| > because of missing autocomplete?
|
| We have an operations team that wants to do searches across
| 200+ fields for an embedded device's logs. The engine
| supports it just fine, but what kind of UX is it to expect
| them to do manual lookups of the fields available?
|
| People with simple use cases of course can't imagine how
| important discovery features are.
|
| Of course those aren't all the parity gaps, a random
| sampling of the ones I banged my head against:
|
| - No Log Stream view, also critical for observability
| operations with any semblance of a reasonable UX
|
| - No wildcard type, critical for machine generated logs
| having sane searchability. Searches are literally broken
| otherwise by false negatives.
|
| - No nested fields in visualizations, can't visualize
| properly structured logs.
|
| - Can't change indexes on visualizations, need to recreate
| the entire visualization.
|
| - Can't use underscores at the start of a field name.
|
| - Doesn't support auto refreshing fields which again, is
| terrible for embedding device logging
|
| Elastic moved past basic search since the days OS forked it
| at, and now it's a genuinely nice choice for observability.
|
| There's a literal report I wrote on the gaps there to
| justify going to Elastic before giving up on our slow RFP
| process. Every gap no matter how small is representative of
| what's wrong with OpenSearch: they don't have 1/10th the
| incentive to actually put comparable resources to Elastic
| behind it.
|
| Especially when you have people lining up to make excuses
| based on the fact they're clueless about the gaps between
| them. Literal droves of people using it to provide a
| middling search experience to their users just don't see
| anything wrong with it.
| gkbrk wrote:
| > OpenSearch infuriates me to no end.
|
| > Even basic things like autocompleting queries have been WIP
| for half a decade now.
|
| It's an open-source project. If this bothered you for half a
| decade, you could always submit a patch.
|
| Apparently it didn't bother enough other people that no one
| cared to send a patch.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Linux distros also infuriate me sometimes, but:
|
| 1. I'm not using Mac-jail-OS
|
| 2. I'm not insane to even remotely consider the possibility
| of using Windows
|
| So, yea, I'm using OpenSearch.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Query autocomplete is a feature of the Kibana web interface,
| not of the ElasticSearch database itself. Which isn't to say
| that it isn't useful, but it's more of a niche utility than a
| core feature of the stack.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Maybe you're unaware OpenSearch covers Kibana's
| functionality via OpenSearch-Dashboards? Just like the rest
| of X-Pack under OpenDistro pre-name change
|
| It's not exactly a niche utility for observability unless
| you plan on hand searching hundreds of fields. But of
| course see my other comment for a list of the other
| observability fumbles they've made.
|
| Elastic chose a pretty great time to start to give
| observability attention, and OS didn't keep up there.
| Meanwhile search is becoming more and more focused on
| integrating semantic search (which Lucene isn't
| particularly excellent at)
| duskwuff wrote:
| What I'm getting at here is that there are use cases for
| ElasticSearch/OpenSearch beyond log collection and
| analysis; many of them don't involve Kibana at all.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Why don't we try to fix the "cannot be used for bezos
| yacht"-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of
| especially databases who _want_ to do good in a meaningful way?
| Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what
| we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately
| afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into
| paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes from those
| unknowns.
|
| Afaik the non-discriminatory use is the only ideological hard
| line. I guess people can debate that forever, like with GPL and
| copyleft and such. But my edgy take is that most people don't
| really care about deep ideology yet want something that promotes
| a healthy hacker- and small-business friendly open source
| ecosystem. Ideally, a simple, well-understood license that
| restricts "re-selling your product" and not much more, that you
| can slap on a project without a legal team, just like with the
| MIT license.
| wmf wrote:
| A bunch of people are working on this from different angles.
| It's in a chaotic phase right now but it will probably
| consolidate later.
| llm_trw wrote:
| The best idea I've come up with is a license which only grants
| the rights to a natural person to use the software otherwise it
| is identical to the MIT, GPL or AGPL, whatever your cup of tea
| is.
|
| If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| This could be an interesting idea, but how would this
| constrain incorporating the licensed software in a larger
| piece of software? Either as a library, or a component like a
| Docker image?
|
| Would it be "viral" in the sense that, if I want to publish
| software that internally uses a Docker container running
| software with such a license, my own software can be used
| only by natural persons?
| llm_trw wrote:
| Yes, you will have to publish under a license with the same
| clauses.
|
| Not because you are distributing it, but because only
| natural persons can run the software.
| aragilar wrote:
| There exist shared-source licences which do this
| (https://prosperitylicense.com/ is almost what you describe,
| but it's the one I can recall of the top of my head), but you
| can't (by definition) have a open source license like this.
| bawolff wrote:
| This is not a new idea... i mean its so old it was called out
| as being "not free" back in the 80s by the gnu project.
| llm_trw wrote:
| The GNU project has failed at getting source code to users
| so badly that despite owning a half dozen GPL based devises
| I have no access to the source code of any of them.
|
| At this point listening to them is at best pointless and at
| worst actively harmful. This is what happens when the last
| time you worked at a real job was some time in the 1980s.
| bawolff wrote:
| Have you tried? Did you write a letter to the vendor
| asking fot source code? Did they refuse?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Certainly not a new idea. As recently as early 1990s I
| licensed shareware that had terms requiring corporations to
| pay for a license with different fees and/or restrictions as
| those for individual, non-commercial users. Somehow this
| ideal was lost. Today, software authors seems allegiant to
| so-called "tech" companies, not to individual, non-commercial
| end users. As a non-commercial end user, I would prefer to
| use versions of open source software that are _not_ receiving
| contributions from so-called "tech" companies. But I never
| see software licenses that say, in so many words, "If you are
| Amazon, Google, etc., then you need to contact the author for
| a commercial license." I used to think back in the 1990s that
| open source software was aimed at least in part at giving
| individuals an option to use software outside the control or
| influence of large corporations. This type of software does
| not feel as if it has the same goal today. It feels like it
| is literally _made for_ those large companies, not
| individual, non-commercial end users. Software authors seem
| delighted to engage with the companies, but generally prefer
| to avoid engagement with non-commercial end users.
| llm_trw wrote:
| No, a non-commercial license is not a natural born person
| only license. If you're a human you get to use the GPL to
| your hearts content. If you're a corporation you do not.
|
| It's not a hard concept to understand, but it does mean
| people can't steal from the commons so they spend a lot of
| time trying to not understand it.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I would have to look at the terms to understand. Your
| comment just reminded me of those sharware-era non-
| commercial licenses. That's all. Did not intend to
| suggest the license you mentioned is similar or the same
| in any other respect than having different license terms
| for commercial entities versus other users.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I think you'll find that the vast vast majority of us don't
| care about the whole "cannot be used for bezos yacht" problem
| when we contribute to free software.
|
| I contribute with no expectation of monitory gain and
| absolutely zero desire for some random foundation or company
| that's part or almost always created later to make any money.
| If some contributors want to make money become consultants the
| "amazon problem" isn't a real one.
|
| I love when Amazon or Google or whoever starts working with a
| project I'm touching it means it will normally get high quality
| contributions.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| How do you make money?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I work a normal job.... Open source is a couple of hours a
| week at most. It's a hobby for me some months I do nothing
| other I crush bugs like it was my job.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The problem is that big OSS database projects have teams
| of paid developers working on them and they want to make
| their money back. You can do this by offering paid
| support or a hosted offering. Having someone like Amazon
| take your product and build their own hosted version
| really cuts into that revenue.
|
| Now, Redis was AFAIK pretty much just written by antirez
| and maybe it could have stayed that way, but even
| exceptional individuals clearly want to move on
| eventually and you'll likely need a team of maintainers.
| Distributed data products are complex and need people who
| contribute more than nights and weekends.
| vasco wrote:
| The best open source software is developed by unpaid
| people. Even the ones with companies around them, the
| best work is done in the first phase when everyone is
| still unpaid.
|
| The "cuts into their revenues" part usually mostly
| affects their ability to keep developing the non open
| source parts anyway, their SaaS dashboard, their billing,
| etc.
|
| Take redis, you could never change it again and it's
| fine. There's no need to support anyone, it's complete
| software that stands on its own.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Until the discovery of a log4j-equivalent, then suddenly
| it's not fine.
| eindiran wrote:
| OP's "cannot be used for bezos yacht" problem is about
| discriminatory licenses. If you don't care that eg Amazon can
| use your software, there is nothing at odds with what OP sees
| as a problem (discrimiatory licenses that violate points 5 or
| 6 of the OSD[0]).
|
| [0] https://opensource.org/osd
| jumploops wrote:
| I believe this is the goal of https://faircode.io ?
| dehrmann wrote:
| > re-selling your product" and not much more
|
| That's not what AWS is doing. AWS is selling management
| services. The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are
| says this is a significant value add.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And that's also how DB companies try to monetize. So a
| hyperscaler offering this directly really undermines your
| entire business. In the past you could offer a Enterprise
| version with support, but with the move to the cloud that
| market is shrinking and Amazon is eating the new market
| themselves
| thayne wrote:
| Perhaps we need a different way to fund database
| development (not necessarily a single company monetizing
| it).
|
| If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at
| an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings
| form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your
| product is technically superior in every way, you are
| another entity they have to do business with (billing,
| support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds
| friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure,
| which means higher network latency, and network costs to
| get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have
| hosting options that run inside all the major cloud
| providers, in any regions your customers use, which means
| you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for
| the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of
| having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud
| platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much
| more difficult for you to build integration with the
| cloud's IAM or other services.
|
| Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service
| that is part of the cloud platform than from another
| provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the
| hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the
| hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I
| don't know how to get there.
|
| As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with
| the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the
| pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud
| companies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Perhaps we need a different way to fund database
| development (not necessarily a single company monetizing
| it).
|
| We have several in use by long-running open source
| database projects that have not felt a need to jump on
| proprietary source-available licensing, even though firms
| like AWS are indeed using their code and selling
| services.
|
| AWS (and other big firms with hosted services) are also
| sponsoring those DBs with code and/or money, but in many
| cases the basic model predates the big push to the cloud,
| and other downstream businesses were doing that before
| AWS and other cloud hosts.
| dehrmann wrote:
| What you're sort of proposing is cloud SaaSaaS. AWS would
| build out hooks for providers to manage the DBs they sell
| so they look like part of AWS. The main problem is AWS
| already has most of the services most of their customers
| want, so there isn't a big market opportunity.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > And that's also how DB companies try to monetize
|
| Open source DBs have been around a while, though. A
| minority of them trying to pay the bills with monopoly
| rents on hosted services is... much newer. Its how VC-
| backed DB-as-central-tech startups try to monetize, and,
| yeah, if you are going to do that, you need a proprietary
| license.
|
| But don't expect people to treat your DB like an open
| source DB, then, either. You can be Oracle instead of
| Postgres, but you can't also expect to get treated like
| Postgres, instead of Oracle.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > That's not what AWS is doing.
|
| Well yeah technically the product is free but the value comes
| largely from unpaid labor. That needs to change if we want a
| healthy small business sector around larger open source
| products. It's not based in opinion or ideological conviction
| on my end, but rather watching this frictionous and awkward
| transformation to BSL-style licenses happen over and over
| with small-mid-size companies who are building valuable
| products and want to be as open as possible while running a
| business.
|
| > The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says
| this is a significant value add.
|
| Indeed, and that's a good thing, because it means a path to a
| sustainable business model is feasible! However, if you
| subsidize the product (make it free and open) in order to
| make it back in management fees, then you need legal rights
| to it. It could be "you have to use $PROJECTs own management
| product" but that's quite narrow thinking. It's a win-win for
| everyone else if mega-players like aws can provide their own
| management _but_ they will have to rev-share with the project
| owner, on their terms. That's a battle-tested model that
| works in all kinds of sectors, with much smaller actors.
| aragilar wrote:
| Define "fix". By definition you cannot have an open source
| licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht". Either you
| accept that, and don't rely on exclusivity for income (which
| really what the whole relicensing thing is about), or you don't
| open source your code (and accept that not being open source is
| a problem for some people). Open source + exclusivity for
| income is an unstable state, and really only works if no-one
| else competes with you (e.g. a specific niche), or you have
| some other means to enforce it (e.g. Red Hat limiting access to
| source to its customers, and not renewing contracts if they
| share the code).
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Define "fix".
|
| It's early. Everyone is confused. If I could define it, I
| would have provided a defintion.
|
| At this stage, it's about acquiring requirements and looking
| at prior art. And being humble about the solution space. No?
| If you don't think there's any problem today, then argue that
| point.
|
| > By definition you cannot have an open source licence which
| says "cannot be used for bezos yacht".
|
| By definition by what definition? There are already
| disagreements about what open source is, long before these
| business models. The problem solving comes first, and then
| there may or not be a debate whether about whether the
| solution fits better into an existing definition or a new
| one.
|
| > Either you accept that [...] or you don't open source your
| code
|
| But why? Is this an intrinsic duality or an
| anccidental/historical one? Or is it about preventing scope
| creep of the open source term? The latter is easy to solve -
| don't call it open source. Or at least defer the debate.
| pabs3 wrote:
| > By definition by what definition?
|
| By the "Open Source Definition":
|
| https://opensource.org/osd/
| klabb3 wrote:
| Right. It's a public benefit org based in CA. I very much
| appreciate what they do, but I don't think they own or
| should own the term. In either case, it's a moot point
| because it's just a term definition. The important thing
| is to find a good model that promotes the same or very
| similar benefits we get from traditional OSS but in an
| evolving world.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's early. Everyone is confused.
|
| No, it is not, it is decades in, in a well-understood area.
| Some VC-backed firms (and the VC's backing them, who see
| this as critical beyond the immediate firms) want to trade
| on the idea and popularity of open source without its
| substance because open source _as has has been known for
| decades_ is not a viable foundation for the kind of
| business model that they would like, but has at the same
| time secured the kind of mindshare in the market that makes
| it difficult for proprietary software to achieve the kind
| of rapid ramp-up that provides the timing and combination
| of returns they want. So they've decided to spend a lot of
| effort making everyone feel confused at some ginned up new
| threat to open-source, which is _not_ a threat to open
| source, not something that open source community hasn't
| known about for decades, but just a problem for a bait-and-
| switch business model in which software gains traction
| trading on the cachet of open source and then rakes in
| monopoly rents that avoiding is one of the benefits to
| users of open source licensing.
|
| They want users to see them like Postgres, but they want to
| milk users like Oracle. That's the problem - a marketing
| problem for proprietary software vendors. The attempt to
| sell confusion is an attempt to conceal that that is all
| the problem is.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Dislike of VCs as much as the next guy, but is this a
| representative picture? Many companies I've seen have
| been genuinely interesting, like SurrealDB, CockroachDB
| and Hashicorp. Are you saying it's all a long bait and
| switch game?
| aragilar wrote:
| In some cases I wouldn't be surprised, in others sure
| maybe the founders did believe in open source at some
| point (there are definitely individuals who claim to have
| never changed their opinion, but their writings would
| suggest otherwise), but either they've left (voluntarily
| or not) or simply they gave away control to others who
| are only in it to make money.
|
| As always, Chesterton's fence applies: all of the 10
| points of the OSD were widely debated at the time (as was
| its predecessor, the Debian Free Software Guidelines), so
| it's worth explaining why the issues raised then no
| longer apply.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > Define "fix". By definition you cannot have an open source
| licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht"
|
| FOSS acceptance is a grey area. Something has been tried with
| the AGPL, which is FOSS, however, it has been deemed not to
| provide adequate protection by companies creating similar
| products (while, ironically, being considered poisonous by
| companies using them), so the SSPL was created, but it hasn't
| been accepted as FOSS license because its intent was
| unclearly defined
| (http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-
| review_lists.o...).
| lolinder wrote:
| > that you can slap on a project without a legal team
|
| The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to
| the kinds of projects that _do_ have legal teams.
|
| If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste
| time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds
| that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT
| and be done with it.
|
| If you're participating in a large decentralized project like
| Postgres, then having a big player like Amazon providing
| managed hosting is actually a huge plus because you get lots of
| contributions from the big players [0]. There's very little
| downside for a project like this, and lots of upside.
|
| The only type of FOSS project that _needs_ an "AWS can't use
| this" license is a project that is driven by a single for-
| profit company which decided to make their business model
| "provide a managed solution layered on top of AWS".
| Unsurprisingly, it's hard to compete with AWS on price when
| you're using AWS itself as your vendor, so these companies tend
| to be the ones that switch licenses to tell AWS they're not
| allowed to compete.
|
| These companies almost certainly have their own legal counsel
| and they represent a tiny minority of FOSS projects, so it's
| not obvious to me that we need a new standardized anti-AWS
| license. Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-
| hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business
| model and try something different next time.
|
| [0] https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
| meowface wrote:
| People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years
| creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open
| source database (or other project) used by millions deserve
| compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since
| they swooped in much later, but the general principle of
| trying to monetize your project with source-available
| licenses doesn't feel unethical to me.
|
| You're right that it's probably not a great business model
| most of the time, but what is a good business model to
| collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating
| years of your life to something loved by millions of people?
| It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service
| with ads, or something.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they
| swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying
| to monetize your project with source-available licenses
| doesn't feel unethical to me.
|
| Yes, monetizing with a proprietary license, whether source
| available or not, doesn't seem unethical to most people
| outside of Free Software ideologues.
|
| "The licensing model isn't unethical but competing ones
| are" isn't why open source licenses became popular over
| proprietary (including source available) licenses, the fact
| that they commoditized the underlying software, enabled
| competing orojects evolved from the same codebase on
| essentially equal terms (which also allowed a competing
| project to fully replace the original if the original at
| some point failed the community) and, as hosted offerings
| became more common, the zero licensing friction for hosted
| solutions, that's what did it.
|
| It does mean charging monopoly rents for a hosted service
| isn't a viable way to recover development costs and pay
| returns to VCs, but until fairly recently, no one was
| trying to do VC-backed startups around single open-source
| products with that as their whole business plan, and the
| arguments as to why that would be a bad idea were well
| developed by the mid-1990s
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and
| continually improving an open source database (or other
| project) used by millions deserve compensation.
|
| Redis Labs can start by compensating its external
| contributors (Tencent, Amazon, Alibaba among them) if they
| care about fairness this much.
| Macha wrote:
| Don't forget it's dependencies like the Linux kernel
| developers or GCC etc.
| struant wrote:
| There is no requirement to make money to have a successful
| open source project.
|
| That being said. Monetizing open source is fine so long as
| people are up front about from the beginning. People are
| upset because switching the license is effectively changing
| the rules in the middle of the game.
|
| It is like going out to a restaurant and in the middle of
| your meal they change policy from having free refills to
| charging per cup. Either policy is fine, but changing
| policies is a scumbag move. A lot of people would have
| never sat down to eat there if the extra drinks weren't
| going to be free. Especially if free drinks was the sole
| reason a lot of them were going there.
| lolinder wrote:
| > People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend
| years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an
| open source database (or other project) used by millions
| deserve compensation.
|
| Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked
| to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on
| Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller
| managed hosting providers and consultancies.
|
| _That_ is a sustainable funding model for an open source
| database project. What isn 't sustainable is building a
| business around the idea that _only_ your company will ever
| profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The
| whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are
| shared with the whole community.
| photonthug wrote:
| > The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant
| to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams
|
| So you want to advocate that every future database /
| infrastructure company needs to burn part of their runway to
| hire lawyers to do the repetitive work of making sure they
| can both try to be open and try to continue to exist? Plus
| we, the users, get to try to decode reams of legalese instead
| of using a convenient three-letter handle for an industry
| standard, like GPL or MIT? This does not seem ideal..
| lolinder wrote:
| Please read to the end:
|
| > Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-
| hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business
| model and try something different next time.
|
| The business model these companies chose was fundamentally
| broken. It's only fundamentally broken for a specific class
| of backend tooling.
|
| I believe that future database/infrastructure projects
| should continue to use the FOSS licenses we all know and
| love and find a sustainability model that works without
| compromising the freedoms that make free software free.
| Postgres, Linux, SQLite, the BSDs, and many other projects
| in similar spaces have led the way.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| There's many things that I don't like about how open source
| works, but non-discriminatory licensing is not one of them.
|
| In fact, the concept of the four freedoms as necessary parts of
| a more fundamental _freedom_ is one of the things that I value
| the most about the free software /open source world.
|
| In hindsight, I think that the probability that things turned
| out the way they did in this regard was relatively low, but the
| ideological drive of GNU and RMS made the world see the problem
| from a philosophical perspective rather than a practical one
| (even among people that don't fully agree with RMS/GNU/FSF).
| thayne wrote:
| I'm much more sympathetic to a company that starts out with
| this kind of license than one who changes the license after
| accepting contributions under a more permissive license, which
| is basically a bait and switch on those developers. It's even
| worse when the company previously promised not to do such a
| thing, as is the case with redis. And this is especially bad
| because the company that is now called Redis didn't even create
| the database, they took over an existing project.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Source available is good, better than proprietary
|
| "Source available" is a subcategory of proprietary, not "better
| than proprietary".
|
| > But my edgy take is that most people don't really care about
| deep ideology
|
| I think most people that orefer open source to proprietary
| software _either_ care about the business benefits open-source
| provides over proprietary (including source-available) software
| or have an ideological affinity for Free Software, occasionally
| both.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The reason these licenses "can't" be fixed is because the OSI
| approves open source licenses and Amazon is their second
| biggest corporate sponsor.
|
| If they approved SSPL they'd probably have to lay off a staff
| member or two.
| rnts08 wrote:
| So you're suggesting the game engine model, you're free to use
| this software for whatever until you make $x from it?
|
| Unity was like that before they screwed it up, I have heard of
| other systems as well but not sure since it's not my cup of
| tea.
| noirscape wrote:
| The problem is that in the minds of FOSS people, you might as
| well try to argue that you want more proprietary software.
|
| The "major platform hijacks our code for the web" is a valid
| concern, but the FOSS people have always kinda gone "well fuck
| you for having these concerns". That's... I guess fine enough
| when the majority of FOSS wasn't part of a SaaS stack, but now
| that the majority of big name libraries and tools _are_ , it's
| becoming clearer and clearer that the OSD is just too lacking
| for those concerns.
|
| To be clear, this isn't a defense of SSPL or similar anti-Bezos
| licenses (the best one I've seen is the BSL, which transforms
| into a traditional OSS license after X years if you want my
| opinion), moreso an observation that there's a clear need here
| that can't be met by OSD. Paying developers on top of the FOSS
| model is hard; doing support favors entrenched suppliers
| because of the CYA problem (this is why AWS has the advantage
| they do) and I'm pretty sure that even if you do the support
| model, it usually just doesn't pan out.
|
| The main reason 90% of these licenses suck is far moreso
| because lawyers will draft contracts and licenses in such a way
| for you that they'll always give you the advantage. The SSPL
| being borderline impossible to comply with is by design for
| example.
| rokkitmensch wrote:
| I so very much wish that Datomic had been licensed this way.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why?
| PHGamer wrote:
| Do we need to "FIX" opensource? I am being serious here. It seems
| like people aren't getting it. Open Source is about openess and
| the ability to modify. Yes, people can lose money to cloud
| provider hosting but why does an Open Source project need to make
| a lot of money?
|
| I say alot because its not like they can't still make money. They
| can still consult, they can still offer support or hosting but
| because theyre not making millions they want a "new" license.
|
| Its stupid. you solve the itch then your done unless your doing
| maintance. people making open source software like paid software,
| constantly adding new features and changing things to justify
| their existance. You dont need millions in devs if your just
| solving a core problem.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Are there even any non-VC-backed companies with those issues?
| Whenever this drama and forking happens, it seems to be venture
| capital.
| fractalb wrote:
| I feel copyleft licenses look more favourable at this point of
| time. What's the value of more free/business friendly licenses if
| you can't guarantee that the same license will apply for all the
| future releases? Looks more like a bait and switch policy.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The future is never guaranteed. Much less if you have no paid
| contract with the people building and maintaining the floor
| underneath your feet.
| fractalb wrote:
| AWS, GCP have assurance that they won't need to pay for their
| Linux infrastructure. What is it if it wasn't for copyleft
| licenses(GPL)?
| endisneigh wrote:
| What assurance is that?
| crabmusket wrote:
| Am I right in understanding that the relicensing was possible
| because of the CLA, not just because of the BSD license? Would
| a permissively licensed project that didn't use a CLA be
| vulnerable in the same way?
| fractalb wrote:
| GPL mandates that all derived software must carry the same
| license. No need for CLA, as I understand it.
| fractalb wrote:
| I misunderstood your comment. Yes, CLA's make it possible
| to change the license. I guess CLA's won't work for GPL'd
| software.
| pmontra wrote:
| The copyright owners of a GPL software can do whatever they
| want with future versions, even going proprietary. The
| problem is that all the owners must agree on that. That's
| why some GPL software only accepts contributions by people
| that give copyright to a single maintainer entity. An
| example is FSF's copyright transfer, which to be fair is
| more nuanced than that and has also other purposes.
|
| https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2022/fall/copyright-
| assignment-...
| 8organicbits wrote:
| A key concern is that BSD isn't viral, so anyone can take BSD
| Redis and fork it into a commercial offering. If you want to,
| you can. The Redis trademark prevents anyone but Redis the
| company from calling their fork "Redis".
|
| A CLA may impact relicencing, it depends on the terms. A
| simple CLA may only say "I am the owner of the code and I
| release it under $LICENSE". The current Redis CLA also has a
| copyright grant, which gives Redis the company greater
| rights.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| "Viral" just means that the license has a "no additional
| restrictions" clause, not that you can't make a commercial
| offering out of it. That's why GPL and AGPL don't really
| solve the problem.
|
| And the problem with the trademark model is that AWS, and
| especially Microsoft, already have established brand
| recognition with the people who sign the big SaaS and
| support contracts. The people who know what a Redis is are
| just nerds with no money, the real big shots do everything
| in Microsoft Excel.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| No, since you can include BSD-licensed code in non-free
| software with just an attribution. The only difference
| between relicensing Redis from BSD+CLA to SSPL and BSD to
| SSPL is that the former would've had a more detailed
| REDISCONTRIBUTIONS.txt.
| lmm wrote:
| A permissively licensed project without a CLA would be
| similarly vulnerable, because the BSD license allows them to
| make releases that include your code under a stricter
| license. To prevent them relicensing you would need both a
| strong copyleft in the license and no CLA/copyright
| assignment (like e.g. Linux - which can't even move to GPLv3
| even if they wanted to, because it would be simply impossible
| to get all contributors' permission).
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| There is an easy solution not just for this, but for other
| potential masses: Just go with MIT license and make money with
| support
| sa-code wrote:
| How does this stop you from "getting Jeff'd", i.e. when AWS
| takes your own source code and competes with you?
| lolinder wrote:
| "Getting Jeff'd" is only an existential crisis if your goal
| is to own the majority of the pie. Postgres's contributors
| come from a bunch of different companies who all manage to
| make enough money off of Postgres to pay them [0]. That is
| the only financial metric that really matters for funding a
| FOSS project.
|
| The problem with these companies is that they actually were
| trying to make large returns for shareholders rather than
| simply earn enough to keep paying the developers.
|
| [0] https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
| IshKebab wrote:
| You're vastly overestimating how much companies want to pay for
| support.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| And if they do pay for support - it will be to Jeff Bezos and
| not some raggy startup of five.
|
| Support is usually for big corporate clients, and the Cover
| Your Ass principle works in full force there.
|
| "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".
| blitzar wrote:
| They wont get totally cut out though - Jeff Bezos will send
| the bugs they find while servicing their $10mil a year
| service contract to the raggy startup of five to fix over a
| weekend between their 3 jobs while sustaining themselves on
| the most expensive food they can afford - a bowl of
| discount ramen.
| akho wrote:
| About as much as it's worth, but not enough to give your VCs
| their x100 profit.
| kazinator wrote:
| Why don't the distros just take the last free version and fork
| from there.
| kqr wrote:
| Isn't that what redict is?
| kazinator wrote:
| I see that it is. So then I don't see what the hoopla is
| about at all.
|
| The software is all there. Some dickheads forked a
| proprietary version. They got the name, which will be their
| consolation prize in their voyage to irrelevance; nice
| knowing you.
|
| Meanwhile, what everyone uses marches on.
| palata wrote:
| I believe that the hoopla is about the CLA. It feels
| immoral for an open source project to accept contributions
| but require a CLA, and later change the license for all
| those contributions that were never compensated.
| kazinator wrote:
| If a GPL-ed project requires copyright transfers and then
| spins a proprietary version, it makes sense for people to
| be upset.
|
| But Redis was BSD or BSD-like, no? Proprietary forks can
| happen with or without CLA, so it is moot.
|
| I would say rather the opposite. If a developer
| contributes to a BSD (or similar) licensed program (under
| that same license of course), then at that point they are
| letting anyone anywhere do whatever they want with the
| code, as long as copyright notices are preserved. Then,
| if someone forks a proprietary version of the program (in
| a way that complies with that developer's license for
| those files) and that developer gets upset and tries to
| revoke the copyright license, that developer is the bad
| actor, not the forkster.
|
| In the context of BSD-like permissive licenses,
| requirments for CLA, I think, would only be a form of
| legal safeguard against such situations, where people
| change their mind.
| kqr wrote:
| I liked Andrew Kelleys perspective on this: let's treat Redict as
| a rename of the Redis project, and the project now called "Redis"
| a weird commercial fork of Redict.
|
| https://andrewkelley.me/post/redis-renamed-to-redict.html
| Kwpolska wrote:
| This article lists the other contenders for the title of new
| Redis, and I think Redict is going to be the least successful
| thanks to its founder, niche hosting site, and the hostile AGPL
| licence.
| c0l0 wrote:
| It's not AGPL, but _L_ GPL-3.0-only. Neither of these
| licenses is "hostile".
|
| And ftr, in my eyes, a project being created/initiated by
| ddevault is an asset, certainly not a liability.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| You are correct. The issue is that any [X]GPL license has
| bad reputation in business environments. They see it as a
| big legal risk that will require constant legal supervision
| over the technical usage of GPL-licensed code.
| palata wrote:
| And they should learn. LGPL is really not that hard to
| use. If more open source projects adopted it, then
| business environments would have to adapt.
| c0l0 wrote:
| -\\_(")_/-
|
| I pity the fool(s).
| rakoo wrote:
| Poor little things that do not want to share anything
| want to work as little as possible. If only we could
| collectively diminish our commons to make life easier for
| companies.
| joshmanders wrote:
| The problem is Drew is being really hostile towards the
| actual maintainers and core contributors of Redis who are
| looking to move on towards an actual open source fork.
|
| He changed the license, moved the code, chosen the name and
| the direction all on his own without consulting anyone in
| the community.
|
| His history had made me like that he forked it, but his
| actions and behavior towards the maintainers of Redis and
| absolute unwillingness to meet in the middle to collaborate
| really puts a hold on Redict being more than a fleeting
| thought.
|
| Linux Foundation, core contributors to Redis and what seems
| to be the majority of the community is rallying around
| Valkey, so I don't see Redict going anywhere except in a
| niche subset of users.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Hey, this is really not how it went down and I'm kind of
| upset that it's being read this way.
|
| The premise of Redict is to create a fork which is driven
| by a grassroots community rather than a commercial
| interest, and which is safe from this kind of rug-pull in
| the future and to press back against this broader trend
| of rug pulls by commercial vendors of free software. I
| invited collaborators from the start at every level,
| going out of my way not to instill Redict as a hostile
| takeover but as a community-led effort to create a future
| for Redis which is protected by copyleft. I talked with
| the people behind Valkey from the start of Redict and
| extended them a role in shaping everything from the
| direction and governance and infrastructure and tooling
| from day one, provided that we could find common ground
| on the license. Hell, @madolson, the primary force behind
| Valkey, signed up for a Codeberg account so that she
| could be made an admin on the Redict repository before
| placeholderkv even existed. She was removed only when it
| became clear that she was committed to her own fork and
| it didn't seem prudent to us to give admin rights to
| someone who wasn't contributing.
|
| Redict was not refusing to collaborate or meet in the
| middle. The raison d'etre of Redict was to be a copyleft
| home for the Redis codebase, and if we could have found
| agreement on that then every other detail was always
| clearly indicated as subject to consensus and we
| proactively reached out to build that consensus, but were
| refused by madolson and the commercial interests that
| wanted to be in charge of their own fork rather than
| participate in a grassroots project.
|
| Even the consensus they wanted on the license choice was,
| in the end, the consensus of the four commercial vendors.
| We tried to find a way of participating in this
| consensus-making process, but it wasn't made for us.
| Calls we made in public to use a copyleft license were
| met with resounding support on GitHub, to no avail.
|
| Don't mistake four commercial vendors and the Linux
| Foundation for a community. I wish them the best of luck,
| and acknowledge that a corporate-led home for Redis is
| probably what some people are looking for. That said, I'm
| not okay with this narrative that Redict was not
| cooperating with the community, because it's just
| factually wrong and hurtful to boot.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > Redict is a Finished Product
|
| I am keenly looking on to see if the people involved in Redict
| see it the same way. As a user of Redis, I would like to switch
| to one of these open-source forks, and to be honest one which
| is "done" and focused on maintenance, bug fixes etc. rather
| than new features sounds more attractive.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Yes, we agreed amongst ourselves (Redict) that the right
| approach was to focus on long-term maintenance and
| reliability.
| punnerud wrote:
| Interesting that around 40% of the commits to Reddit is from
| Chinese companies (Tencent 24.8%, Alibaba 6.8, Huawei 5.2,
| Bytedance 2)
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| Why is that interesting?
| jpgvm wrote:
| Not so much interesting as it is normal these days. Chinese
| big tech is much more OSS focussed than US big tech in my
| experience.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Because tencent consistently won Pwn2own and other CTF
| competitions until their government turned
| protectionist/isolationist and disallowed them from
| disclosing 0days to the world?
|
| https://cyberscoop.com/pwn2own-chinese-
| researchers-360-techn...
| harryf wrote:
| To me Redis has always seemed like a Trojan Horse for developers.
| The first impression is its this simple key-value database, so
| easy to use. Oh wait... it's also a cache, nice! Let's cache all
| the things too! And look... all the cool kids are are using it
| too, so it must be cool, meanwhile the old Unix mantra of make
| each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh
| rather than complicate old programs by adding new features. (
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html ). Fast
| forward 10 years and you need to download it's Enterprise
| Whitepaper ( https://redis.com/solutions/use-cases/caching/ ) to
| make the right caching decisions.
|
| Where this is coming from is having worked on a project where
| Redis was being used as a database and a cache, on different
| ports. And of course most of the dev team hadn't read the the
| manual because Redis "is simple and just works". And of course
| someone forgot to actually configure the Redis instance that was
| supposed to be a cache to actually _be_ a cache. And someone else
| thought the instance that was supposed to be a cache but wasn't
| was actually a database. And yet another had used TTL caching to
| solve all their performance issues. And pretty soon mystery bugs
| start showing up but sadly no one can actually REASON about what
| the whole thing is doing any more, but there's no time to
| actually clean up the mess because it's a startup struggling to
| stay afloat.
|
| And I remember asking "why didn't you memcached for caching?" and
| the response was "Dude! No one is using memcached any more". So
| the technical decision for Redis was based on "what's cool right
| now".
|
| Anyway... I feel a bigger rant brewing so I'll stop here.
| cmacleod4 wrote:
| Redis is a very useful tool. You shouldn't blame the tool if
| people can't be bothered to use it properly!
| rnts08 wrote:
| hear hear.
| kunley wrote:
| I think it's rather features were added to Redis out of the
| experience and craft, not just to "lure future users into a
| pit", I doubt antirez would have that in mind.
|
| But I think you described right the social behaviors of
| certain/common types of users.
| gnz11 wrote:
| Nothing wrong with Memcached but at high loads weird issues
| will crop up with it too and if you don't have an understanding
| of how slabs work in Memcached (I doubt your average dev does)
| you are going to have a hard time reasoning with it as well.
| Eventually someone will say "why didn't you just use redis for
| caching?".
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| Microsoft's Garnet has the best chance of replacing Redis, the
| OSS project and the hosting company.
|
| Article doesn't mention it, but supposedly Microsoft uses novel
| algorithms and multi threading to achieve an order of magnitude
| improvement in throughput.
|
| Now if they can commercialize it with Azure, it should be a
| credible alternative to Redis Enterprise hosting.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| Probably not, because it's new and incompatible with many Redis
| use cases (lua scripts, etc).
| alternatex wrote:
| Most Redis users don't really do scripting though. If
| Microsoft manages to replace Redis for most use cases they
| will succeed.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Article does mention it
| bcye wrote:
| Let's replace a project that failed because of a CLA with
| another project that requires a CLA
| BartjeD wrote:
| Garnet is MIT licensed.
|
| See: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet
| bcye wrote:
| And requires a CLA, see the same link
| dindresto wrote:
| I think the point BartjeD wants to make is that due to
| the nature of MIT licensing, they could run away with
| your contributions anyway, even without a CLA.
| Furthermore, Redis didn't have a CLA if I remember
| correctly and the relicensing is solely based on the what
| the previously used BSD license allows.
| bcye wrote:
| Interesting, I thought the point of not wanting CLAs was
| not giving them the ability to relicense your code under
| a more restrictive license (i.e. SSPL), not to keep them
| from running away with it.
| mort96 wrote:
| Is that true? If I contribute to a MIT-licensed project
| without a CLA, my contributions can't just be re-licensed
| to some proprietary license, can it? Wouldn't my
| contributions remain MIT, even if they re-license all
| other parts of the project to some proprietary license?
|
| Isn't the point of CLAs that you can re-license
| contributors' contributions?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| MIT and BSD are so liberal that anyone can commercialize
| the work. All they have to do is attribute your parts to
| you, and not demand a warranty of you.
| mort96 wrote:
| Why do corporate MIT-licensed projects have CLAs then?
|
| (That's not meant a gotcha, I just don't really know how
| this stuff works)
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| To not support the FLUSHALL command suggests that Azure is the
| goal with the project.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Why?
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| It should be a simple task to add that command and it is
| widely used. It sounds more like a business decision to not
| add it. It is not unusual that cloud providers make it
| difficult to delete data for various reasons.
| neonsunset wrote:
| As it currently stands, it is as difficult to get data
| _onto_ Azure - you 're supposed to manually deploy a
| container yourself to whichever cloud provider you are
| using, there is no "Managed Garnet" solution yet (but
| given hype it will probably arrive at some point).
|
| Either way you can see contributions to add more commands
| here: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/pulls?q=is%3Apr
| +add+comm...
|
| With that said, I'm slightly skeptical of/worried about
| Garnet but the reason is different - it received a bit
| too much hype soon after going public and I'm concerned
| it will be subject to corporate politics that often
| plague projects like that.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I was of course talking about a managed service. And the
| problem with deleting data exists in several Azure
| producs like Cosmos DB, Table storage, App Insights and
| so on.
| fmajid wrote:
| No, it's built using the .NET stack most Linux users won't
| touch with a 20-ft pole.
| neonsunset wrote:
| It's a very unfortunate but classic myopic view of a
| hopefully smaller part of Linux community. Where-as .NET in
| reality is often easier to contribute to than a random
| project they are using with owner having ego issues.
|
| It's a stack they are looking for but keep missing right
| under their nose.
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| You must be confusing .NET (formerly .NET Core) with .NET
| Framework. Which is forgivable, because MS is terrible at
| naming things. The former stack is a joy to work with since
| some QoL changes a few years ago--as long as you don't need
| both a GUI framework _and_ Linux support, in which case you
| 're pretty screwed. (Our app is still on .NET Framework for
| that reason.)
|
| I don't know if you were referring to the total install size
| of apps or to the licence or maybe just how annoying Mono
| was, but nowadays you can compile down to one binary,
| optionally with the runtime included. That makes it simpler
| for Linux sysadmins than Java or even Python, IMO.
| mort96 wrote:
| No such confusion is going on. Most Linux people won't
| touch the Microsoft .NET stack with a 20 foot pole, whether
| it's called .NET Core or .NET Framework.
| bogwog wrote:
| Can confirm. There is nothing Microsoft could possibly
| offer, except for maybe a ludicrous bribe, to convince me
| to walk into their ecosystem again.
| fmajid wrote:
| Or Apple's Swift for that matter. Or Oracle's MySQL or
| Java. Or more recently Redis.
|
| It has nothing to do with the technical merits of the
| technology, but with suspicions of the intentions of the
| company behind it and a desire not to create a dependency
| on them.
| neonsunset wrote:
| AvaloniaUI and Uno are pretty great! There is also new
| actively maintained fork of GtkSharp as well as many other
| bindings. Honestly, it's as good as it gets in many other
| alternatives which don't have the advantages of .NET.
|
| It's an important disclaimer as someone might read this and
| go write another tool in Python + Tkinter (with terrible
| results).
| lukaszwojtow wrote:
| All this outcry about license switch coming from "community"
| feels funny. After all, if there is the "community" then they can
| take the last open-source version and keep developing it
| themselves, right? But most "communities" are about "take, take,
| take", not "work, work, work". They often upset only because
| someone declared they aren't going to work for free any more.
| jychang wrote:
| That's a dumb take. That completely ignores opportunity cost of
| such actions. You can't just spin up a fork like that; there's
| barriers to entry, network effects, etc which prevent that from
| being a simple solution.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You really can just spin up a fork
| xandrius wrote:
| Yep, that's exactly it. Of course it makes sense: making
| requires several orders of magnitude more effort than using.
| But if a project changes/goes down, the community often just
| moves elsewhere, nothing major lost from their perspective.
|
| And I think Open Source is based on the very few who decide to
| take it upon themselves to be the ones spearheading a specific
| project/task and share it with everyone else. Maybe it's not
| every single time me, sometimes it's you, sometimes it's Lucy
| or Mark, and that's how the roll keeps rolling for everyone.
|
| So if a project goes down and nobody comes up to replace it,
| either it wasn't worth much or this is the time nobody took it
| upon themselves to do it (yet).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, it is incredible how the whole free software movement
| turned into a bunch of entitled folks that want to be paid for
| their work, while refusing to put down any penny for the folks
| that make their tooling possible in first place.
|
| At the same time big corps use it as carte blanche to basically
| pirate software in a legal way, while following the letter of
| the licence.
|
| Going back to the open core/demo versions (aka Shareware/Public
| Domain/Trials) is the only sustainable way to make a living.
| chii wrote:
| > Going back to the open core/demo versions
|
| aka, just sell software, rather than make it open source.
|
| What is being balked at is the idea that you can use open-
| source as a foot-in-the-door marketing and growth hack, which
| you then reap after some level of popularity/network effect
| is reached. Some call it bait and switch.
|
| Blaming big corps for "leeching" is just self-serving. They
| are doing exactly what the license allows them to do - a
| license for which was chosen at the start to allow for it! If
| you expected to be paid to make this software, don't
| opensource it.
| ufocia wrote:
| Or perhaps open source it in exchange for being paid,
| something that developers working for corpos which
| contribute to (FL)OSS already do.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > the whole free software movement
|
| Eh no. What an overly broad generalization to read. Whether
| it is enough to make a living is another question, but that
| does not mean one must paint all of the communities the same
| color.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The fact that after 20 years this has become almost a daily
| discussion theme speaks for itself.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| The problem is companies externalising development work
| on the boring parts of their software as "community
| edtions" and the like. That is a very distinct category
| of open source project and the only one that any of these
| discussions revolve around.
|
| You seem to believe that all open source projects are in
| this category. That is not the case. You also seem to
| believe that there is always one company doing the most
| work and everyone else is just leeching off. That is also
| not the case.
| stephenr wrote:
| You keep making comments about this, as if Redis was build
| from scratch by the company that is now making it closed
| source.
|
| They bought an open source project, and now that the original
| founder has stepped away they're trying to squeeze it for all
| they can.
|
| The "big corps" that you claim are using it to "pirate
| software in a legal way" (a) have been contributing to the
| formerly open source redis project, and (b) are now
| specifically forking it to _keep maintaining it as open
| source_.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Doesn't matter, they are the rigthfull owners of Redis and
| the author has freely given ownership to them, and has been
| paid for.
|
| Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| Supermarket bills don't get paid by broken business
| models either. If Redis Inc never existed, Redis the
| software wouldn't be much worse for it. I'm starting to
| wonder who the entitled is in the first place.
| ufocia wrote:
| It's only broken when they go out of business. Just
| because you don't like the business model, doesn't mean
| it's broken.
| pritambarhate wrote:
| > rigthfull owners of Redis and the author has freely
| given ownership to them
|
| By using BSD license Antirez has freely given it to the
| whole world, not the name Redis but the code. No matter
| how big the corporations, the cloud providers are just
| using that code the way Antirez intended when he used the
| BSD license. You can't blame the cloud providers for
| that.
|
| > Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
|
| But one can become famous by writing quality open source
| software and this fame can be used to get very high
| paying jobs.
| stephenr wrote:
| > Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
|
| Nor with increasingly unnecessary and niche features
| aimed at "enterprise" customers, it seems.
|
| One could probably even argue that buying the rights to
| the name of a popular permissively licensed project is a
| _terrible_ way to pay said bills.
| ufocia wrote:
| One can argue a lot of things, and that's what we're
| doing here.
|
| How is it terrible?
| stephenr wrote:
| It's apparently terrible because it didn't work.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| None of what you say is happenening in this case. Unless by
| "entitled folks" you mean Redis Inc.
|
| The community has been doing the heavy lifting over the years
| and Redis Inc has been trying to reap the benefits off of
| that by providing the software as a service. Which the
| community was fine with. Turns out other companies with
| deeper pockets for infrastructure can do the same. Now Redis
| Inc is trying to save their broken by design business model
| by changing the license. This casts a whole lot of doubt on
| the future utility and licensing of the Redis project. And
| this is what the community balks at.
| ufocia wrote:
| Who is the community?
| mort96 wrote:
| I for one don't like it when companies do a bait-and-switch.
| It's fine to develop proprietary software, the problem is
| when you grow a user/customer base based on the fact that
| your software is open source and then turn it proprietary.
| ufocia wrote:
| Trust no one. Be self sufficient.
|
| I, for one, will take the risk, reap the benefits and move
| on when factors are no longer conducive to my goals.
| sangnoir wrote:
| So I take it you endorse the Amazon-backed fork? Amazon
| too strives to be self-sufficient, and has moved on from
| Redis because the factors are no longer conducive to its
| goals.
| stephenr wrote:
| With Redis it isn't even a case of "grow a user/customer
| base based on the fact that your software is open source
| and then turn it proprietary"
|
| It's "buy the naming rights to an already popular piece of
| open source software and try to make a quick buck"
| ufocia wrote:
| If it's legal, it's not piracy. It is merely availing oneself
| of an opportunity. If the authors meant to license the
| software differently, they should've done so.
|
| I'm sure that (FL)OSS core/demo versions is not the ONLY
| sustainable way to make a living. There is no need for
| hyperboles.
|
| You don't even need to author software to sustainably make a
| living. Don't limit yourself.
| palata wrote:
| If you only take, obviously there is no reason to complain. Now
| the problem is rather when contributors (those who "give", not
| those who "take") have to sign a CLA. Then the company who gets
| their copyright takes their work for free, to later use it in a
| non open-source project (assuming they changed the license,
| like Redis did).
|
| I think it is valid to find this immoral. The solution is
| pretty simple though: do _not_ contribute to open source
| projects that require you to sign a CLA.
| endisneigh wrote:
| No? They create a fork that maintains the existing terms. No
| cla required.
| lukaszwojtow wrote:
| Using the code later in a non open-source project can happen
| also with MIT/Apache licensed code. Even without CLA. Does it
| mean that company that does it is immoral?
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| In this case the community is the biggest contributor to Redis.
| The ones that "take, take, take" is Redis the company. Your
| comment seems way out of place in this light.
| lukaszwojtow wrote:
| Good. So now Redis Inc is in trouble because they have to
| replace community work with their own. If community does most
| of the work, then what's the problem?
| oefrha wrote:
| The problem is too many people are announcing OSS forks so
| it's hard to align development efforts and users are
| confused. No one's begging Redis Labs (which didn't create
| Redis in the first place and only took over the brand with
| VC money when it was already popular) or whatever they're
| called now to keep the bug fixes rolling. They only account
| for 20-50% of recent development anyway (50% if you
| attribute all "unknown" contributors to them), with the
| other 50% from (predominantly Chinese) cloud companies
| allegedly "pirating" their software, according to some.
|
| I don't typically ask people to RTFA because that's against
| the rules, but you would have known all of the above if you
| bothered to read the article.
| endisneigh wrote:
| What you're describing isn't a problem. Why does it
| matter if there are too many forks? Development also
| doesn't need to be aligned to begin with.
|
| It's like complaining that there are too many
| implementations on GitHub of the same thing.
| ufocia wrote:
| > It's like complaining that there are too many
| implementations on GitHub of the same thing.
|
| You're spot on. People are bellyaching that the world
| doesn't operate according to their arbitrary rules.
|
| Perhaps I'd be happier in a geocentric universe, but it
| doesn't make a non-geocentric universe bad per se.
| ufocia wrote:
| What's your definition of the community? Are all the
| bellyaching leeches part of the community? What about
| contributors are they a part of the community or are they
| exclusively the community? Has Reddit contributed? If so
| they're part of the biggest contributor. Methinks you are
| cherry picking.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| That doesn't seem like a very reasonable takeaway from an
| article which describes almost _too many_ people announcing
| that they will take the last open-source version and keep
| developing it themselves for everyone else to use.
| LtWorf wrote:
| It's not "the community". It's "well funded startups".
|
| People who use open source are very entitled. They'd be very
| angry also if the license was changed to GPL or AGPL.
|
| I doubt most of this people have meaningful contributions to
| FOSS.
| jzb wrote:
| Author of the article here. There may be some scenarios where
| there's a company just tossing code over the wall under a FOSS
| license and people complain when it stops. This scenario is not
| that.
|
| The company now known as Redis did not invent Redis, it started
| as a company trying to make money hosting other peoples' work.
| After it finally hired the creator of Redis, it specifically
| promised not to do what it has just done (move away from three-
| clause BSD as the license for Redis core) at least twice.
|
| In the development cycle from 7.0.0 until a few days ago, Redis
| isn't even the majority contributor to the codebase. The
| largest single contributor is from Tencent. (All of this is in
| the article.)
|
| If Redis had been doing all the development, had not promised
| it wouldn't move away from the license, then I might agree that
| people have little to complain about.
|
| But this situation isn't as you've suggested here where a
| community is all about "take, take, take" from a company that's
| been doing all the work. The company was _founded_ on the idea
| of trying to do what it now complains about Amazon doing, and
| their claims that cloud companies do not contribute is clearly
| false -- just look at the code contributions.
| tayo42 wrote:
| What did that guy and tencent contribute to so much of
| recently?
| tayo42 wrote:
| to answer my own question, i didn't realize tencent had
| their own cloud offering with all the major software
| available a service, guess they/him just do general
| development and bug fixes.
| graycat wrote:
| Redis, Redis, again more about Redis ....
|
| From you people who know a lot about Redis, help me out here: For
| my Web site code (for my startup), I needed a _key-value_ store.
| Soooo, it looks like I could use Redis for that.
|
| But instead, wrote a little code using two instances of a
| Microsoft .NET _collection class_. Simple code. Plenty fast.
| Welcome programming exercise using .NET classes. Cheap -- no
| ongoing charges and no chance of charges in the future. And, no
| concerns about what might happen from politics, business, some
| remote _service_ , etc.
|
| Question: What am I missing by using my little DIY (do it
| yourself, _roll your own_ ) solution and avoiding Redis, work of
| other people, or a _service_ from Amazon Web Services, etc.????
| rmbyrro wrote:
| You are presuming everyone has the same needs as you had when
| assessing Redis, which is a bit naive, if I may share my
| opinion.
| graycat wrote:
| > You are presuming ...
|
| No, no, not at all: I admit, accept that no doubt Redis has a
| lot more functionality than the few pages of code I wrote.
|
| My question was: My code looks like it will do what I need
| done, but maybe I'm missing something, i.e., maybe Redis has
| some features that very likely I should have?
|
| If want to expand the question to other people, what is the
| chance that usually Redis is _overkill_ , more functionality,
| code, complexity, considerations, ..., than needed? I don't
| know so am asking.
|
| Or, I had a 2 wheel drive car, but did I miss a lot not
| having a 4 wheel drive car that I nearly always used in only
| two wheel drive?
| junto wrote:
| Actually you want a ConcurrentDictionary, but that still
| wouldn't provide you with a cluster across instances.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/collection...
| graycat wrote:
| Nice! Thanks! Looks like a nice .NET class!
|
| It's _thread safe_ so that if my startup is more successful
| than I 'm _assuming_ then I 'll be free to do less on how to
| exploit _parallelism_ from several servers. As it is, the
| code I wrote _serialized_ access to the key-value store I
| wrote. Sooo, that could be a performance bottleneck.
|
| I should review _network address translation_ (NAT) and
| _affinity_ of one user to some one server, instance of
| Microsoft 's IIS (Internet information server), thread of
| execution, etc.
| somat wrote:
| It reminds me of the berkely db situation, where they(sleepycat
| software at the time, but now I think it is owned by oracle)
| changed the license to try and sell it, and everyone just kept
| using the last bsd licensed version.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've started keeping tabs on forks and alternatives:
| https://taoofmac.com/space/protocols/redis
| vrtx0 wrote:
| Whoa, very biased article (especially for LWN). Only cites media
| coverage; no links supporting that Amazon, MSFT, Google, etc.
| were in fact EEE'ing (or at best, behaving unethically) with each
| of these projects.
|
| It even suggests cloud providers did contribute, and uses bad
| data (git commits "by employer" w/o dataset) that basically
| contradicts their argument.
|
| I may be biased, as I saw Amazon doing exactly what this article
| claims "maybe they weren't". But statements like this seem
| intentionally misleading, and easily disproven:
|
| "Distributing a source-available version of MongoDB could be seen
| as a loss-leader strategy to reach developers that the company
| wagered did not care about open-source."
|
| MongoDB _is still_ "source-available", and on the same GitHub
| repo I've used since 2010. The SSPL only impacts cloud-providers,
| and has exceptions for cloud providers who release their source
| code.
|
| The OSI doesn't get to define open-source. Neither do I, but at
| least I was part of the community for ~20 years...
| whirlwin wrote:
| I see valkey getting a lot of attention recently, as it is a
| newly founded alternative. What is the major differences over
| using TiKV which has been around for many years?
| https://www.cncf.io/projects/tikv/
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Can't I just keep using the old version?
| koromak wrote:
| I'm actually sympathetic to the cloud provider angle. As of right
| now, that is the natural trajectory. The majority of high-value
| customers are going to go through a cloud provider.
|
| Maybe some kind of new license is in order. Open source, but
| preventing cloud redistribution. I don't know, I can imagine the
| issues with that as well. You want AWS out, but you probably
| still want the small up-and-coming CI/CD tool in.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Why would Snap support Valkey if they have KeyDB?
| nurple wrote:
| I'm disappointed that FOSS discussions like this always devolve
| into profit-focused arguments.
|
| It's no wonder our "freedoms" in the software world have slowly
| but steadily been shifting to look exactly like our "freedoms" in
| the physical world: artificial scarcity apportioned by the few
| using their leverage over systems which put you in a steel cage
| if you don't play along.
|
| And here we are, arguing with each other using the terms of those
| who seek to enslave us to their control. The fact that these
| billion and trillion dollar tech companies even exist is a
| testament to our failure.
| blackoil wrote:
| Far more involved people are in this thread, but my 2c. Forking
| of software isn't a big issue, but of the community is. If new
| software was R++ which company will close and original Redis is
| now in hands of the community everyone would have been OK. The
| community is built organically and has contributed a lot over the
| years. Now, it will have to be built again where the efforts
| would be diluted in multiple forks till they gravitate toward
| one. Maybe AWS, Tencent, MS will back one and we'll have to
| settle on a version backed by corporates.
| hackerdad wrote:
| Netflix created a fully peer to peer distributed Redis compatible
| DB https://github.com/Netflix/dynomite
| marsupialtail_2 wrote:
| The sincerest form of flattery is when AWS decides to come up
| with a big consortium to displace you with some open source.
|
| Incidentally the most effectively way to stall a project
| according to the CIA is to have a huge guiding committee with
| clearly diverging interests.
|
| Redis will win because it's focused on its users. It's
| competitors will lose. Like OpenSearch, like OpenCL etc.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I wonder if there is a use case for an open source permissive
| license that also cannot be changed. Several companies have
| started off with MIT in infancy and then switch to something else
| later when successful to improve monetization.
|
| I mean, I get it, everyone wants to become billionaire, but best
| to be honest about it up front.
| edkvmn wrote:
| As many others pointed out before, Redis Labs did not create the
| project, they started to provide Redis as a hosted solution just
| like other cloud providers, and with time gained control.
|
| Redis Labs is not the only contributors to the project, Tencent
| and AWS contribute as well.
|
| For Redis Labs the open source license was a distribution channel
| which they benefited tremendously.
|
| I'm not an AWS fanboy but they operate some hosted solution
| significantly better than the companies building the products, at
| least the core offerings, this is what happened with Elastic and
| MonogDB.
|
| It is Redis Labs prerogative to change the license, but they can
| also build a product around Redis that will drive customers to
| them instead of AWS, an offering that will be hard to replicate.
|
| IMHO making a business that is "reselling" server capacity that
| was bought from AWS and trying to make a profit, can come back
| and bite you.
| garfieldnate wrote:
| Maybe it's good for GitHub, GitLab, etc. to be as open and
| liberal as possible with its definition of open source, but I
| think there is definitely an argument to be made that businesses
| making source available without actually open-sourcing it should
| pay to have it hosted. GitHub didn't become proactive about
| asking users to add licenses to repos until far into its
| existence, and there's plenty of code there that doesn't have an
| explicit license, but I think participating in the open source
| community should actually require that your source is open.
| License proliferation is already an issue, but adding non-open
| source to GitHub seems especially dangerous to me. The license
| should be highlighted in bright red with a big note saying that
| users are not allowed to do what they will with the source code.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| One thing I think people underappreciate is license compatibility
| - the projects which bundled BSD redis very likely can't bundle
| SSPL redis without changing their own license, or not at all if
| some other components are licensed with license not compatible
| with SSPL
|
| This is actually the good news as it makes it all but certain
| there will be well maintained Open Source Redis alternative.
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