[HN Gopher] From where I left
___________________________________________________________________
From where I left
Author : tilt
Score : 614 points
Date : 2024-12-10 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antirez.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antirez.com)
| rowantrollope wrote:
| Welcome back Salvatore!
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, I see this as great news. I've been tinkering with vector
| search myself and really don't like the APIs, query structures,
| even the embedding steps required. Anything that makes it simpler
| (and faster) is most welcome.
|
| I do hope Salvatore keeps doing emulators for MCUs, though :)
| antirez wrote:
| Thank you Rui, my target is: API that can be learned and used
| under 120 seconds. I don't think more of this is needed, for
| the basic usage. Then there could be other stuff, but it must
| be incremental. Easy things must be easy.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, the VSIM example I got inside of 10 seconds, so at
| least for now you're on track :)
| antirez wrote:
| TLDR API:
|
| VADD key [VALUES <float float ...> | FP32 <binary blob>]
| element
|
| VSIM key [VALUES ... | FP32 ... | ELE ...] [COUNT <count>]
| [EPSION <max distance>]
|
| VCARD key (number of elements)
|
| VDIM key (dimension of the vectors)
|
| VDEL key <ele>
|
| And so forth. However there are nice things you can enable,
| if you want. For instance VADD has the [REDUCE] option that
| implements random projection in order to reduce the
| dimensionality of your embeddings. Less memory, and it is
| faster. And so forth.
|
| Will work on it during xmas, it's quite fun.
|
| It implements on-insertion normalization and int8
| quantization. The algorithm to insert nodes inside the HNSW
| attempts to never leave isolated nodes and to get good
| quality links and so forth. More hacking needed.
| le-mark wrote:
| Huh Charles actually can code? We'll then.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| yes loving this! please PLEASE be the hero we need in
| unfucking the unholy mess of misdirection and useless
| abstraction that is storing some vectors somewhere for
| similarity search right now
| revskill wrote:
| U mean there are too much leaky abstractions in the field
| now ?
| jeffchuber wrote:
| chroma's api i think takes something like 20 seconds
| maremmano wrote:
| Bentornato ;)
| Nabeel_ wrote:
| Welcome back, Salvatore!
| PieUser wrote:
| Will be interesting to see how the Valkey community reacts to
| this
| bhouston wrote:
| I don't think it changes the negative business actions that the
| company Redis has been doing. But it likely means that Redis
| may actually evolve now, rather than being a static target.
| reconditerose wrote:
| Valkey maintainer here. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I worked with antirez a bit before he left the project in 2020,
| and I still look fondly back on that time since he was a
| wonderful person and he helped me learn a lot. I wish he had
| considered coming to work with Valkey instead of Redis, but
| maybe we'll find some some way to work together that benefits
| both communities.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| I think antirez has made very rational economic decision. For
| Open Source Redis/Valkey community though it would be better
| if he had joined Valkey of course.
|
| Note though it is not certain he even could - the Non Compete
| when you have significant compensation in cash or equity can
| be much stronger and run a lot longer than employment related
| bhouston wrote:
| I suspect he is going to make a lot of money coming back to save
| Redis from the negative press they have been having recently as
| well as the threat of Valkey. I sort of have to view it in light
| of all the other events that have been happening to Redis.
| antirez wrote:
| I covered this in the blog post: no big money involved, I asked
| to rejoin and without a big paycheck _on purpose_ because to be
| free to act you should not get too much money, otherwise it 's
| all fake.
| bhouston wrote:
| But if you wanted to have influence without a big pay check,
| why not join Valkey? Redis, the company, in your absence has
| gotten a reputation as a predatory company that has attacked
| open source projects in other to further those goals.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2024/04/redis...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858144
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607
| metalnirvana87 wrote:
| Talking about predatory behavior https://www.forbes.com/sit
| es/justinwarren/2024/04/11/opentof...
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2023/09/... https://apnews.com/article/google-
| antitrust-ad-tech-virginia...
| antirez wrote:
| I want to help Redis to find a good path forward (while I
| respect the work of everybody). I was sponsored by this
| company for ages, I know the core hackers there, and they
| are _strong_ and are good people. I talked with the CEO and
| he is very interested in finding novel ways to play, so I
| rejoined Redis and not ValKey.
|
| Honestly even if Redis public image has not been stellar
| recently, I know the people that work at Redis, many
| engineers are there since the start, and I believe they
| have huge design abilities and can do what is needed to
| make Redis more useful for the community.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| At least you go into this seeing the reputation that
| Redis Labs has worked hard on earning recently.
|
| Could you not have stayed separate from them while
| contributing again?
| antirez wrote:
| What motivated me was the company idea that with the
| license change the attitude could change significantly
| towards providing as much value as possible back to
| Redis. So merging what is super useful and has been, so
| far, only available to paying customers, and so forth.
| Also the company is interested in changing attitude. All
| these things made me feel that my efforts were better
| spend doing some bridging work between the community and
| the company.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Don't hate the player, hate the game.
| hobs wrote:
| The player in this context has an outsized influence on
| the game, the people managing the game are using their
| work, and contributing more to it is effectively
| influencing the game in a big way.
|
| I don't really hate or care about anyone in this game,
| but it's a non-trivial move in the game.
| echelon wrote:
| > why not join Valkey?
|
| Valkey is making it possible for hyperscalers to continue
| appropriating open source and charging fat margins to
| everyone else.
|
| In a sense, Valkey is the bad guy here.
|
| And just look at all the support Valkey is getting from
| Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc. They're perpetuating the
| problem.
|
| The same thing happened with Elasticsearch. Unfortunately
| ICs without decision-making power started lambasting the
| Elasticsearch leadership for attempting to fend off AWS and
| their ilk from absorbing all of the revenues derived from
| their hard work.
|
| Open source is just a commodity feature for hyperscalers.
| It's time we stop giving it to them for free.
|
| This is all about power. We're ceding it to trillion dollar
| companies because we've been trained that "open source" is
| ethical. Meanwhile, we don't question the ethics of these
| companies profiting off of this work while charging us
| absurd margins. None of the hyperscaler infra is open
| source.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Many of the Redis developers left to form Valkey, so that
| they could keep working on the Open Source project they
| wanted to work on. Valkey is continuing a project that
| was released under Open Source terms, after the original
| company rugpulled the Open Source project in favor of a
| proprietary one.
|
| Or, in other words, Valkey is Jenkins here, and Redis is
| Hudson.
| benatkin wrote:
| Indeed. The project had continuity. The trademark exited
| the building.
| antirez wrote:
| > Many of the Redis developers left to form Valkey
|
| What's the point of spreading informations that are not
| true? I believe there is a single person that was in
| Redis and works there now, at least AFAIK. And this
| person stopped working at Redis long time ago (and was
| not a core developer). So I'm not understanding who
| joined ValKey from Redis folks.
|
| Everybody is working at Redis: me, Oran, Yossi, Meir,
| many others.
| bhouston wrote:
| > I believe there is a single person that was in Redis
| and works there now, at least AFAIK. And this person
| stopped working at Redis long time ago (and was not a
| core developer).
|
| It is probably more correct to say a bunch of Redis
| contributors left the Redis GitHub project and moved over
| to Valkey.
|
| You can see there are a bunch of contributors listed on
| this page who seem to predate the fork and who have
| continued to contribute:
|
| https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/graphs/contributors
|
| Particularly these contributors standout:
|
| https://github.com/enjoy-binbin
|
| https://github.com/madolson
|
| https://github.com/soloestoy
|
| https://github.com/hwware
|
| https://github.com/zuiderkwast
|
| https://github.com/hpatro
|
| https://github.com/pizhenwei
| rubiquity wrote:
| Nearly all of them work at cloud providers so they
| literally just followed their income stream.
| bhouston wrote:
| > Nearly all of them work at cloud providers so they
| literally just followed their income stream.
|
| Sure. And same for Redis employees who continue to work
| on the Redis Github project. All my significant
| contributions to open source have had financial
| incentives as well.
| reconditerose wrote:
| I know this doesn't mean much, but I spent a lot of time
| outside of work helping to maintain the Redis codebase. I
| attended our meetings and responded to issues on vacation
| because I cared about the community, it was more than
| just a paycheck for me. I don't regret doing any of that.
| bhouston wrote:
| > In a sense, Valkey is the bad guy here.
|
| Are all the open source libraries that Redis depends on
| [1] also evil? Or are we just focused on declaring Redis
| competitors evil today?
|
| [1] https://github.com/redis/redis/tree/unstable/deps
| blibble wrote:
| as much as I dislike the hyperscalers parasitising open
| source...
|
| "redis ltd" the company did not originate redis
|
| "redis ltd" was originally "Garantia Data": a company
| that offered hosted redis as a service
|
| fundamentally they are/were doing the same thing as
| AWS/Google: taking an existing open source product they
| did not originate, and selling hosting for it
|
| they may have hired its creator (several years after he
| wrote it), and since then changed their name to "redis",
| but they're not any different to GCP/AWS
|
| other than the complaining about others more successful
| business models
|
| this is very different to e.g. sentry
| yard2010 wrote:
| I love this sentiment, I guess you have to have some sort of
| basic economical confidence to be able to afford this.
| antirez wrote:
| Yes, past Redis venture provided me covered enough that I
| can avoid trying to maximize the money side. Money still
| useful of course but one has to balance I believe.
| metalnirvana87 wrote:
| And Valkey with backing from AWS, GCP, and Oracle don't make
| any money at all ... wait aren't those trillion dollar
| monopolies?
|
| The pot calling the kettle black
| bhouston wrote:
| Valkey also has the backing of The Linux Foundation. So maybe
| it just has a lot of backing in general.
|
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-
| launc...
|
| BTW are you an employee of Redis? You seem to have created
| this account just to reply to me.
| metalnirvana87 wrote:
| And who funds the Linux Foundation? - it is the CSPs
| themselves - https://chatgpt.com/share/67587e4c-bde8-800b-9
| f0a-fc824d3d6f...
|
| Any thoughts on CSPs making money from open source projects
| while the open source developers (e.g., Redis, Mongo,
| Hashi) suffer)?
| echelon wrote:
| The Linux Foundation is a mouthpiece of the closed source,
| trillion dollar hyperscalers.
|
| They're using the deceptive good feels to stop you from
| questioning their fat margins.
|
| Why isn't the entire stack of AWS infra open source, again?
|
| Open source has been twisted against us. The big players
| know where the money and value and power accumulates.
| bhouston wrote:
| > Why isn't the entire stack of AWS infra open source,
| again?
|
| This line of argument is untethered from reality.
|
| The Linux Foundation actually is the parent of the Cloud
| Native Computing Foundation
| (https://www.cncf.io/about/join/), which actually is
| infrastructure for cloud services: containers, envoy,
| etcd, helm, istio, Kubernetes, prometheus, etc.
| echelon wrote:
| > This line of argument is untethered from reality.
|
| You had a business that was acquired by Amazon. I don't
| know if you're giving this a fair assessment.
|
| When the copyright holders of large open source
| infrastructure projects want revenue from their hard
| work, Amazon forks them or provides funding to their
| direct competitors.
|
| Amazon can strategically launch free and open source
| competition to commercialized open source products as a
| means of keeping more of the cloud spend budget for
| themselves.
|
| The hyperscalers want to commoditize anything that
| impinges upon their margins. The software should be free,
| it should run on their clouds, and it should lead to
| increased cloud spending. Other companies shouldn't dip
| their hands into the pot.
|
| Moreover, hyperscalers get to hoover up "managed"
| versions of open source software and collect even thicker
| margins. Redis, Elasticsearch, etc. fly in the face of
| this strategy, which is why they attack it so
| relentlessly.
|
| The Linux Foundation and CNCF serve its industry
| contributors. The microservice ecosystem is booming
| business for AWS, Azure, and GCP.
|
| I don't see how this is "untethered from reality". This
| is cutthroat business, and it's how the trillion dollar
| companies throw their weight around.
|
| If you build open source infrastructure products and
| don't have an anti-cloud provision, you'll get picked
| clean by the hyperscalers.
| worldmerge wrote:
| Good luck!
|
| I like Redis, it was my first queue system and it worked great. I
| used it for this project
| https://edwarddeaver.me/portfolio/control-my-lights to pass
| messages from multiple inputs into a central funnel.
|
| Looking forward to reading more of your posts.
| dxuh wrote:
| > hint: (Claude AI is in its own league)
|
| Is there a good way to use the Anthropic models as a private
| person? It's my understanding you can only pay for them as a
| business.
| Veen wrote:
| You can use the API and Claude as a private individual. I've
| been doing so for a couple of years.
|
| Edit: Go here and create an account: console.anthropic.com
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > You can use the API and Claude as a private individual.
| I've been doing so for a couple of years.
|
| You're using Claude since a "couple of years". You really
| must be an early adopter ; )
| Veen wrote:
| I checked and I got access to the Anthropic Console in
| April 2023, so not quite 2 years, but not far off.
| antirez wrote:
| Nope it's like ChatGPT. 20 bucks / month.
| byefruit wrote:
| As sibling comments have said, you can pay per month to use the
| web interface, pay for use of the API via self-signup or you
| can even use them via openrouter.
| simonw wrote:
| Claude is available for free (with usage limits) if you
| register for an account. Then you can pay for a $20/month
| Claude Pro account as an individual.
|
| You can also create a paid API account as an individual and use
| it via their API, which is almost certainly cheaper than the
| $20/month Pro account for personal use.
|
| I use the Pro account because I really like the Claude
| Artifacts and Claude Projects features.
| ksec wrote:
| Welcome Back. Antirez! ( Surprised This blog post is submitted
| just 2 min after it was posted )
|
| I am wondering if Valkey has moved so far off from Redis the
| codebase couldn't be merged again? I am reading the top
| contributor to ValKey are now from Tencent Cloud, Google, Amazon
| and Ericsson.
|
| Could someone help with me with SSPL, is it essentially AGPL v3
| except instead of releasing the source code only you have to
| release the whole system that is able to run the services you are
| currently operating on top of ?
|
| Just wondering these things from the sideline. As I am still on
| the memcached camp.
| antirez wrote:
| Hi ksec! Thanks. ValKey and Redis are not so different
| codebases so far, but I have the feeling they will diverge more
| and more. I hope that at least at protocol level they will stay
| compatible, to be able to use the same clients. I doubt the
| projects can be rejoined, because the backers have different
| goals. Amazon / Google / Alibaba / ... wants to keep using it
| without any revenue sharing, and Redis instead does not want
| Redis to be sold SAAS style since the cloud three-poly makes it
| very hard to penetrate the market without any agreement. I'm
| not a business person but this is how I see the current matter.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I am a big fan your work, including your lua c64 coding thing
| which actually was a great educational tool for my small cousins
| and for some friends. Also works well on the go. Just wanted to
| say that.
| antirez wrote:
| I appreciated a lot reading your comment. I feel silly
| sometimes when I use months of time to write something like
| LOAD81, I question my sanity, but then I see that other people
| had some good time with it and I'm so happy: and also I'm sure
| that I used my time in the best way.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| It is a work of art for me as a c64 80s guy so I put it on
| too many people to learn coding. It is great!!! Thank you.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I for one partially wrote a few mobile games with LOAD81 ; I
| was travelling and only had my Pandora with me; I wrote all
| the logic tested them all out with load81. Of course I had to
| actually get them on a mobile platform device and create a
| better UI, however all the logic and most of the UX was all
| done in lua on load81.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| @antirez, if you manage to see this, can you tell me what you
| think of [1] as a funding model?
|
| [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-
| fro... , though just read until you get to
| https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... .
| didip wrote:
| Antirez, I am just wondering about something...
|
| Given that you probably already have retirement-sized exit from
| Redis. Isn't it more liberating to start something completely
| new? Or maybe forked Redis as the foundation of something new? Is
| there a need to re-join the old company?
| antirez wrote:
| That's a good question. The problem is that: I would end doing
| something in the vector search space probably, or other stuff
| that are tangent to AI. I can do the same but in public, as
| examples of hacking with this stuff, to share with the
| community. In the process I can add a solid vector indexing
| capability to Redis. It looks like a nice way to continue
| hacking.
| brabel wrote:
| From the blog post, looks like he contemplated that (I'm sure
| that while playing around with code, he would've thought of
| that) but ended up going in another direction. You can
| disagree, but you've got to respect his decision to try and do
| what is best for him, and what he believes is best for Redis.
| world2vec wrote:
| Is Claude really that much better than ChatGPT? I Use ChatGPT
| Plus on a daily basis and have no complaints but is it worth
| cancelling it and get one for Claude?
| antirez wrote:
| If you find ChatGPT useful, pay just one month of Claude AI and
| use both. I bet you'll discover that Claude AI can help you a
| great deal more. If that will be the case, you gained a much
| better AI assistant. Otherwise it's just 20 bucks... For me the
| difference is huge.
| pknerd wrote:
| I have used Claude(Free) for coding and architecture-related
| questions and found it pretty solid but I found chatGPT a
| generalist LLM that is good at many things. Is Claude the
| same? Or you found Claude better for coding related tasks?
| Keyframe wrote:
| or maybe through perplexity he can try both (and more)
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| I think both are really capable. However anecdotally, I notice
| myself doing way less of the "annoyed, cancel response, extend
| prompt instructions, regenerate" cycles with Claude as compared
| to chatgpt.
|
| Also, I am not sure if it has my writing style preferences
| saved somewhere, but Claude uses the terse style I prefer to
| read explanations in, without me needing to mention it. ChatGPT
| can do it too but it needs to be prompted lest it do the whole
| "repeat question, bullet points, summary" ceremony. ChatGPT
| gets really annoying when you have do the "slightly more
| detailed, slightly more terse, there we go" ceremony as well.
| For similar reasons, I prefer it for code.
|
| One place where ChatGPT absolutely takes the cake though is
| mathematical proofs heavy with symbols. Nothing else comes
| close in my experience. It's also better at latex typesetting
| (seems to be more fluent with common packages like amsmath).
| devjab wrote:
| We use both, in my anecdotal experience it depends on what you
| use them for. The engineering teams which build solar plants
| use them as "an extra set of eyes" for increased quality
| control, and they chose ChatGPT. It discovered something to do
| with cable sizes and efficiency which ended up saving/making a
| lot of money. I'm sorry I can't be more precise than that, but
| I know they had a much better result rate with ChatGPT. For my
| team which is software development, we favour Claude. It's
| obviously rather anecdotal but it has been much better at Go
| than ChatGPT. For other languages like Python I don't think
| there is any real difference. If you feed them both the same
| prompt they'll often give you an extremely similar output, and
| neither will consistently be better than the other.
|
| So I think it's mainly to work with the one which works for
| you. I've seen some of our more junior developers first use
| Claude and then ChatGPT to refine their output, or the reverse.
| electroly wrote:
| I was in the same boat. I gave Claude a try, just to see what I
| was missing, and I ended up never returning to ChatGPT except
| to generate pictures (which Claude can't do). Give it a try for
| a month. It's worth a shot. They have improvements beyond just
| generally being smarter. For instance, Claude can _edit_ a
| prior code block rather than just emitting a new one. It can
| build React components and show them to you, rather than just
| giving you the code.
| vessenes wrote:
| Love this, welcome back Salvatore -- hopefully it's fulfilling
| and fun. You authoring some new vector primitives seem to
| indicate to me you might be back in your sweet spot.
|
| Getting a 100x engineer back to making new things is great for
| the world.
|
| Some thoughts on vectors and embeddings and etc; there was a
| spate of companies that launched RAG-related "new" databases a
| couple of years ago, and obviously we have plugins to major
| databases now. I appreciate the idea that some low level tools,
| properly tuned, will be maximally useful. There was a lottt of
| overhead playing with those vector dbs, and often in testing I
| would just want to throw up like 10,000 embeddings and do some
| things with them; I didn't want to have to choose a pytorch
| variant in a docker image to do so.
|
| Anyway. It makes me wonder what else would be useful to have on
| the AI support side. I'll look forward to playing around with the
| module.
| Attummm wrote:
| That is great news.
|
| Redis remains my favorite database. I've had the opportunity to
| work extensively with it, not only professionally but also
| through open-source projects like redis-dict[0], a Python
| dictionary with Redis as the backend.
|
| How can we follow your progress on the vector set feature?
|
| [0] https://github.com/Attumm/redis-dict
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I really appreciated the section about OSI licenses as someone
| who this year stopped using them entirely for new work.
|
| (Snippets from the article below)
|
| > I wrote open source software for almost my whole life. Yet, as
| I'm an atheist and still I'm happy when I see other people
| believing in God, if this helps them to survive life's hardships,
| I also don't believe that open source is the only way to write
| software.
|
| > Moreover, I don't believe that openness and licensing are only
| what the OSI tells us they are. I see licensing as a spectrum of
| things you can and can't do.
| benatkin wrote:
| I appreciate redis, but believe me when I say, I never considered
| using redis under anything but its original license, and I am
| just as grateful for valkey as I am for redis. It is very easy to
| move and I will keep moving anytime there is a license switch-up
| like this. I prefer a fork rather than an alternative, but if a
| good fork hadn't emerged, I would have moved to something
| different with its own technical advantages and drawbacks.
| nine_k wrote:
| What parts of the new licence are particularly critical for
| this decision? Just curious.
| ofiryanai wrote:
| Very exciting! I sympathise with the Redis "lego" way. But don't
| you think that hybrid search ha meaningful use cases? E.g
| searches that combines BM25 or piplned search in more
| sophisticated way than simple filter + knn / hnsw then filter? Or
| maybe its more for a search engine than a cache
| antirez wrote:
| I think that hybrid is useful in many contexts, but that
| providing hybrid as a bundle with other filtering techniques,
| API-side, is not necessarily the best way. Just a trivial
| example, you want to filter by documents year for similarity.
| With Redis vector indexes you didn't even care about hybrid,
| you create different keys for different years. This is the
| usual Redis tradeoff, it's very similar to the past but applied
| to a novel field.
|
| However I don't deny that in the future maybe, if elements of
| vector sets happen to be JSON documents (maybe just with the
| attributes you want to filter with, and a document ID), it may
| be useful to have VSIM options to filter by such scalars.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > more extensively thanks to Redis Labs later: a freaking Robin
| Hood of open source software, where I was well compensated by a
| company and no, not to do the interests of the company itself,
| but only to make the best interests of the Redis community.
|
| Governments should do this and tax companies to pay for it.
|
| Re: vector embeddings, two projects I've had recent exposure to--
| Memgraph and FalkorDB (previously RedisGraph)--are implementing
| similar functionality. I think the lego approach is really
| awesome, I wish this concept was more broadly adopted. All that
| is to say, this seems exciting!
| munificent wrote:
| _> However, during the "writing years" (I'm still writing, by the
| way), I often returned to coding, as a way to take breaks from
| intense writing sessions (writing is the only mental activity I
| found to be a great deal more taxing than coding)_
|
| This has been my experience too. With both "Game Programming
| Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters", writing the code was a joy
| while writing the prose was _hard_ work. Gratifying, but mentally
| draining in a way that programming isn 't.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| That's really interesting - was chatting to a few friends who
| are very into using tools like cursor to generate code. They've
| been complaining of feeling extremely drained after a day of
| prompt writing.
| antirez wrote:
| Totally agree. It's very hard, especially since when writing
| fiction, and the kind of fiction I wanted to write, there are a
| lot of things you doubt about yourself: is my style as good as
| I wish? Are my stories and my characters strong enough, with
| the right motivations? And I bet many of this ingredients are
| still there even when writing technical books _if_ the goal is
| to do a very good job. Teaching in written form, with a book,
| is like a long story that must fit, chapter after chapter,
| sentence after sentence.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Please keep writing, I want to read your fiction. I cal tell
| you have style from your blog entries. Lean into the style
| and readers will love you for it.
| antirez wrote:
| Thanks! I can write better in Italian :D But appreciate
| that you found the blog post to have the right tone.
| jaronilan wrote:
| I find, even in the short stories I write, that managing the
| story arc is so much harder than managing code execution...
| braco_alva wrote:
| "Game Programming Patterns" has been of huge help throughout my
| career and it's always my go to recommendation for new game
| programmers and reading your comment makes me feel even more
| grateful that you made the effort of writing it, thanks for
| writing such a great book!
| munificent wrote:
| You're welcome!
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Dropping by in the comments to say many thanks for both of
| these books.
|
| I have hardcopies of both and "Crafting" remains my all-time
| favorite programming book.
|
| It's delightful, educational, and beautiful.
| munificent wrote:
| You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed them. :)
| foresterre wrote:
| Where did you get the hardcopy? (I already have the paperback
| for "Crafting Interpreters", but I prefer to buy hardcopies
| if available)
|
| As far as I was aware, there are only paperbacks.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I think they meant hardcopy as in "physical copy" not as in
| "hardcover"
| block_dagger wrote:
| I have had the same experience. With coding I can be in that
| coveted state of flow for 10 hours straight. With creative
| writing, I feel exhausted after 3 or 4 hours. I didn't expect
| this and don't fully understand why.
| codazoda wrote:
| Would Game Programming Patterns help someone who wants to build
| a slot machine? I've built a wall mounted machine for my home
| but I never got the software side done. I think a book could
| help but most of them cover very different mechanics these
| days.
| munificent wrote:
| Honestly, probably not. It's about software architecture for
| games, and not about game mechanics specifically.
| codazoda wrote:
| Why the down-votes? Are people specifically opposed to
| gambling or is it something else I said? I'm just wanting to
| write a hobby slot machine because they fascinate me but the
| mechanics of a slot machine UI are quite different than a 2D
| scroller or a 3D game engine.
|
| I do appreciate the author answering. Thank you.
| MisterTea wrote:
| It's because the audiences for each are different. The audience
| of programs are CPU cores that have a well defined set of
| behaviors. An i7 isn't going to one day decide it doesn't like
| the SHL instruction or offended by having to perform too many
| MOVs.
|
| The human by comparison is more taxing to write for as your
| brain is the compiler and checker for the instructions of your
| language. You write, proof read, correct, proof read again,
| correct more, delete, re-write, etc. I get why AI tools for
| writing are in high demand. Hell, sometimes I spend what feels
| like forever writing some of the comments here on HN as I have
| to compress a lot of thought into a few, clearly written
| sentences.
| munificent wrote:
| It's that but even more so: you aren't writing for a single
| human, but for the superposition of all possible readers of
| the book.
|
| It's sort of like trying to write a program that is
| simultaneously valid Perl, C, Ruby, etc.
| adelmotsjr wrote:
| Does it have something to do with the ambiguity of our language
| (english, spanish, _et cetera_) in contrast with formal
| languages? Like, it would require more mental effort to
| describe something in the English language, compared to
| describe an algorithm using language constructs: you know the
| constructs, and you know your restrictions in the programming
| language; in the English language, you don't know in advance
| what can you say and what you cannot, and you have to imagine
| what is your message going to get across in reader's minds.
| Well, who knows?
|
| Anyway, absolutely love your books, have the Crafting
| Interpreters print copy (which has been inadvertently unboxed
| by my friend; did want it to be still in the plastic) despite
| using only the website version, and looking forward to buy the
| Game Programming Patterns. I hope you continue to be successful
| in your endeavours (especially if they result in legendary
| books like these :D). Also, could we be looking forward to a
| version of yours of a CPU architecture book, a la Nand2Tetris (
| deg [?]? deg)?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Our language centers evolved to build our "natural" languages
| and our "natural" languages evolved to take the best (most?)
| use of our language centers. Whether or not it is ambiguity
| or simplified context or some other "complexity mechanism",
| if you agree with the Chomsky hierarchy that our "formal"
| languages are pure subsets of our "natural" languages, then
| that alone would imply we use only a smaller subset of our
| language centers when working in "formal" languages.
|
| Though yeah, that does feel awfully reductive as an argument,
| and leans on a lot of assumptions in Chomsky's theories. I
| know that there are axes where "formal" languages feel more
| orthogonal to "natural" languages than "pure subsets". Some
| parts of "formal" languages to me feel a lot more visual like
| poetry than linguistic in the same way as prose.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| This type of genuine openness mixed with the excitement of
| passion is so joyful to read, especially from a high achiever
| with strong technical capabilities and a history of business
| success.
|
| Salvatore is definitely high on my list of role models.
| simonw wrote:
| For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons:
|
| 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project
| for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing
| tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that
| it was under the understanding that project would remain under
| the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of
| trust.
|
| 2. From a purely selfish point of view, my favourite thing about
| open source licenses is that they let me know exactly what I'm
| allowed to do and build on that software without having to
| consult a license. Licenses like the new Redis one leave me
| potentially needing to get my own legal advice depending on what
| I'm building on the software. I don't want to spend my time,
| energy or money on that stuff!
|
| I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open
| source generally. It used to be that you could pick an open
| source project and build a business on it and expect that the
| project would stay available to you under those well understood
| terms. That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis,
| there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling
| projects. I'm sad about that.
|
| (And yes, I do understand and dislike the trend of businesses
| building on open source without contributing back. There are no
| clearly correct answers here.)
| jcgrillo wrote:
| The question of what constitutes a "service" seems very murky,
| and although it's obviously not the intention of all these
| source-available, BSL style things, in a dark timeline it seems
| like there's a lot of room for litigious actors to behave very
| badly. The uncertainty is what makes it scary, I'd also like a
| lot more clarity.
| antirez wrote:
| The good thing about this is that since the companies are
| copyright holder of the code, if this creates issues, the
| licenses can be rewritten and modified in order to be as
| sharp as possible in the use cases they want to avoid (which
| is... two/three users in the world :D).
| jcgrillo wrote:
| This is a great point, it'll probably take the better part
| of the next decade for all this to shake out. It'll be
| interesting to see where it goes.
| zokier wrote:
| the issues of sspl have been frequently and loudly been
| brought up previously, and nothing has happened. just to
| reiterate, this section is ridiculously expansive:
|
| > "Service Source Code" means the Corresponding Source for
| the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding
| Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or
| modified version available as a service, including, without
| limitation, management software, user interfaces,
| application program interfaces, automation software,
| monitoring software, backup software, storage software and
| hosting software, all such that a user could run an
| instance of the service using the Service Source Code you
| make available.
|
| it is practically impossible for anyone to comply with
| that, to provide source code for every single program (
| _without limitation_ ) that they happen to use anywhere. of
| course none of the major sspl-using vendors are even
| pretending to themselves to follow these rules.
|
| sspl would be much better license if it just simply forbids
| providing services, instead of hiding behind this thin
| veneer of fake copyleft.
|
| > You can _even_ still sell Redis as a service if you want,
| as long as you release all the orchestration systems under
| the same license (something that nobody would likely do,
| but this shows the copyleft approach of the license).
|
| note that this is not right, the "copyleft" is not limited
| to orchestration systems, it covers _all programs that you
| use_
| ndiddy wrote:
| I believe that the original reason why they didn't just
| say "you're not allowed to provide this program as a
| service" is that MongoDB were trying to get SSPL approved
| by the OSI. The OSI didn't approve it because as you
| mention, it's basically impossible for a cloud provider
| to actually attempt to comply with the SSPL. Not only
| would they have to release the code to all software used
| to make the program available, they would have to do so
| _under the SSPL_. I 'm not sure why MongoDB didn't change
| the wording when they gave up on getting the license
| classified as "open source".
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > it is practically impossible for anyone to comply with
| that, to provide source code for every single program
| (without limitation) that they happen to use anywhere.
|
| It is practically impossible to comply, yes, but not just
| because you'd need to provide the source code to all the
| software you're using. The thing that really makes it
| impossible to comply with is that you must release all of
| that software _under the SSPL_. This could be reasonably
| interpreted to preclude the use of FOSS software, like
| Linux, that you do not have the authority to relicense
| under the SSPL.
|
| I wrote a blog post[0] about this a while back, but I
| think this is fixable if you allow the other software in
| the stack to be released under another FOSS license (and
| you could still require its disclosure).
|
| [0] https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/the-sspl-is-not-a-
| reasonabl...
| jchw wrote:
| I'm sorry, but how is this a good answer? If you really
| only care about "two/three users in the world" and don't
| want users to worry about legal implications, why not
| explicitly write that in the license?
|
| It doesn't matter how good your intentions are, in the long
| run, it's not you or Redis, inc. we have to trust, it's
| _anyone_ who potentially inherits the rights of these
| licensed IPs, at which point the courts will not rule on
| what your feelings are of what the license was meant to do
| but instead what was actually written and agreed to. That
| 's why an existing, well-understood and symmetrical
| copyright license is going to beat out weirdo "business"
| licenses any day, and why they will never be considered
| OSI-compliant, which is fine, because if we all really
| hated big tech they're already allergic to the AGPL anyway.
|
| I know I'm not going to score any points by disagreeing
| with you here of all places, but I genuinely wonder if you
| really do believe this or if you mostly just don't care to
| actually confront the reality.
|
| This whole thing could be a nothingburger forever, or,
| alternatively, Redis, Inc. could some day be acquired by
| Oracle. Absolutely no way for any of us to know for sure.
| Unfortunately, that leaves me with little other option but
| to stick to the forks.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > Redis, Inc. could some day be acquired by Oracle
|
| This is truly the nightmare scenario, and it'll be
| interesting to see how it plays out when such a thing
| happens. Not saying specifically with these two
| companies, but so far these licenses aren't particularly
| tested, and it seems we just can't really know what will
| actually happen without running the experiment.
| necubi wrote:
| A cynical view is that it's not just 2-3 providers, its
| any competition to their cloud-hosting business. See for
| example the recent wordpress drama, which concerns a
| small competitor.
|
| SSPL and related licenses are ambiguous and scary enough
| to ward off anyone potentially competing with the
| copyright owner, and I doubt that's seen as a downside.
| collingreen wrote:
| This is a really good example of why software with a
| license that is basically "this could hurt you but, like,
| trust me bro" isn't worth building
| with/extending/learning. It feels a LOT like a landmine
| waiting to detonate.
|
| Even if I'm doing completely non commercial work I never
| ever ever will want to productize in any way I'd rather
| build my skills and familiarity with something portable
| (and I don't want to have to remember when I can and
| can't safely use each part of my stack). Anything else is
| just asking for a future nightmare.
|
| The oracle and wordpress stuff recently are devastating.
| Can you imagine having to grind your entire company to a
| halt looking for anything that uses anything that uses
| anything that uses redis/java/whatever?
|
| I'm an engineer. I can't justify a fixed amount of upside
| for an unbounded downside if I ever get on some
| stranger's bad side for whatever reason.
| coldtea wrote:
| For the companies who "are copyright holders of the code"
| the uncertainty and litigation potential is not a bug, it's
| a feature.
| collingreen wrote:
| This feature could actually be the overwhelming value of
| acquiring the copyright. When trillion dollar companies
| go to war with each other this kind of thing is a
| fantastic weapon in the arsenal.
| fweimer wrote:
| No one is expected to use any of the code licensed in this
| way commercially. You enter a contract with the vendor, tell
| them what you need, and negotiate a price. At that point, it
| doesn't really matter what the copyright license says.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| So the entire license is just a bad faith trap? I could see
| it being used that way, potentially, but I don't believe
| that's actually Confluent's, MongoDB's, Elastic's,
| Hashicorp's, or Redis Labs' intent. In fact they've all
| explicitly stated the opposite. Are they all lying?
| antirez wrote:
| "Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project
| for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing
| tutorials, publishing example code etc"
|
| I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is
| that such value never gets lost. People are able to fork, and
| after a fork for the original project to still lead will be
| require to put something more on the table. Inside Redis it was
| tried very hard to don't change license. For years it was some
| kind of "dogma", something one could not even speak about. Then
| after all the kind of attempts, and following the experiences
| of MongoDB and others, finally this choice was made.
| (Disclaimer: I saw the switch as an outsider, so my information
| is not complete about the final decisions -- I for sure know
| how this was always considered to avoid if other setups were
| possible).
|
| However now I see that there is the case for giving the
| community something in exchange to the license change: a lot of
| good things in the core, a very good attitude towards the
| community, and so forth.
| benatkin wrote:
| In a sense valkey is the main line and redis is now the fork.
| Valkey is about the same except losing the trademark. It's
| similar to Hudson and Jenkins. It's not so clear cut with
| OpenSearch.
| sroussey wrote:
| What's valkey?
| benatkin wrote:
| Persistent key-value database with network interface
| https://packages.debian.org/testing/database/valkey-
| server
| alanwreath wrote:
| fork of redis https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey just
| before the transition to their new source available
| licenses
| sroussey wrote:
| Ah thanks. Is this by AWS or similar?
| simonw wrote:
| Yes: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-
| foundation-launc...
|
| > Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services
| (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are
| supporting Valkey.
| benatkin wrote:
| Interesting to see Google there. They have LevelDB.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I've only looked briefly at leveldb, but IIRC redis is
| _hugely_ more featureful than leveldb (which I'm sure is
| a great fit where it's used).
| scq wrote:
| Redis and LevelDB are very different, with different use
| cases.
|
| LevelDB is a key-value storage library that writes to
| disk. It's the sort of thing you could use as the storage
| layer for a relational database.
|
| On the other hand, Redis is an in-memory key-value
| database server.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Cloud providers offer productized versions of Redis, so
| their interest in Valkey should be obvious :)
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community rallied
| behind Big Tech instead of a small startup though. Just
| saying.
| simonw wrote:
| It's the Redis fork with the most resources and the most
| backing. It's well funded and it sits under the Linux
| foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-
| foundation-launc...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| and remains truly open-source, unlike Redis.
| benatkin wrote:
| Redis from Redis Labs, available under a choice of its
| own license or the SSPL, is pretty close to _truly open-
| source_ , IMO closer to it than the BSL. It is pretty
| similar to the AGPLv3, and they even credibly applied to
| get it OSI-approved. What it isn't close to is the
| original license, which is a permissive open source
| license.
|
| https://blog.tidelift.com/what-i-learned-from-the-server-
| sid...
| https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11291/how-
| to-...
| antirez wrote:
| IMHO the "real" Redis is not about licensing, but about
| design (as long as the license is acceptable, as I think it
| is in both cases). We will see.
| benatkin wrote:
| That's a nice way of looking at it. It's quite an
| influential project. I'm just now thinking of taking more
| direct inspiration from it for a micro-library for
| webassembly.
|
| I wish you success in Redis Labs and thanks for Redis. In
| my other comment I said I never considered using Redis
| under the new license, but I didn't say that I never
| would consider it, and I think I would if I found myself
| on a project that needs a key value database with
| enterprise support or more bells and whistles. I think it
| has its place, and to me it is an awful lot like postgres
| and EnterpriseDB, especially if Redis Labs gives its
| blessing, directly or tacitly, to adding this new vector
| type to valkey.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm embarrassed to admit that I hadn't fully taken into
| account that those contributions do at least remain under the
| BSD license and hence stay open under those original terms.
| Thanks for reminding me of that.
| antirez wrote:
| It's not an error at all, Simon! Because different setups
| in the past lead exactly to the scenario that you depicted.
| Examples: projects that requested signed copyright transfer
| for each patch (even GNU projects required this). But also
| what is more insidious is that very complex projects, while
| sometimes BSD or similarly licensed, were made completely
| proprietary (and not under the MongoDB / Redis
| circumstances, but just to turn proprietary for other
| reasons) but they were so complex internally that basically
| you can't do anything with the code, without paying like...
| 50 engineers to study it for six months. So it is an actual
| danger, but not in the case of BSD + projects that have an
| acceptable barrier to entry to be understood, fixed,
| modified, ...
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Note though, the code is not Music, it rots quickly without
| maintenance. The "social contract" of contributing the code
| is what it will be maintained by collective community,
| otherwise many companies would just keep it as private
| forks.
|
| It is wonderful thing though, with Open Source, people can
| band together and "pull Valkey" to create well maintained
| fork based on all those past contributions
| jart wrote:
| That may be true of node.js codebases, but last time I
| checked Redis was written in C and only depends on ISO
| and POSIX standardized stuff. I doubt there's been any
| leftpads that have broken the old versions by now.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| It is not just compatibility, there are bugs, but most
| important security issues which are constantly being
| discovered.
| crote wrote:
| With open-source software, a license is as much a social
| contract as it is a legal one. People contribute because they
| want to be part of a community building something which is
| beneficial to _everyone_. Everyone contributes where they
| can, and in turn takes what they need.
|
| Redis Ltd. broke the social contract. They decided that the
| short-term profitability of the company was more important
| than the project as a whole, the community which had grown
| around Redis and the future of the software. Probably a wise
| decision from a business perspective, but that doesn't make
| it any less of a rug pull from a community perspective.
|
| You're right that no pre-relicense code was lost. People
| _could_ and _did_ fork. But something far more valuable was
| lost: the community 's trust. First they relicensed the code
| solely for their own benefit, now they tried to take over
| third-party libraries and started behaving in a hostile way
| towards the community forks. Why would _anyone_ volunteer
| their time and effort when it is mainly going to benefit a
| company which is so openly antagonistic against its
| volunteers? After all, what 's the next shady move going to
| be?
| kunley wrote:
| It is really hard to believe that no one defends antirez&co
| as protecting themselves from greedy overpriced SaaS
| businesses who were parasiting others hard work. What about
| them saases breaking a social contract of giving reasonable
| prices adequate to the effort put into a product (or a
| wrapper around the product)?
| simonw wrote:
| It's possible to hold both positions at the same time.
| kunley wrote:
| In the world of legal consequences it is not.
|
| Or please explain.
| pydry wrote:
| Yeah, this is weird. The one restriction is one you
| probably dont care about because you're not amazon or
| azure yet some people still freak out like youve taken
| their toys away.
|
| Truly odd.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's not that weird. With a FOSS license, I know I can
| use a program for anything I choose to and the terms will
| never change. I might launch a startup with a friend
| tomorrow using a package and complying with its license
| terms, and a million dollars later we're still legally
| entitled to use it.
|
| Adding constraints later is a non-fallacious slippery
| slope. The restrictions Redis added aren't directly
| onerous to 99.999% of users, but now the world is divided
| into people who are allowed to use it at will, and people
| who can only use it in certain ways (or not at all).
| That's an enormous change from a FOSS license. And if
| they change it today specifically to lock out Amazon,
| will they change it again tomorrow to lock out my
| startup? The thing is, now that they've established
| precedent, there's no way of knowing what'll happen
| later.
|
| Again, I know I can use GPL or MIT or BSD software for
| anything I want as long as I play by the exact same rules
| as everyone else. There's nothing that says you can use
| it but I can't. The difference between Free to non-Free
| is vast, even when I'm not affected (yet).
| pydry wrote:
| Your answer is "it's not that weird what if I wanted to
| launch a startup competing with azure and amazon"?
|
| Well, Id say in that case youve got waaaay bigger
| problems than a license.
|
| >Adding constraints later is a non-fallacious slippery
| slope.
|
| No, it's very much a fallacious slippery slope.
| Constraints are the very essence of licenses and
| contracts.
| mavelikara wrote:
| > But something far more valuable was lost: the community's
| trust.
|
| But before that the community turned its back on Redis
| Ltd., when it let those cloud offerings from others thrive.
| Once the "community" got that going, these consequences
| were inevitable.
| jart wrote:
| Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does not
| form a social contract that entitles you to future gifts.
| It is _not_ a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you
| gifts. The old versions of Redis are yours for all time. No
| one can take that away from you. In fact, Redis is still
| giving you gifts to this day, just with a different
| wrapping. The new license seems perfectly reasonable, given
| how much companies like Amazon have exploited the gift
| economy to the point where it threatens these startups
| survival.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Open source is a gift economy. Receiving a gift does
| not form a social contract that entitles you to future
| gifts
|
| I think op was talking about contributors, who
| essentially gifted back. One might take offense if they
| were exchanging gifts with someone, and they open a pop-
| up store and sell what was gifted.
|
| Also, it's also a tiny bit hypocritical to expect revenue
| sharing with Amazon without doing the same for
| contributors.
| jart wrote:
| Redis has a CLA so contributors can't use their gifts as
| leverage to control others.
|
| https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-
| contributor-...
| collingreen wrote:
| I don't think you should conflate CONTROL with resentment
| or distaste or feeling betrayed or feeling misled. They
| aren't the same.
| jart wrote:
| Even without a CLA, Redis was originally licensed BSD.
| Releasing code under a BSD license is making a promise
| that you are OK with people using your code for
| commercial purposes. If you as a developer express
| personal feelings of dissatisfaction that someone is
| doing with your gift what you gave them permission to do,
| in such a way that could be construed as reneging on your
| promise, then that would make you dishonorable and
| untrustworthy.
| skinner_ wrote:
| > in such a way that could be construed as reneging on
| your promise
|
| Nothing could be construed in such a way, because such a
| reneging is not possible.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Releasing code under a BSD license is making a promise
| that you are OK with people using your code for
| commercial purposes.
|
| That's just the microcosm of the larger issue, isn't it?
| Contributor:Redis :: Redis:AWS - Redis gave Amazon the
| permission to host and make money off of Redis, but Redis
| seems somewhat salty about the state of affairs. I think
| contributors have reason to be salty too.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I guess there's a blind spot here.
|
| antirez gave
|
| community gave
|
| most people assume that this create a new thing, a group,
| which has a shared past and value .. and should continue
| (i would agree to that personally)
|
| "pure" open source advocacy would claim "nothing is ever
| to be expected in any future" (i can understand that too
| but find it a bit sad)
| BizarroLand wrote:
| They're also stealing the name of the community.
|
| I feel like once a software is open sourced the name of
| that software should also be required to remain open
| sourced as well, and any closing of the source must come
| with a requirement of forking the software and changing
| the name.
|
| It's honestly pretty horrible that a group of people can
| take centuries of man hours away from the community and
| tell the community to kick rocks when the software
| they're stealing would NEVER NEVER NEVER have had the
| traction it has if it were not OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE TO
| BEGIN WITH.
|
| There is a rash of thefts going on in broad daylight, and
| I think people need to start litigating. Its obscene and
| soulless and doesn't belong as an acceptable thing to do
| in society.
| ac29 wrote:
| If a company's survival is threatened by people using its
| open-source software, then maybe it shouldn't be open
| source. Open source software (to me) says I should be
| able use the software for any purpose, including
| commercial ones.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I agree. It seems that "open core"[1] is a failed
| experiment. I'm hopeful the idea will be replaced either
| by governments being smarter about the computers, or
| companies agreeing to sponsor foundations, or...
| something. But clearly taking venture investment to build
| OSS and turn it into a profitable enterprise is an idea
| that has been thoroughly shown to be flawed.
|
| [1] aptly named if you think about the nuclear power
| analogy :)
| TrueDuality wrote:
| That isn't really the case here. It didn't start with a
| company. The company came along independently,
| effectively took control of an open source project that
| was already well established. They found that support
| alone wasn't enough to be profitable on and have been
| lashing out at the community that built around the
| original project, including independent opensource
| clients.
|
| It's not that the company shouldn't have the code as open
| source. The company shouldn't exist in the first place
| and we're all suffering for it.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Reciprocality over time building trust is in fact the
| basis of gift economies. Please read some David Graeber.
| maccard wrote:
| > With open-source software, a license is as much a social
| contract as it is a legal one
|
| Funny how when these license changes started happening
| people said the exact opposite - that the license is the
| license and if they didn't want to be Jeff'd they should
| have used a difference license.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| People wrote an article... probably on a blog with a
| shitload of ads, and are entitles to something?
|
| Get Lost
| ensignavenger wrote:
| That is true, and that is how Valkey and other forks are
| moving forward. But the value wasn't just in the code- many
| folks contributed value by writing blog posts, making videos,
| and writing books or otherwise promoting "Redis". The Redis
| trademark owners had every legal right to change what "Redis"
| means by changing the license, but it creates a massive
| headache and a practically impossible task for everyone that
| gave so much to promoting the project to change all of these
| references.
|
| Folks like to cite MongoDB as some great example, but Redis
| had significant community contributions in recent years. And
| AWS never used any Mongo code.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license
| is that such value never gets lost."_
|
| That is one side of the coin: _value never gets lost_!
|
| The other side is that the BSD license is very clear what it
| allows. It's a good thing that there are licenses that allow
| what Redis did. It is also a good thing that there are other
| licenses which can help prevent what Redis did.
|
| It is our choice as developers and we should _never_ blame
| others for exercising the rights we granted them.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| > I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to
| open source generally
|
| I've re-read this a few times and I'm still not sure what
| "harmful to open source" means in this sentence, could you
| expand on this a bit when you have time? (readings I
| considered: this will dissuade people from using OSI licenses,
| this will dissuade people from trying to monetize open source
| components, this will dissuade people from using open source
| components in their products all together, this will dissuade
| people from contributing to open source)
|
| > Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis
| project for free
|
| This one is not directly addressed at OP but I would be
| interested to see what the contribution numbers are like for
| Redis and other projects post-license change.
|
| In my own limited experience (project with >10k, <100k end
| users), I received no meaningful code contributions when the
| project was MIT licensed, but contributions of significant
| features and large bug fixes skyrocketed after switching away
| from it (not saying that the license change is the reason for
| that, just that it didn't dissuade some people who are willing
| to contribute significant effort from contributing to the
| project).
|
| Editing this post to say thanks for the response and clarity, I
| don't have anything else to add!
| simonw wrote:
| I see the open source movement as being about developers
| sharing their work in order to raise all ships and
| dramatically accelerate the rate at which participants in
| that community can build cool software.
|
| A lot of that benefit comes from not having to worry about
| licenses: pick platform components with known open source
| licenses, build cool things with them.
|
| I think the rise in not-quite-open-source licenses
| (especially projects switching to those licenses) undermines
| the things that I value about open source, and further
| encourages more projects to make those decisions in the
| future.
| inopinatus wrote:
| In this matter, that pretty phrase "social contract" is at
| root a demand for ego massage from a) contributors that don't
| actually believe in the freewheeling spirit of the BSD/MIT
| licenses but used it anyway, and b) noncontributors whose
| sense of entitlement is projecting as loss aversion.
|
| The revised license is nevertheless a problem for component
| selection. Usage caveats are a landmine and thereby a
| coherent motivation for the Valkey fork.
| collingreen wrote:
| "A demand for ego massage" is a pretty rude way to try to
| dismiss away someone's expressed feeling about something
| they cared about fundamentally changing.
|
| I think it's a stretch to attack everyone who liked the
| idea of a totally open license as either disingenuous or
| selfish.
| inopinatus wrote:
| I agree, it would be, so I take issue with the extreme
| interpretation of the remark. These are merely two cases
| of foolishness. The first is of one's choices not
| actually being in harmony with one's preferences, the
| latter is simply a common cognitive bias. I'm not
| characterising talk of a "social contact" as malicious,
| but naive. Folks who want community obligations attached
| to their contributions can and probably should choose a
| copyleft license. Realising this in hindsight is a matter
| of personal growth.
|
| I advise against relating to software as an emotional
| construct. Certainly for noncontributors but also even
| for contributors and primary authors. Redis is not your
| cat.
| collingreen wrote:
| I'm ruffled by your repeated dismissals and arrogance BUT
| now I really want to name a pet redis so maybe you're
| coming out ahead in my personal calculus.
|
| You taking issue with my "extreme interpretation" seems
| like a bad faith statement. Perhaps you really do feel
| mistreated by it; if that's the case I'm sorry because my
| intent is directly addressing the language you're using
| but not you personally.
|
| To ape some of your phrasing, I advise against taking
| offense when others disagree with your approach or
| severity when you are attacking strangers, dismissing
| their reactions, gatekeeping who should get to care,
| patronizing them about personal growth, and calling them
| foolish at best.
| thayne wrote:
| > this will dissuade people from using OSI licenses
|
| Yes, because other projects will follow the pattern of
| successful ones.
|
| > this will dissuade people from using open source components
| in their products all together,
|
| Yes, because now there is a very real risk that after you
| have invested in using an open source license, the owner
| might change the license on you, which makes potential users
| more wary of open source projects.
|
| > this will dissuade people from contributing to open source
|
| Yes, for similar reasons to the above.
| _acco wrote:
| AFAIK, the reason for these changes is basically "prevent AWS
| from eating our business". Is that right?
|
| If so, are these trends harmful to open source? Are we not
| choosing between:
|
| 1. A world where all revenue in OSS infrastructure ultimately
| flows to a few big platform companies.
|
| 2. A world where these carve-outs are commonplace.
|
| Meta's carve-out with Llama is so interesting because it
| practically calls the big companies out by name. Should there
| be a similar standard license for open source infrastructure?
| Suppafly wrote:
| >there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling
| projects. I'm sad about that.
|
| It also severely sets the industry back every time one of these
| rug pulls happens and we have to scramble to find a
| replacement. Sure it might drive some minor innovation, but it
| also wastes a ton of resources by splitting communities and
| leading to tons of rewrote just to get back to a place of
| stability.
| simonw wrote:
| That vector sets design outlined towards the end of the article
| is delightful - it's exactly the kind of API design I appreciate
| from Redis over the years: simple, elegant and feels obviously
| correct to me.
| antirez wrote:
| Very happy to read this from you, Simon!
| some1else wrote:
| Where would a Redis vector store play a part though? Maybe
| you'd load up relevant embeddings for a particular user while
| they're interacting with their dataset, to make their responses
| quicker? You've already spent the effort on hydrating their
| data out of persistence though. I guess step one is likely
| being a more trusted alternative to the in-memory vector
| solutions like HNSW, Faiss, and a potentially faster engine
| than pg_vector. I've always seen Redis as an augmentation, but
| maybe in this role it can take the helm?
| simonw wrote:
| It's exactly that. Redis is an in-memory data structure
| server that you can outsource index-style operations to.
| Vector similarity is a type of index search. I think it's an
| exact fit for Redis.
| some1else wrote:
| Cool. Redis in front of Postgres always brought peace-of-
| mind that will likely be welcome for the vector data use-
| case.
|
| P.s.: Appreciate the llm command line tool.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I'm really interested in this bit: "the fracture with the
| community is not about licensing, or at least it's not mainly
| about licensing"
|
| I wish he'd elaborated a bit more on what he thought it _was_
| about. My understanding is that it 's 100% about the license.
| That's certainly why _I 'll_ reach for valkey instead of redis
| next time I need it. That's also what I've heard from everyone
| else in a similar position. What else _would_ the community split
| be about?
| antirez wrote:
| For somebody, like you and many others, it was very important
| to retain an OSI license. But I feel that in general given that
| the new license is IMHO good for almost every user, from the
| POV of what they can do with the code, and that the cloud
| situation was quite self evident, I believe that with better
| communication, and immediate developments/merges in the core,
| to counter balance the license switch, many people would
| understand the license matter.
|
| We will not win back you as a user, and I respect that. But
| many, many users that see openness, good features and
| documentation, the github repository at the center of
| everything: I believe they will appreciate this, and can decide
| that Redis is good for them.
| collingreen wrote:
| Thanks for directly expanding on this.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Yeah, I have the same question, I wasn't sure if he had said
| what he does think the fracture was mainly about and I missed
| it.
| sneak wrote:
| > _The license language is almost the same as the AGPL, with
| changes regarding the SAAS stuff. So, not OSI approved? Yes, but
| I have issues calling the SSPL a closed license._
|
| The AGPL is a nonfree license, despite being erroneously
| classified as a free one. It is a nonsensical EULA masquerading
| as a copyright license, and I'm not the only person to point this
| out.
|
| Comparing your nonfree license to the AGPL might _seem_ like an
| argument in favor of the open-ness of your license, but in
| reality it is a condemnation.
|
| It is insane to think that you should be able to dictate what
| happens to software that other people run on their own computers
| that you have given away as free software.
|
| The AGPL and SSPL both demand this, for different reasons. Both
| are nonfree and both are wrong.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've never had a use for Redis, but I was very happy to read
| this, and sincerely wish him the very best of luck. He seems to
| have his priorities straight.
|
| I am 62, and write more software, now, than I ever did. This
| time, though, it's for free. I make it a point to treat my
| projects as "top-shelf" professional-grade shipping software, as
| opposed to the "hobby-grade" that I see from many folks I know
| that write non-commercial software.
|
| That's just me, and the way I do things. WFM. YMMV.
|
| Anyway, hats off to him, and the best of luck!
| justin66 wrote:
| > I make it a point to treat my projects as "top-shelf"
| professional-grade shipping software, as opposed to the "hobby-
| grade" that I see from many folks I know that write non-
| commercial software.
|
| What are the practical differences in the end result?
|
| My mind leapt to documentation, but I bet you meant more than
| that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's part of it, but then, there's architectural integrity,
| code quality, testing, testing, and more testing, then
| there's testing, and some more testing, then, there's taking
| care of all the "boring" release stuff, like testing. Then,
| of course, you can't have a release without testing.
|
| Getting an idea of what I mean? Finding a pattern in there?
|
| I generally don't have a ticket system, beyond the GitHub
| Issues, and I have yet to go over one digit.
|
| That's not because I write perfect code. In fact, I'm
| _constantly_ finding problems. It 's just that I never stop
| looking, and fix issues -comprehensively- when I find them.
| Usually, the finding and fixing is so fast, that it isn't
| even worth it to log the issue. The changelog has what I
| need, as does the checkin history.
|
| Just because I release something, doesn't mean that I stop
| testing, documenting, or maintaining it.
|
| In January, we released an app (which I won't link, here). It
| is currently up to version 1.7.0 (I've been busy), and I'm
| working on a 1.8.0 version. This will be a basically "behind
| the scenes" release that won't result in any real user
| interface changes, but will set the stage for adding a fairly
| considerable upgrade, down the road (maybe a 2.0 version, but
| we'll see).
|
| I write code that can have a fairly significant impact on the
| lives of the folks that use it. It's a Responsibility. I take
| that fairly seriously.
| levkk wrote:
| Hesitating to put this because it's not related to the topic at
| hand, but I find monospace font for blogs hard on my eyes. I
| think I'm getting old, but Arial (and other sans-serifs) are
| easier to read.
| alex-moon wrote:
| Honestly working as a back-end Web dev is kind of a dream job
| just because you have these stack apps that are super fast, super
| stable and do exactly what they say they do. Nginx and PostgreSQL
| are typical examples, and I consider Redis one as well.
| codazoda wrote:
| > However, during the "writing years" (I'm still writing, by the
| way), I often returned to coding, as a way to take breaks from
| intense writing sessions (writing is the only mental activity I
| found to be a great deal more taxing than coding)
|
| I wrote and published my first book in a weekend frenzy and it's
| one of my favorite accomplishments.
|
| I've published half a dozen small books since then, the most
| popular of which is about how to write and publish your own book.
|
| Over the past couple months I've been preparing a system to help
| others publish their own book. If you have any interest in
| writing and publishing, please reach out. I'd love to help.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Welcome back to the project!
|
| I love to see original creators continue to work on their
| projects until the very end, e.g. Linus and D. Richard Hipp of
| sqlite. I think this produces the best quality software over the
| long term.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Hehehe,
|
| Reading between the lines. Redis is Hurting, Valkey is making a
| real difference at pulling the customers away. Elastic and
| OpenSearch were in similar situation, so Elastic went on to
| change license back to (more restrictive) Open Source License.
|
| Redis went different route by bringing Redis founder back. I
| wonder if they go back on their license change next or do they
| think Redis founder endorsing license change, despite his
| previous promises of Redis being Open Source forever is enough ?
| Time will tell.
| antirez wrote:
| Except this is not true: I mean, I asked to rejoin, not because
| I evaluated the situation of the company, but since I wanted to
| do more hacking / community stuff. So you see what happens
| trying to read too much between the lines? That you invent what
| satisfies your needs as a reader, but drives you away from what
| actually happened. P.S. at Redis they didn't expected this at
| all and were really surprised.
|
| And about switching to a more open license, who knows? Maybe we
| will be doing that as well if it offers enough protection - I'm
| not in charge for such decision but... I can suggest things -,
| so thank you for the idea (kidding apart, I was already talking
| about this possibility inside the company).
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Perhaps. I've seen people seen/write all kind of stuff when
| serious money are involved, and I also was offered to just
| just that on number of occasions.
|
| I appreciate your honesty in disclosing what you still have
| Redis Labs stock, and assuming it is anything reasonable
| their value at future IPO would be much larger than any cash
| compensation which you might be getting as the part of the
| deal.
|
| Reality is you did not fulfil (chose to or could not, I do
| not know) your public promise to keep Redis Open Source
| https://antirez.com/news/120
|
| I hope your return will positively impact Redis as Open
| Source Project. Yet I'm disappointed to read your position on
| the Redis License - seeing cloud non compete license
| "basically as good as open source", as I far as I'm concern
| for many users which want to have software ran for them, and
| consume it as DBaaS it is no different to proprietary
| license, as it prevents competition.
| strbean wrote:
| It's wild to me that the prevailing opinion seems to be "It
| is only TRUE Open Source if megacorps can modify the
| software and resell it without sharing their
| modifications".
|
| The hosted vs. distributed loophole is just that, a
| loophole. If, when the GPL was first published, the world
| was cloud-hosted and SaaS-ful, the GPL would either have
| included some provision like the SSPL, or it would have had
| relatively little impact on the world.
|
| I understand complaints about a lack of clear boundaries or
| overreach in these licenses. But acting like these aren't
| attempting to close a loophole being abused seems crazy to
| me.
| orra wrote:
| > If, when the GPL was first published, the world was
| cloud-hosted and SaaS-ful, the GPL would either have
| included some provision like the SSPL, or it would have
| had relatively little impact on the world.
|
| Well, no on the first one. We know exactly what the GPL
| looks like to protect users against proprietary network
| hosted software: the GNU Affero General Public License.
| collingreen wrote:
| This opinion seems to require the idea that targeted
| license changes that are intentionally devastating (going
| from "do anything" to requiring relicensing all/some of
| your stack) will only ever be used against "the bad guys"
| tm and OF COURSE we agree on who "the bad guys" tm are
| and OF COURSE that will never be me or you _trust me
| bro_.
|
| Feels like a cliche "first they came for the richest saas
| providers and we said nothing..."
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| This argument about "evil megacorp" is problematic
| because you can't really isolate those from the small and
| wonderful startups.
|
| Specifically I've been directly involved in MongoDB
| ecosystem with FerretDB and there are so many small indie
| providers worldwide would love to offer MongoDB Atlas
| alternative to their customers, but can't because of SSPL
| license.
|
| I know, for many it is hard to make piece with it - Open
| Source, for real means EVERYONE can use it for ANY
| PURPOSE, and this means for good and for evil, both "good
| guys" and "bad guys"
| snoman wrote:
| Meanwhile, it's wild to me that you seem to think open
| source means "free for everyone... except them - they
| make too much money."
| stochastician wrote:
| > At some point my daughter, who is now 12, and is a crucial
| person in my life, enlightening my days with her intelligence,
| creativity and love, wanted to visit NYC for her birthday.
|
| I know this wasn't the point of the post, but it was the most
| beautiful thing I've read all week, and really sums up how I feel
| about my own children. A small aside in a much longer post but
| incredibly humanizing and wonderful.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I'm not a christmas person. Lights are pretty and I may throw
| up a piece of tinsel and a reef to make it seasonal but overall
| not a fan of the holiday.
|
| I went down to the cafeteria today at work and they had school
| children carol singers. Seven/Eight years old singing Christmas
| tunes. I have to say it touched me, they were really putting
| their hearts in to it. The warm innocent spirit of something
| they believed in.
|
| I then grabbed my styrofoam tasting lunch and then fell back in
| to my cynical self for the rest of the day. But it's pleasant
| to keep memory of.
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| Well written and thoughtful piece - I don't have problems with
| the license - they control the project, they can do what they
| want, I can use it or not as I want.
|
| The thing that's interesting to me is the idea that these things
| have to continue to "evolve." Like we need to keep adding
| features to keep people engaged to have an active community, yada
| yada.
|
| In my mind, and maybe I'm wrong, some of these projects are just
| sorta finished - they've evolved to a completed state more or
| less and just need maintenance. Memcached has sorta went this
| route afaict - it's still tremendously useful for some things and
| it's not constantly trying to add data types to compete with
| other things.
| BeefySwain wrote:
| All the conversations about SSPL seem to go the same way:
|
| - Someone complains about the extra restrictions imposed on AWS
| (lets be real, it's basically just about AWS)
|
| - People point out that SSPL is basically AGPL+, and that for the
| vast vast majority of people it doesn't make any difference
|
| - People counter that the SSPL is written ambiguously/untested in
| court, and so while it might seem like it's AGPL+ and doesn't
| matter for most users, you can't rely on that
|
| - People complain about rug pulling (valid, IMO)
|
| My question is this: Can there be a AGPL+ that is OSI approved?
| Could there be a "AAGPL" that GNU releases that covers this (very
| common, and IMO valid) "need" for open source companies to not be
| cannibalized by cloud providers?
|
| Is this conceptually unacceptable, or is it just that the SSPL is
| poorly executed?
| stackskipton wrote:
| Problem comes down to, what is cloud provider?
|
| My company has a piece of software we will sell you that
| requires Redis/PostGres. For fee, we also offer hosting of said
| software. Are we now a service provider? Our software does come
| with ability to manipulate the data in Redis so do we have open
| source our entire code base? Would we get stuck in lawyer
| battle royale?
|
| We have resellers coming on board so interface is being built
| that lets them deploy our software for their customers so Redis
| will be deployed by us and given to reseller? Are we cloud
| provider then?
|
| Now, I think reality is Redis wouldn't see as cloud provider
| because we don't go "Here is Redis, do whatever you want."
| Lawyers however get paid to think of worst thing that could
| happen and our lawyers said "Eh...... I'd hate to have these
| terms hanging over your head."
|
| That's why alot of people recoil at SSPL.
|
| Luckily, Valkey is drop-in replacement for us, testing is
| almost completed and likely we will switch when paperwork is
| all completed.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I agree with your analysis and I sympathize with Redis in
| some way.
|
| It seems to me that it's painfully obvious what a cloud
| provider is, but that everyone is afraid of what a lawyer
| could convince a judge in the Eastern District of Texas to
| think a cloud provider is.
|
| The technical definition should be something akin to offering
| raw R/W connectivity to redis databases for arbitrary
| purposes.
|
| Offering a redis-backed SaaS should not be covered.
| foobarchu wrote:
| Tbh it seems far past time for the OSI to come out with a
| blessed license with well defined terminology so we can
| stop watching every large OS project invent their own way
| of combating AWS/etc
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Is this conceptually unacceptable, or is it just that the
| SSPL is poorly executed?
|
| In my opinion it's the latter. There's a minor change you could
| make to the SSPL that would take it from "practically
| impossible to comply with" to something that just about anyone
| building a service with FOSS dependencies could comply with:
| https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/the-sspl-is-not-a-reasonabl...
|
| Essentially, add EUPL-like license compatibility clauses for
| dependencies to the SSPL.
|
| I'm not saying this is exactly what we should do to accomplish
| that goal, but I think it's worth considering, and probably has
| a reasonable shot at being considered a free software license.
| merb wrote:
| actually the sspl can't be a fork of the agpl. Because osi and
| thus the agpl do not discriminate users and this includes cloud
| providers. A license like the sspl discriminates a certain user
| base.
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Just wanted to acknowledge the humanity of antirez. To many of
| us, they're a folk hero, but they're just a normal human being
| with a family who wants good things for the world and their
| family.
|
| Thanks for opening up to us so much and for what you've
| contributed to the world antirez! And welcome back!
| pookeh wrote:
| Can we please just move to using OSS licenses with a clause
| namely targeting cloud providers? e.g this MIT license is
| applicable to everyone except for the following companies:
| Amazon, Microsoft, Google.
|
| Leave the rest of us poor folk alone so we don't have to seek
| expensive legal counsel.
| forty wrote:
| I think the right solution for this problem, and many others,
| is not to allow the "platform" to compete inside their own
| garden.
|
| So if you offer infrastructure, you cannot offer managed DBs
| there, if you have a market place you cannot sell on it, if you
| have an app store, you cannot sell apps there. Etc etc
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| What if they had named Facebook in that list, and then Facebook
| became Meta?
|
| I don't know anything about the legal side of things, but
| although I can see the appeal of a short blacklist, I think it
| would be a can of worms.
| seqizz wrote:
| I think people are not afraid of the current change on licensing,
| but the magic is broken as soon as a company starts wandering
| around. Yes the current license is not that bad, but while we
| have valkey on the side now, how can I trust "Redis Inc." will
| not decide another small change which does not affect me, then
| the next one, until it makes something which does affect me.
| antirez wrote:
| > how can I trust "Redis Inc." will not decide another small
| change which does not affect me
|
| Good point: the key is that, starting from now, Redis Inc.
| should make small changes that positively affect you.
| collingreen wrote:
| Is this snarky or real? If real, how would this work? If
| snarky, then :(
| antirez wrote:
| Absolutely real: focus on the community, merge things that
| were now in payed versions of Redis into the core, so that
| everybody can benefit, contribute positively to the clients
| space, improve the documentation, and so forth.
| crazypyro wrote:
| I don't have any involvement in OSS besides using it at my job,
| but I still enjoyed the post because of the notes on AI. I have
| noticed a similar disconnect in technical discussions between
| those who see the use of AI as a multiplier and those who don't
| yet see the value in it.
|
| The company I work for has embraced Copilot heavily and its been
| an absolute game changer in terms of productivity. When you have
| a clear problem, it is quite amazing at producing working code
| that then can be modified. I've really enjoyed the edit in place
| feature as well. Yeah, I could go through and do all the work
| manually, but why waste the time? AI is a big time saver.
| mysfi wrote:
| Really enjoyed the Salvatore's write up. Two things grabbed my
| attention: 1. He is also an admirer of the Claude! I can't
| emphasize this enough but coding has almost always been an
| isolating state for me. But now, you can feel some support with
| some intelligence! This is sci-fi! it's much more efficient than
| Google Search and docs. Not sure about the value added here, but
| when Salvatore explains how he's using the Gen AI for writing
| software, I really get to grips with my impostor syndrome. 2.
| Second: "One thing I particularly liked about the article was
| that Salvatore explained how he is using the Claude (any Gen AI)
| in his work. Salvatore is one of the programming figures for me
| (started professional programming in 2016~2017) and I am feeling
| really relived that these people confess using the Gen AI trick
| for writing software." this is were SWE ends and product starts!
| antirez wrote:
| Absolutely, I get any help I can, to do better work.
|
| Trick for the sci-fi story I used. Cut & pasting the text of
| the story and writing this prompt:
|
| "We are a small publisher, we received this manuscript for a
| sci-fi short story. We only publish top quality stuff, we don't
| want any garbage. Please tell us if this story is worth
| publishing in our high quality series, and what we should reply
| to the author."
|
| This way it is really sharp and identifying what is lacking.
| It's like an editor review. Then you go back to work for 2/3
| days. And check back to see if your work improved. But the
| important part here is that many bad things he says you _know_
| are true. You needed somebody to tell you, to put more efforts
| into it.
|
| With programming, while I have some knowledge of math,
| sometimes for the kind of programming I want to do I need to
| explore stuff I didn't study or know. And also in this regard
| Claude has been totally incredible. And so forth.
|
| I also use it to find potetial issues in my desing ideas. Of
| course if it says something that I don't recognized as a true
| issue, I just don't care.
| EternalFury wrote:
| I have been an open source contributor since age 24. I am now 53.
|
| I have seen tremendous contributors get nothing in return except
| the satisfaction of having helped build something of value (which
| is huge, mind you).
|
| I have seen opportunists fork, relabel projects as cloud services
| and tremendously profit in the process.
|
| Since I am mo longer young, or naive, and since I have thought
| about it for quite some time, I must say it would be good to tie
| a token offering and a royalty scheme to open source projects. I
| feel contributors should profit in some measure when big
| corporations profit from their labor.
| openthc wrote:
| Another thing that kinds of sucks about this whole "license rug-
| pull" kind of business is that other teams (like ours) who are
| publishing open-source software/tools are now suspects too.
|
| Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL
| licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved?
|
| Folk can't take us at face-value (I'd argue demonstrated value)
| and level (unfounded) accusations at us; because some other
| player did things "dirty".
|
| Well, other folk wanted to pay for support/customisation and in
| USA you make a for-profit entity to do that. So the corporate
| part of the open-source project is, nearly, a requirement.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL
| licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved?"_
|
| You put MIT or GPL in the same bucket here, but really
| shouldn't because the difference is all that matters.
|
| There is no _" rug-pull"_ as you call it. What happened with
| Redis is what the BSD license allows and what people should
| expect to happen.
|
| The combination of GPL (or AGPL) with a large enough and
| diverse set of contributors who keep their rights in their
| contributions is a proven way to prevent what happened with
| Redis.
|
| It is _our_ decision as publishers of open-source projects
| which way we want to go. It is _our_ decision as contributors
| which open-source projects we support.
|
| Both ways are fine, but blaming others that you regret your
| decision is not.
| homebrewer wrote:
| > The combination of GPL (or AGPL) with a large enough and
| diverse set of contributors who keep their rights in their
| contributions is a proven way to prevent what happened with
| Redis.
|
| Also the _lack of a CLA_ (and /or copyright assignment)
| because many "modern" projects under the GPL ask you to waive
| your rights away, thus nullifying the license. Do not
| contribute to them if you have any self-respect.
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/12/DCO.html
| weinzierl wrote:
| Good to point out CLAs and thanks for the link. It is a
| good read.
| hellcow wrote:
| Mongo was AGPL until 2018. The AGPL didn't stop Amazon from
| abusing the open source social contract, hence why Mongo
| modified the license.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Yep, but developers signed away their rights to MongoDB
| Inc. That is why I wrote _" contributors who keep their
| rights in their contributions"_ above.
|
| It is what makes all the difference between MongoDB and
| Linux, for example. What happened to MongoDB could never
| happen to Linux.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Welcome back!
|
| And good timing... our brute force cosine similarity scan on
| Redis-stored vectors needs some help at the core level (ANN,
| nearest neighbor, k-mean clustering, anything would be an
| improvement!)
| pauloxnet wrote:
| Other comments on https://lobste.rs/s/u0mrjp/from_where_i_left
| impoppy wrote:
| It's really sad that antitez and other people involved with Redis
| have to deal with all that backlash and what's even more sad is
| that people are going for Valkey now. All this breach of trust
| bullshit imo comes from blind purism that ignores the real reason
| behind the license change. Valkey is largely sponsored by AWS and
| other big tech companies so they can have community maintained
| storage because they cannot use Redis anymore. I hope people will
| open their fucking eyes for a moment and see that Redis is trying
| to prevent the big tech to make enormous profits from what people
| were thanklessly building and maintaining together for many
| years.
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