[HN Gopher] Redis Inc seeks control over future of Rust redis-rs...
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Redis Inc seeks control over future of Rust redis-rs client library
Author : sandwell
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-11-27 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devclass.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devclass.com)
| voidfunc wrote:
| I have yet to hear a single positive story about this Redis
| Inc... it's like a giant company full of only assholes. Story
| after story is just "wow, these people all suck"
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Shame because I remember the original author being quite well
| regarded on places like here and Reddit.
| herrkanin wrote:
| He still is
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Did he start Redis Inc or got hired to work there? I remember
| something like that for a popular open source project.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I agree. At the same time, they're just 'doing their job'
| working at a for-profit company controlling the brand of open-
| source (core?) software.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Yes, you can simultaneously condemn individual behavior and
| the system that incentivizes it. Both are bad in this case.
| karmakaze wrote:
| My point is that the blame is on the system moreso than its
| expected outcome.
| acedTrex wrote:
| They have some of the same people from the elastic license
| debacle so this makes sense.
| paxys wrote:
| Redis the project was essentially taken over by a company that
| had nothing to do with its development.
|
| Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) started Redis and developed it
| by himself from 2009 to 2015, gaining massive popularity and
| building a large community in the process. It was FOSS the
| entire time.
|
| A separate VC-backed company called Garantia Data used to make
| money by offering a hosted version of Redis. That company
| changed its name to Redis Labs in 2014 (and eventually just
| Redis), likely themselves violating antirez's Redis trademark
| at the time.
|
| They _then_ hired antirez in 2015 and started officially
| sponsoring the project.
|
| From there began a slow transformation of Redis from a
| community run FOSS project to a proprietary locked down
| service. The company also managed to acquire full rights of the
| Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after
| hiring him and then finally kicked him out in 2020.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| excellent summary (not kidding); thank you for it because i
| hadn't understood it until what you wrote
| seneca wrote:
| > The company also managed to acquire full rights of the
| Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after
| hiring him
|
| How did that happen? He must have given/sold it to them,
| right? I remember him making an announcement that he was done
| with Redis and stepping away from involvement.
| reconditerose wrote:
| The only public record I've seen him talking about it was
| in https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/issues/544, where he
| mentioned having sold the copyright.
| paxys wrote:
| Impossible to know as an outsider. They could have tricked
| him with false promises ("we'll take good care of the
| project and always put the community first, trust us"). Or
| he could have decided that the check was big enough and not
| really cared beyond that.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13670
|
| Created a PR to add this into the context.
|
| Feel free to comment on it.
|
| Also, calling other bystanders to add other missing pieces to
| the history.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| They paid antirez and I'm sure compensated him for his
| efforts on redis. I haven't heard antirez being "kicked out".
| There may have been a separation of ways when redis inc.
| decided to not be truly open source, but I haven't heard of
| them being abusive or unethical with antirez.
|
| So yes, antirez started it. He owned the trademark and gave
| it off to redis inc. and was compensated for it. I am not
| seeing why this has to be controversial.
|
| I don't like what redis is doing. But they're within legal
| rights.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes, nobody says that there's something illegal here. Were
| it so, Redis is high enough profile project for someone to
| take a legal action.
|
| But this is a takeover that is slowly draining the value
| from the community and directing it to private pockets.
| E.g. Redis is now source-available.
|
| There are still compatible alternatives: https://valkey.io/
| (C, a direct Redis fork) or https://keydb.dev/ (C++, an
| evolved Redis fork), both BSD-licensed.
|
| I wish RethinkDB was more alive :-\
| paxys wrote:
| No one is saying what they did was illegal, but you'd have
| to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make a case for it
| being ethical and in the spirit of open source.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| PE/VC-backed bait-and-switch takeovers of "open source"
| projects have cost me a significant amount of time and money
| over the past few years.
|
| My rule of thumb now is that I now consider any project that
| has a pricing page OR requires copyright assignment/CLA to a
| for-profit company to be effectively proprietary and just using
| open source as a marketing technique. That doesn't mean I won't
| touch it, but like with proprietary software, I'll evaluate it
| against the risk that the price will probably be jacked up in
| the future.
| bluGill wrote:
| The important part is the contract the company signs for you.
| Contacts generally are enforceable in court and lawyers know
| of standard provisions for weird situations (what if the
| company goes bankrupt)
|
| QT has contracts with KDE around the open source version
| which gives KDE peace of mind. I use QT in a commercial
| product - we have some useful contract terms with QT that are
| not public and I can't talk about them.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Alright gang, from now on, all community projects are named
| Sider.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Well done, for those that missed it: "Sider" is "Redis" back-
| wards.
| jsploit wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607
| greenavocado wrote:
| My theory is Redis is trying to take control over all popular
| libraries that interface with it so it can break protocol level
| compatibility to force vendor lock-in
| bhouston wrote:
| My theory as well. I would almost bet on it.
|
| Redis is risking its reputation in order to solidify its
| revenue stream in the face is rising threats like Valkey, etc.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Well it's either solidify revenue stream or likely go out of
| business. And what's a reputation if there's no business to
| attach it to?
| mperham wrote:
| That would push everyone to valkey. They want to add
| proprietary features supported only by their server and client.
| That's the extend part of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
| gorjusborg wrote:
| All of this drama is already doing that.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Some cash cows would remain stuck and they are ultimately the
| ones that would be milked for profit even if 95% of the
| community leaves
| papruapap wrote:
| Are there many redis drop-ins alternatives?
| whstl wrote:
| Valkey is the fork/drop-in replacement from the Linux
| Foundation.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Valkey, dragonfly, kvrocks are all protocol-compatible and
| mostly drop-in replacements for upstream Redis.
|
| If you want something hosted/managed, there's Upstash Redis
| (though I reckon they'll soon have to change the name of that
| offering).
| stackskipton wrote:
| Microsoft has also been working on one.
| https://microsoft.github.io/garnet/
| seneca wrote:
| Kvrocks is pretty substantially different, from my
| understanding. It only shares the protocol.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > "companies do consider protecting their trademarks where their
| reputation is challenged"
|
| That's rich considering how they've been actively destroying
| their reputation by themselves.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| 8/10 uses of redis I have encountered in the world were people
| using it as a slower memcached.
|
| 1/10 are using it as a hope-for-the-best "queue" instead of
| rabbitmq, which is bullet-proof.
|
| The last 1/10 actually use it as a novel "database" but every one
| of those instances also has mysql or postgres, rendering it
| completely redundant.
|
| Redis itself was, for a while, a massive open security hole when
| the above people would put it on the open internet, where it
| would to quite useful to hackers as a free lua program runner.
| webstrand wrote:
| Isn't it good for building and querying custom indexes? Doing
| that with mysql or postgres is very difficult or impossible
| depending on hosting solution.
|
| Or would you still prefer to build on top of memcached?
| pokstad wrote:
| Valkey
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Is there a mature valkey client for Rust?
|
| I'm willing to bet most people running Valkey, Dragonfly etc.
| on the server are still using the Redis clients.
| pokstad wrote:
| Just fork the Rust client for Redis before any breaking
| changes were made.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| I don't think there are any at the protocol level. At least
| not yet.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Redis is trying to take over the all of the OSS Redis
| libraries_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607
| gpm wrote:
| Seems like this was resolved with Redis Inc backing off prior to
| the HN post. From @mortensi roughly 4 hours prior to the post:
| https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecommen...
|
| > Thanks everybody for the feedback. Speaking on behalf of Redis
| Inc., we want to find a way to collaborate to best support the
| community and our customers. The objective is to ensure
| predictable releases for a Rust client library, manage issues and
| escalations promptly, as well as support the best we have to
| offer without forking the library and competing with the client
| library project. After discussing this with @nihohit in this
| thread and based on the whole conversation, we want to work
| together. We have already identified initial areas from which we
| could start.
|
| > We have no issues keeping the project name as it is without a
| transition to Redis. We also have no problems with continuing to
| call this library "redis-rs". There is no intention to claim
| ownership of the client library's name, source code, or the
| crate's package registry.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Comments are all reasonable and there was no reason for the
| drama in the first place...
|
| Rust seems to just attract drama sometimes, the other client
| library owners dealt with the company without blowing up?
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > Comments are all reasonable and there was no reason for the
| drama in the first place...
|
| As the author of that issue I'm assuming if there was drama,
| then it was up to me. However I did not intend on causing
| one, but to discuss this issue with active maintainers of the
| crate as well as to understand to which degree valkey support
| is needed by users for the crate.
|
| That this has created a discourse that goes beyond that was
| not intended.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > That this has created a discourse that goes beyond that
| was not intended.
|
| I think the thing started off fine and reasonable, but if
| you go down the comments it takes a turn towards cynical
| and antagonistic where people are assuming the worst. Which
| is basically the point of my comment, rust related things
| seems to have these weird blow ups.
|
| Some quotes
|
| > Redis team has the required Rust proficiency, nor that
| they actually care about maintaining this crate
|
| > Concepts of a plan eh?
|
| > Of course they don't have a list of missing features,
| it's not about features. It's about taking control of a
| ecosystem that's collasping under them because of widly
| percieved-as shady license rug pulling.
|
| In bold too
|
| > What you care about is your customers, not the community
| or any contributors.
|
| Then there's headlines like
|
| > Redis Inc seeks control over Rust Redis-rs library, talk
| of trademark concerns
|
| Its overall inflammatory, when the intention from the
| emails shown seem fine and the goals seem clear.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Unfortunately ever since the relicensing the situation in
| the Redis community is loaded. I have seen discussions in
| other repositories around Valkey and the discourse is not
| much different.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If we take the maintainer by his word (and I don't see why we
| shouldn't) then this was very necessary drama that caused
| Redis Inc to back off.
|
| > the other client library owners dealt with the company
| without blowing up
|
| A lot of the other client libraries are already under the
| control of Redis Inc. The Python client, one of the popular
| Java clients, the Go client and the nodejs package all live
| in the Redis Inc Github organization.
| svieira wrote:
| https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecommen... -
| looks to be mostly resolved at this point, with Redis Inc. simply
| going to step up its contributions to the open-source version
| without taking control.
|
| Thank you antirez, mitsuhiko, and mortensi for working to resolve
| this amicably!
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Redis Ltd. probably parent of Redis Inc. owns the trademark. It
| isn't complicated, they can go around and ask people to change
| the names of their stuff away from Redis.
|
| Is this in bad form? What does the guy have to do to convince you
| that he has to rename the library? It's tough cookies, but if he
| renames it, and the Redis Ltd. people fork the library and put
| the fork on crates.io under the redis name, that's what happens.
| The way it works just _isn 't_ whoever gets the name on crates.io
| first, irrespective of copyright.
|
| I'd think that if the situation were reversed - Random Guy On
| GitHub Complains About Distasteful Actor Taking Over His
| Trademark - you'd root for the guy no?
| SahAssar wrote:
| redis-rs has been around since 2013, so before redis inc. was
| called anything related to redis (the were called Garantia
| data) or they hired the redis creator (in 2015) or bought the
| redis trademark (in 2018).
|
| That might not be legally relevant but it is certainly
| ethically relevant.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > That might not be legally relevant but it is certainly
| ethically relevant.
|
| I don't know if it's ethically relevant. I'm sure there was
| someone named Matt Damon before the actor Matt Damon, and
| maybe that guy was even an actor, but I wouldn't say today's
| Matt Damon is ethically violating ancient history's Matt
| Damon.
|
| What is the right rule for abandonware? It can't be, whoever
| got there first. Anyway. I don't buy your timeline. Redis-rs
| comes after the name Redis, certainly, which these guys now
| own. It doesn't matter when these two events you picked out
| of a hat occurred.
| timeon wrote:
| Analogies are not arguments. Just made up scenario.
| aurumque wrote:
| The real value of open source code is that it should be able to
| be fully decoupled from trademarks. Much like OpenTofu, we
| shouldn't be caring too much about what private entities are
| trying to do to disrupt the community. Fork the code, change the
| names, and move forward together.
|
| We don't need this noise. The code is already written and
| published. Consider the 'brand recognition' of such exciting
| tooling as:
|
| * fzf * tmux * ripgrep * exiftool * fdupes * etc.
| probablybetter wrote:
| I have no need for Redis in my life. There is nothing unique it
| provides in 2024, and they have no special sauce I would consider
| getting hooked-on (locked into).
|
| I am trying to remember why their software became considered
| ubiquitous for caching and sessions, and I reckon many a
| framework is busy rectifying this choice, as we speak.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Because its very stable, very fast and very well documented /
| supported.
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