[HN Gopher] From where I left
___________________________________________________________________
From where I left
Author : tilt
Score : 1130 points
Date : 2024-12-10 16:41 UTC (1 days 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
| antirez wrote:
| Appreciate your kind words, and I'm very happy it was a good
| experience to work together, it was cool for me too. I hope
| there will be ways to exchange infos and hack :)
| reconditerose wrote:
| Everything we do is open-source, so you're free to take it
| and incorporate it back into Redis. (Although I'm more into
| rewriting the data structures to more efficient on modern
| CPU hardware). Keep some comments out in the open like your
| discussion about vector sets to keep the conversation
| going. For the record, I really don't like the vector set
| idea, but I'm not one to dish out hot takes on hacker news.
| 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)?
| caniszczyk wrote:
| No one organization in the world funds the LF in a way
| that is more than 1% of the total LF revenue... it has
| nearly ~2000 members across the world. You can usually
| get some of this from the LF Annual Report: https://www.l
| inuxfoundation.org/resources/publications/linux...
| 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.
| bonzini wrote:
| You have to release the whole system _under the SSPL_. So there
| could be a reading where you can 't use Linux, you can't use
| systemd, you can't use glibc, etc.
| 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.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| For writing code, I've found Claude far better at
| conventional/framework based code. I've found ChatGPT better at
| reasoning about more complex/nuanced code.
|
| As other commenters have said, that is just my personal
| opinion, I have zero evidence to back that up lol
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| See, I read that and immediately was reminded that I don't
| exactly love the OSI being the one true definer of Open
| Source... but somehow the only people who ever argue that
| immediately try to use it as an excuse to pretend their stuff
| is open for marketing reasons while avoiding actually giving
| users the same rights. Besides, it's _not_ that "openness and
| licensing are only what the OSI tells us they are"; it's that
| the OSI and FSF and DFSG all agree.
| 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"
| munificent wrote:
| There are only paperbacks. By "hardcopy", they meant
| "printed".
|
| I sell print editions through Amazon KDP and IngramSpark.
| Amazon is the lion's share, so I designed the print edition
| based on the formats they offer. At the time I started
| working on it, KDP only supported soft covers. They added
| hard covers _right_ as I was finishing the book, and I didn
| 't want to have to go back and redo everything.
|
| I have to admit that "Crafting Interpreters" is pushing the
| limits for what you can get away with on a soft cover. When
| I first started writing the book, I expected it to be
| (much) shorter, but I just estimated wrong.
|
| If I had a time machine, I might go back and tell myself to
| print it as two separate volumes.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| I'm not sure how these services work, but are you
| planning to offer hard covers as well for a "next print"?
|
| I've had my eye on Crafting Interpreters for a bit now,
| and I don't mind paying extra for a nicer version --
| especially if it's going into the pockets of an
| independent writer.
| munificent wrote:
| If I do a second edition, I'll probably think about it
| then. I don't have any plans to touch the book any time
| soon. I worked on it every single day for six years, so
| when it was done, I was _really_ ready to be done working
| on it.
| shever73 wrote:
| I love Crafting Interpreters, it's a fantastic book, and
| is on my desk beside me right now. Everything about it is
| just so well...crafted!
|
| I know Amazon is a must for authors, but as an Amazon
| avoider, I was delighted to able to order it through my
| local bookshop.
| munificent wrote:
| I'm glad you support a look bookstore too. Those sales
| are a very small fraction of what I make, but they're the
| fraction I love the most.
| 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.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| There are a couple of reasons as far as I can tell.
| Programming can be adequately gamified or fulfill basic
| dopaminergic feedback loops in a way that "true" creative
| expression (outside of an effort-action-reward feedback loop)
| cannot. With fiction, the value is strictly non-instrumental
| or context-specific. While the parsimony of the (formal)
| language you deploy can be (reflexively) satisfying to look
| back on, the real joy of art for its own sake is the response
| from the reader, which is necessarily slower than that of a
| computer, as it requires a more complicated system of
| evaluation than pure utility.
| 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.
| girvo wrote:
| > Game Programming Patterns
|
| Huh, I own this in a print copy. Thank you so much for writing
| it :)
| 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...
| vvillena wrote:
| Redis puts Redis into the open, and companies exposing
| Redis put everything they use to expose Redis into the
| open too.
|
| The key enabler in that whole business is still Redis, so
| the knowledge exchange appears fair.
| 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.
| stephenr wrote:
| TBH oracle have been better stewards of MySQL since they
| bought Sun than Redis the company has been of Redis for
| the last five or so years.
| jchw wrote:
| I personally have wondered if Oracle's behavior with
| MySQL is partly motivated by the fact that if they try to
| rug-pull it will most likely just push all of the cloud
| providers over to MariaDB anyways, which has been doing
| just fine, and I think is already supported by Amazon RDS
| anyways. Ultimately I am totally fine with a fork-heavy
| ecosystem, the only thing I would erase if I could is the
| normalization of signing CLAs, as I think they make the
| normally-symmetrical prospect of contributing to open
| source projects highly asymmetrical, and the consequences
| are not always so obvious to people.
| stephenr wrote:
| MariaDB is one of the biggest ironies to me: it was
| started because people _claimed_ Oracle was going to do
| Oracle things with it, and somehow make it not open any
| more.
|
| What actually happened is:
|
| - Oracle has just made MySQL better, and continues to
| release new tooling (e.g. mysql router) for it under the
| same license (gpl2).
|
| - MariaDB releases the bare minimum database engine under
| the GPL, and uses closed licenses for the tooling which
| is, to quote _them_ : "an essential element to any
| production database environment".
| jchw wrote:
| I wouldn't really put too much weight into the marketing
| speak, MariaDB feels like the same MySQL offering that
| always existed, at least to me (and I do run it in
| production, albeit only on a small scale.) And MariaDB
| has done plenty of work that is available in the open
| source product: performance improvements, new storage
| engines and so on. The only thing that's surprising is
| that MySQL continued to do the same.
|
| I don't think what MariaDB is doing today is what
| everyone was really worried about Oracle doing. Rather,
| Oracle simply never did what everyone thought they would.
| Personally, I think MariaDB keeps them honest, and if
| MariaDB ceased to exist as a serious alternative there is
| a good chance the lawnmower would fire back up.
|
| Though who knows. Maybe Oracle is different. However, I
| would prefer not to waste the openness of my mind. I
| reckon if they thought they could pull the rug they would
| do so.
| evanelias wrote:
| MySQL and MariaDB have diverged over the years. They each
| have some interesting major features that the other one
| lacks, and there's an ever-growing list of
| incompatibilities between them.
|
| Amazon RDS does offer a MariaDB option, but Amazon Aurora
| does not. And other clouds often don't offer it. As far
| as I can tell from a quick search, Google CloudSQL does
| not offer a managed MariaDB product. Azure offers one,
| but they're officially retiring it next year.
|
| This discussion is also a bit ironic because MariaDB
| created the BSL (for use in their proxy product), which
| is typically attacked alongside SSPL in these types of
| threads.
|
| Not taking sides here, to be clear. I use both MySQL and
| MariaDB and am glad they both exist. And personally I
| have no problems with BSL (or SSPL etc) software, since I
| am not a cloud hosting provider.
| jchw wrote:
| I would like to clarify since I am one of the people who
| is always present in these threads debating these
| licenses:
|
| I think these licenses suck compared to even kind-of-bad
| open source licenses, like AGPL, though some suck more
| than others. For example, the SSPL is a poorly-conceived
| liability nightmare. BUSL, on the other hand, may not be
| much better, but it is pretty interesting. Software that
| is BUSL today is _theoretically_ open source
| _eventually_. As long as this holds up in court, it is an
| intriguing alternative to other "business" licenses.
|
| However: it was never about this. My complaints always
| center squarely around two things:
|
| - One, deception. If you release a product and you call
| it "open source" or otherwise try to imply it is open,
| but actually it is not open source, this is bad. This is
| bad because like it or not, people have a perception of
| what open source is that has been shaped by the careful
| guarding of the definition of the term, and when people
| misuse it, it dilutes this while also deceiving people
| into thinking it's the same thing they've come to know.
|
| - Two, violation of expectations. I get that the
| contributions made by open source contributors rarely
| compares much to the contributions made by those employed
| at companies, but even still, the CLA breaks the
| fundamental mutually beneficial relationship that open
| source contributors have with the projects they're
| contributing to, and I think that this aspect of CLAs is
| troublesome. That aside, I personally evangelized Redis
| within organizations with the understanding that it would
| always be open source, because why wouldn't it be? And I
| reckon that big open source users like MediaWiki also
| never envisioned that Redis would cease to be open source
| some day. Don't get it twisted, I think Redis is great
| software that can stand on its own, but it doesn't
| matter: it _didn 't_. It got a healthy boost from
| participating in the open source community, and then one
| day, it suddenly left said community in the dust, which
| is why we have to fork.
|
| However, despite that... I am not ideologically opposed
| to closed-source, source-available, or any other kind of
| software. It's fine. I use software that is "non-free". I
| pay for software. I pay for JetBrains Toolbox. This does
| not bother me and is not my issue. It's literally just
| those two things that bother me.
|
| So why don't I care about MaxScale? Honestly, it's pretty
| simple: It's outside of my purview. It may very well be
| an important project used by a lot of people, but it just
| doesn't seem like it was ever a huge open source project:
| according to GitHub, it has a total of 39 all-time
| contributors, most of which seemingly after the
| relicensing, versus Redis's 729. I've never used MaxScale
| and I'm not sure what depends on it. If someone else is
| mad about this relicensing, I do not necessarily blame
| them, but I just simply have no dog in the race.
|
| MySQL and MariaDB themselves remain as open as ever, and
| that's really all most people are concerned with IMO.
| evanelias wrote:
| > people have a perception of what open source is that
| has been shaped by the careful guarding of the definition
| of the term, and when people misuse it, it dilutes this
|
| That's true, but it's an unfortunate accident. In my mind
| the core problem is that OSI chose to take an existing
| term/concept (source code being "open" which previously
| just meant the code was publicly available) and
| conflating it with a new, _much_ more specific definition
| relating to copyright license terms.
|
| And then because the term "open source" already had
| previous usage in the industry, OSI couldn't get a
| trademark, which means discussions of "misuse" and
| "dilution" are purely matters of opinion which are very
| prone to holy wars. If they had just chosen an _actually_
| new /novel term which could be trademarked (e.g.
| "sourceware" was one alternative floated at the time), I
| suspect a lot of confusion could have been avoided.
|
| > the CLA breaks the fundamental mutually beneficial
| relationship that open source contributors have with the
| projects they're contributing to
|
| It reduces some of the benefits for the contributor, but
| it's still a mutually beneficial relationship that (imo)
| benefits the contributor more than the maintainer. Most
| third-party contributions are features/fixes specifically
| needed by the contributor, and having them merged
| upstream typically makes life much easier for the
| contributor, despite the possible risk of future
| relicensing due to the CLA. From the contributors' point
| of view, that's still generally better than alternatives
| such as either maintaining a private fork forever, or re-
| implementing the software in-house from scratch.
|
| > I personally evangelized Redis within organizations
| with the understanding that it would always be open
| source, because why wouldn't it be? And I reckon that big
| open source users like MediaWiki also never envisioned
| that Redis would cease to be open source some day.
|
| A lot of people made this assumption, but at the end of
| the day, in retrospect this was akin to assuming that
| ZIRP would remain the status quo forever. And that's
| understandable, given how the industry skews young and
| that means a majority of folks have worked their entire
| career in this low-interest-rate, massive-tech-valuation
| bubble. And even for older engineers, it's easy to get
| lost in the bubble when most of your coworkers are
| younger and have 100% internalized those market
| conditions as being "normal".
|
| So then when the bubble deflates a little bit, people
| start vocally blaming Redis and Hashicorp and RedHat and
| Elastic and MongoDB and every other previously-open-
| source company that gets added to this ever-growing list.
| That's human nature I suppose; when enough people make
| the same bad assumption, they're going to blame the
| external symptoms and not blame their own bad assumption.
|
| > It got a healthy boost from participating in the open
| source community, and then one day, it suddenly left said
| community in the dust, which is why we have to fork.
|
| Changing the license doesn't leave the community in the
| dust though. I mean, "we" don't "have" to fork, unless
| "we" are cloud providers, right? I don't think it is a
| coincidence that a number of the Valkey contributors work
| for cloud providers.
|
| But I find it curious that many of the loudest voices in
| these threads aren't actually code contributors to the
| software being discussed. (I'm not referring to your
| comments, to be clear; I found your writing quite
| insightful and nuanced, even though I disagree with some
| of it.)
| jchw wrote:
| > That's true, but it's an unfortunate accident. In my
| mind the core problem is that OSI chose to take an
| existing term/concept (source code being "open" which
| previously just meant the code was publicly available)
| and conflating it with a new, much more specific
| definition relating to copyright license terms.
|
| > And then because the term "open source" already had
| previous usage in the industry, OSI couldn't get a
| trademark, which means discussions of "misuse" and
| "dilution" are purely matters of opinion which are very
| prone to holy wars. If they had just chosen an actually
| new/novel term which could be trademarked (e.g.
| "sourceware" was one alternative floated at the time), I
| suspect a lot of confusion could have been avoided.
|
| As far as I can tell, the term "open source" was not in
| any kind of widespread use prior to the explicit open
| source movement that began in 1998, so while it does sort
| of sound like a generic term, I don't think they were
| conflating much with any existing term in widespread use.
| The OSI themselves[1] also seem to suggest that they
| believe they were responsible for making the phrase
| ineligible for trademark:
|
| > Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success
| in bringing the "open source" concept into the
| mainstream.
|
| [1]: https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-
| source.p...
|
| --
|
| > It reduces some of the benefits for the contributor,
| but it's still a mutually beneficial relationship that
| (imo) benefits the contributor more than the maintainer.
| Most third-party contributions are features/fixes
| specifically needed by the contributor, and having them
| merged upstream typically makes life much easier for the
| contributor, despite the possible risk of future
| relicensing due to the CLA. From the contributors' point
| of view, that's still generally better than alternatives
| such as either maintaining a private fork forever, or re-
| implementing the software in-house from scratch.
|
| Personally, I only contribute to projects with CLAs when
| I have pretty much no other choice, due to constraints
| outside of my control. Example: I have begrudgingly made
| contributions to Qt because I have no control over the
| upstream that KDE uses.
|
| To be fair, I guess this does technically still count as
| a mutually beneficial relationship, but to me, it feels a
| lot more like a toxic one. But yes, that's true.
|
| > A lot of people made this assumption, but at the end of
| the day, in retrospect this was akin to assuming that
| ZIRP would remain the status quo forever. And that's
| understandable, given how the industry skews young and
| that means a majority of folks have worked their entire
| career in this low-interest-rate, massive-tech-valuation
| bubble. And even for older engineers, it's easy to get
| lost in the bubble when most of your coworkers are
| younger and have 100% internalized those market
| conditions as being "normal".
|
| > So then when the bubble deflates a little bit, people
| start vocally blaming Redis and Hashicorp and RedHat and
| Elastic and MongoDB and every other previously-open-
| source company that gets added to this ever-growing list.
| That's human nature I suppose; when enough people make
| the same bad assumption, they're going to blame the
| external symptoms and not blame their own bad assumption.
|
| Well, from my perspective, a perfectly-reasonable, common
| assumption became an unreasonable without much warning.
|
| As much as people have misgivings about how Red Hat has
| handled RHEL, they still proved for a very long time that
| it _is_ possible to run a sustainable business even when
| the primary thing you do is work on open source projects.
| They are not alone: there are others. Off the top of my
| head, Collabora, Ltd. is often right alongside Red Hat. I
| think all of the misgivings people have with Red Hat are
| also after the IBM acquisition, so it 's hard to be sure
| exactly what went wrong there.
|
| What's happening today feels very different, though. In a
| post-CLA world, a lot of companies are banking on the
| rugpull. They are starting businesses operating in ways
| they know is not sustainable, securing enormous
| investments, and knowing full well that when the time is
| right they will change the rules, which is legal because
| they reserved the right to do so.
|
| And I won't say that people _shouldn 't_ take caution and
| mind the risk. They are! I think a lot of people are more
| skeptical of business models than ever. Even on the
| consumer end, the mantra of "If you're not paying for the
| product, then you are the product" has entered the
| mainstream thanks to Facebook, and many are skeptical of
| startups like Discord as well for similar reasons.
|
| But even then, I feel deeply that companies should take
| responsibility when the expectations are misaligned. If
| you have a CLA on your project with the explicit intent
| to be able to relicense the project later, _please
| communicate this very clearly to your users and
| contributors_. Prior to recently, a very good
| justification for a CLA was actually just legal book-
| keeping: it killed many birds with one stone, like
| allowing a contribution to be used in a dual-licensed
| product with a commercial license, additional assurance
| that the person who is contributing the code has the
| legal right to contribute it, and allowing for good-faith
| relicensing when it would be helpful (e.g. transitioning
| from GPLv2 to GPLv2+ or something like that.) I didn 't
| expect CLAs to be used the way they are used today, and
| needless to say I'm pretty disappointed.
|
| So sure. Users should beware. But, I think that doesn't
| absolve companies from not setting proper expectations.
| We should expect companies to not do things that will
| leave everyone feeling bamboozled. Just as arguably the
| people should've known better, companies like Redis, Inc.
| should've known better, too.
|
| > Changing the license doesn't leave the community in the
| dust though. I mean, "we" don't "have" to fork, unless
| "we" are cloud providers, right? I find it curious that
| many of the loudest voices in these threads aren't
| actually code contributors to the software being
| discussed. (I'm not referring to your comments, to be
| clear; I found your writing quite insightful and nuanced,
| even though I disagree with some of it.)
|
| In some cases, I am legitimately not permitted to use or
| run SSPL software. To be clear though, it's not like I
| disagree: I feel like SSPL is a trash fire that, if
| brought from the metaphorical realm into the physical,
| could be seen from space. It is less a copyright license
| to me and more of an extended middle finger.
|
| In other cases, I choose open source for practical
| reasons. For example, if I am using Linux, many
| distributions will flat-out not package software that is
| not open source. This is both for ideological and
| practical reasons. Working with non-open-source software
| in an otherwise-fully-open-source project feels like
| dealing with toxic waste. And it's not entirely
| unreasonable, as it _can_ be surprising. If I install the
| Redis package one day and it 's open source, then the
| package updates in a system upgrade and it's SSPL, that
| would be a rather huge problem! So this clearly can't
| work, and we have to very clearly distinguish what
| software is safe to use and what software might be quite
| unsafe to use.
|
| Even if it is technically possible for me to use SSPL
| software, I would greatly prefer to not do so anyways. If
| I wanted to contribute upstream to a project I use, I'd
| greatly prefer it to be one that doesn't use a CLA.
| Valkey doesn't use a CLA. Therefore, if I use Valkey, I
| don't have to sign a CLA to contribute upstream.
|
| > And meanwhile I don't think it is a coincidence that a
| number of the Valkey contributors work for cloud
| providers.
|
| Definitely, but actually, I think this sort of model is
| exactly what has always worked best for open source: all
| of the cloud providers contributing to it get to benefit
| equally from it. To me this is what Linux kernel
| development also looks like, along with many other
| successful projects.
|
| Is it a bit sad that Redis, Inc. and the folks who made
| Redis what it is today will ultimately lose out if Valkey
| winds up dominating the mindshare in the long run?
| Absolutely, it's a terrible end result. But the way I see
| it, it feels like it's either that, or the rest of the
| world loses out on having an open source Redis-compatible
| database. I don't think Redis, Inc. really needs to be
| rewarded infinitely forever for the work that they did,
| even as much as I value it, so this temporary situation,
| as unfortunate as it may be, seems like a good tradeoff
| for the longer haul.
|
| I think the story of Redis and many other such projects
| will wind up being a cautionary tale, and we're just now
| finding out to whom it will be to. Though, even if I
| don't like it, it's looking more and more likely that the
| cautionary tale is to us, the users.
| 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?
| fweimer wrote:
| I don't think it's in bad faith. A lot of people still
| believe that they have to pay one of
| AdaCore/Baylibre/Embecosm/Red Hat/SUSE/Wind River if you
| want to use GCC commercially, to cover GPL-related risk.
| 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.
| stephenr wrote:
| The community rallied around a community fork with an
| open source licence instead of a VC funded startup with a
| penchant for changing licences.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Around competitive prices and terms rather than a
| monopoly.
| motorest wrote:
| > Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community
| rallied behind Big Tech instead of a small startup
| though. Just saying.
|
| The community rallied behind the project that ensures the
| software they care about remains free and open and
| available to all without the risk of being blind-sided.
| acmeian wrote:
| Microsoft appears to be the only major player that isn't
| going with Valkey and established some sort of licensing
| deal with Redis [0].
|
| [0]: https://redis.io/blog/introducing-azure-managed-
| redis
| riverdweller wrote:
| Microsoft also last year released their _own_ Redis-
| client-compatible key-value store, Garnet:
| https://github.com/microsoft/garnet
| 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 BUSL, which is
| another source-available license. It is pretty similar to
| the AGPLv3, and they even credibly applied to get it OSI-
| approved.
|
| https://blog.tidelift.com/what-i-learned-from-the-server-
| sid...
| https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11291/how-
| to-...
|
| What it isn't close to is the original license, which is
| a permissive open source license.
|
| The license switch-up is why a fork was needed. Matrix
| did a similar thing with the AGPL which alas, doesn't
| have a major fork. https://element.io/blog/element-to-
| adopt-agplv3/ Although it's technically still open
| source, they didn't do right by the contributors to it.
| lmm wrote:
| Every license is a unique snowflake, but if you're going
| to stay sane and get on with your life you need some
| categories and lines. Redis is not available under a
| license that is open-source in any of the usual senses -
| not OSI-approved, not DFSG-compatible, not FSF-approved.
| That is a big deal. Matrix remains open source under a
| license that meets all those criteria. It's not a
| technical distinction, it's the line in the sand that
| stops open-source from being whittled away to nothing.
| jenadine wrote:
| If the new license is so similar to the AGPL, why did
| they not pick AGPL as one of the license options in order
| to keep a well known OSI-aproved license?
| adolph wrote:
| Yes, picking the same license is at least some security
| against a backdoor of some crafty IP lawyer.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| It's not truly open source if the most basic freedom,
| freedom to use code for any purpose, is not fulfilled.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| I hate that people feel the need to so strongly attach
| the generic term open source to Open Source Initiativer
| OSI Certified(tm) license's marketing (anti Stallman)
| propaganda as the one and only true open source. Redis'
| license is open in all the ways that matter.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| OSI has nothing to do with being anti-Stallman. (I think
| the most anti-Stallman person is, unfortunately, Stallman
| himself, having done so much to destroy his own
| reputation.)
|
| Even Stallman would agree that nothing can be open source
| if the freedom 0, freedom to use software for any
| purpose, is not provided. SSPL does not grant this
| freedom.
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| Which makes rot a good metaphor actually. The DNA of a
| tree which becomes infected with a new mutation of a
| fungus didn't change, the fungus did.
|
| Code in which a vulnerability is discovered is in the
| same position. It's developed a susceptibility to a new
| force malevolent to its purpose. It doesn't have to
| change to rot, it suffices for the world to change around
| it.
| 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.
| kunley wrote:
| Erm I am not sure if I was understood correctly - I meant
| legal consequences from the perspective of redis guys on
| one side, and saas guys on the other side..
|
| One simply can't admit that they both were doing a valid
| thing
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Lots of people defend these licenses on exactly those
| grounds. I, too, find it pretty mystifying that this
| seems to be a minority perspective here. At least this
| seems to be the case among the people who speak up when
| this comes up here. It's hard to know if there is a less
| noisy majority who feels differently about it.
| xvector wrote:
| I think the "silent majority" is just fine with this
| change. The OSS "extremists" will certainly be the
| noisiest about this - everyone else will continue on with
| life as usual, especially if they have an understanding
| of the concept of business pressures.
| bandrami wrote:
| If you just call SaaS "hosting" does that change your
| view of things? Because I remember when commercial
| hosting for free software was actively encouraged.
| 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.
| thayne wrote:
| Well in this case, antirez literally promised[1] they
| wouldn't change the license of the core away from BSD,
| and then Redis Labs did just that, and now antirez is
| speaking favorably of that decision.
|
| [1]: https://antirez.com/news/120
| skinner_ wrote:
| Wow, I wasn't aware. @jart, do you have any harsh
| comments on the actual reneging of an actual promise?
| @antirez, do you have any kind of comments?
| gavindean90 wrote:
| That post was from literally thousands of days ago and
| seems to be in relation to some confusion at that time.
|
| Honestly to me you can see the tensions that led to the
| license change in that post. It's largely consistent with
| what antirez has said in the post and in this thread.
| master2121 wrote:
| Hey gavindean90!
|
| You are absolutely right--context! matters, especially
| when we are talking about something from so long ago. It
| does seem like the post reflects the confusion and
| tensions of that time, which may have influenced the
| eventual license change.
|
| Looking back, it is interesting how the decisions align
| with what he has shared, both back then and here in this
| thread. It really gives perspective on how things
| evolved.
|
| Thanks for pointing that out!
| jillyboel wrote:
| Ok so just because something is in the past it's become
| irrelevant? So no promises are ever worth trusting? The
| creator of redis LITERALLY said "Redis will remain BSD
| licensed". And it's no longer BSD licensed.
| evanelias wrote:
| Where is there a "promise" in that post? Where is there
| any wording about it remaining BSD _forever_?
|
| It's a post from 2018, about a specific license confusion
| situation that occurred in 2018. Context matters.
| jillyboel wrote:
| In the title: "Redis will remain BSD licensed"
|
| You can try to be a smartass and add random caveats but
| that's not how language works.
|
| Imagine if everyone thought like you did: "Sure I promise
| to do X" (not saying that I mean for the next 5 minutes
| and will then ignore my past promise)
| evanelias wrote:
| Again, where is the word "promise" in this post?
|
| The post title _in its original context_ is clearly
| referring to the confusion discussed _in the very first
| sentence_ : "Today a page about the new Common Clause
| license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if
| Redis itself switched license." The title is saying that
| Redis core's license was not switched to Common Clause at
| that time in 2018. That's all. It is not titled "I
| promise that Redis will remain open source forever".
| thayne wrote:
| > This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD
| licensed.
|
| True, he doesn't explicitly say for how long, but I don't
| think it is unreasonable to read "will remain" as "will
| remain indefinitely" and not as "will remain so until we
| change our minds".
| evanelias wrote:
| > I don't think it is unreasonable to read "will remain"
| as "will remain indefinitely"
|
| That's a reasonable interpretation. But it involves an
| assumption on behalf of the reader, of words that are not
| there. I think it's a stretch to consider that specific
| post a "literal promise" by Antirez.
|
| That said, I just did more research and must admit I am
| completely wrong with regards to the bigger picture
| there. My genuine apologies. In the HN commentary on that
| same post [1], the cofounder/CTO of Redis Labs (Yiftach)
| apparently made a much more direct statement that "Redis
| remains and always will remain, open source, BSD
| license". Due to use of the word "always", _that_ I think
| can unambiguously be called a literal promise that was
| broken by the Redis company.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818647
| jillyboel wrote:
| You don't have to use the word promise to make a promise.
| It's inferred.
| 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 a microcosm of the larger issue, isn't it?
| Contributors : Redis :: Redis : AWS - Redis gave Amazon
| the permission to host and make money off of Redis, but
| Redis was evidently 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)
| devsda wrote:
| I wonder how the oss community will react if the sequence
| of events were a little different.
|
| 1. Redis Inc creates a fork of Redis and names it say
| RedisNext or anything else(xyz) without a reference to
| Redis name at all.
|
| 2. Announces that, xyz is a fully compatible next gen
| version of Redis with enterprise features but it is only
| available under SSPL license.
|
| 3. Also announces that original Redis software is feature
| complete and will be under maintenance with only critical
| bug fixes.
|
| This will be them playing by the same rules as any other
| third-party.
|
| Will the community still manage to find fault with Redis
| Inc?
|
| Will it feel entitled to continued updates or the Redis
| brand demanding a project handover to a different
| "group"?
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Cannot speak for the community, but I'd assume that the
| right thing would be to handover Redis brand to a FOSS
| foundation.
|
| Anything else just complicates things, like we see today,
| where Valkey and others are referenced as being Redis
| compatible (at least as far as RESP is concerned), and we
| either have specific clients (such as valkey-go), or
| existing Redis clients, that seem to want to maintain
| compatibility with most (all?) of them.
| 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.
| enugu wrote:
| It is absurd to call this license change stealing when
| the previous work is still available under the original
| license. This is more like someone who is giving to the
| community, still continuing to give, but with a slightly
| more strict license. Do you expect someone who is doing
| philantropic work, gets contributions from others, but
| later becomes less philantropic to change their name?
|
| > NEVER NEVER NEVER have had the traction
|
| There is plenty of even closed source software which has
| traction in many domains, let alone software released
| under a license which as anti-rez points out allows the
| users to freely run their websites on redis, modify and
| redistribute code etc.(with the exception of running
| hosting services like Amazon).
|
| For instance, it would be amazing and a great improvement
| if there was a top-quality CAD program with a similar
| license to Redis.
| evanelias wrote:
| You clearly feel very strongly about this topic; out of
| curiosity, are you a Redis contributor? If so, was your
| contribution done via your day job (paid time) or was it
| an outside/independent contribution?
|
| > 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.
|
| Who should enforce such a requirement, and under what
| mechanism?
|
| Open source licenses are _copyright_ licenses, whereas
| product names are _trademarks_. These are separate legal
| concepts. Meanwhile "the community" isn't even a legal
| entity at all. As I understand it, there's nothing to
| "start litigating" here, and no one to litigate it.
|
| Are you proposing that the OSI should change the OSD such
| that open source licenses must include mandatory
| trademark assignment to an independent nonprofit
| foundation? That's a rather extreme view if so.
| 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 :)
| redkoala wrote:
| It's the entire premise of public goods, and the
| sustainable funding model for that would be through
| government funding or funding of open source foundations
| like the CNCF. For example, the IETF standards body is
| founded by the global charitable organization the
| Internet Society. How do we continue to build on this
| public goods funding model for projects like this?
| motorest wrote:
| > seems that "open core"[1] is a failed experiment.
|
| I don't think the jury is out. If you look at nginx, you
| won't see a lot of complains over nginx plus. The nginx
| brand still has a lot of goodwill and a few open source
| projects seem to be peacefully building upon it without
| any issue.
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Receiving a gift does not form a social contract that
| entitles you to future gifts.
|
| Certainly, but if you exchange gifts with someone every
| christmas, have been doing so for a decade, and they
| suddenly stop giving you one, or give you an unpolished
| one where they previously cleaned it to a shine, you are
| perfectly within your rights to be a bit miffed at that,
| and withold your own.
|
| People can say the new license is reasonable (and by all
| reasonable measures it probably is) but that's not how it
| feels, and that's the important part.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Open source is not a gift economy, and is in fact a
| different, and long established social contract. Never
| has this misplaced metaphor been used to describe open
| source, nor do the contributers demand any return that
| amounts to an "entitlement to future gifts".
| jillyboel wrote:
| It absolutely is though. Do you not see any value in bug
| fixes? Do you think software never needs to be updated?
| We all know security updates are crucial, and pretending
| you can just run the old version forever is insane. If I
| contributed to redis in the past I did so under the
| assumption that I was contributing to a product that I
| could actually keep using. But instead they took all
| those contributions and gave the contributors a huge
| middle finger by denying them security updates and fixes.
|
| And sure, you can say "just do the bug fixes yourself".
| But if I knew that was going to be the case, I'd never
| have bothered to contribute.
| evanelias wrote:
| > If I contributed to redis in the past I did so under
| the assumption that I was contributing to a product that
| I could actually keep using
|
| It sounds like you also have an assumption that the
| maintainers will spend the effort to maintain your
| contribution _forever_ , after already spending the
| initial effort to review and integrate your contribution.
| This all takes time and money, which has to come from
| somewhere.
|
| You're asking "Do you not see any value in bug fixes? Do
| you think software never needs to be updated?" from the
| contributors' and users' point of view. But the same
| exact issue exists from the maintainers' point of view.
|
| A lot of people in this thread are commenting as if an
| open source contribution is a purely altruistic act by
| the contributor which then solely benefits the
| maintainers. That's far from the case in reality. Many
| third party contributors are writing their contributions
| as part of their day job (meaning they're paid to do it),
| and the contribution directly benefits themselves and/or
| their employer by fixing some problem they encountered or
| adding some feature that they needed.
| jillyboel wrote:
| > It sounds like you also have an assumption that the
| maintainers will spend the effort to maintain your
| contribution forever, after already spending the initial
| effort to review and integrate your contribution. This
| all takes time and money, which has to come from
| somewhere.
|
| Correct, that's generally how open source works. You make
| a contribution, they merge it, and then the assumption is
| that it is maintained by the maintainers. You seem to act
| like this is an odd assumption, even though it is and has
| been the reality for pretty much every open source
| project ever.
|
| > But the same exact issue exists from the maintainers'
| point of view.
|
| Right, it's their "job". Maintaining the software. It's
| pretty much in the name. That's what happens when you
| accept contributions. They get merged into the software
| project, and then you (the maintainer) are responsible
| for maintaining it, or removing the functionality in a
| subsequent release. That's why code review happens where
| you consider the maintenance burden, and features
| sometimes don't get merged.
|
| If this doesn't sound appealing then don't become the
| maintainer of an open source project.
|
| > Many third party contributors are writing their
| contributions as part of their day job (meaning they're
| paid to do it), and the contribution directly benefits
| themselves and/or their employer by fixing some problem
| they encountered or adding some feature that they needed.
|
| Sure, and they could've kept it private so it only
| benefits them and/or their employer. But instead they
| chose to open source it in the hopes that
|
| 1) The maintainers will maintain it
|
| 2) It might benefit someone else
|
| That's the whole deal. You're essentially trading your
| contributions for future maintenance.
| evanelias wrote:
| I'm well acquainted with open source maintenance; one of
| my open source projects has been downloaded over 2
| million times, and another is imported by over 8000 other
| repos on GitHub. I'm not "acting like this is an odd
| assumption" but rather my point was to consider the
| economic side from the maintainers' point of view, which
| many people in this thread are completely ignoring.
|
| As you said above, maintainers don't have to accept your
| contribution, and if they do, they always have the option
| of removing it in a future release. And if the
| maintainers use a CLA or other copyright assignment
| mechanism, they _also_ have the option of _changing the
| license for future releases_. So why are you assuming you
| can keep using _future versions_ of the product forever
| if you contribute to it and sign a CLA?
|
| > Sure, and they could've kept it private so it only
| benefits them and/or their employer
|
| But that _doesn 't_ actually provide a net "benefit" to
| the contributor, because then they have to take on the
| massive burden of maintaining a private fork.
|
| My point in all this is that contributing to open source
| often benefits the contributor _more_ than the
| maintainer, and yet people act like it primarily is an
| altruistic gift from the contributor which solely
| benefits the maintainer / product owner.
| indymike wrote:
| > It is not a "rug pull" for someone to stop giving you
| gifts.
|
| I'm not sure that the developers contributing code from
| outside the company see it that way. An easy way to tell
| if contributors see a license change as a rug pull is if
| the forks that happen after the rug pull get traction.
|
| > 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.
|
| Most of the time, though, open source limits growth - and
| doesn't threaten the original author's startup. This is a
| really important distinction because there is a trade-off
| in choosing open source as a marketing strategy - you do
| potentially face competition from other contributors,
| users and parasites that will moderate growth.
| 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.
| kemitchell wrote:
| No well-known permissive open software license includes any
| promise to do future development, much less to make it
| available under the same license terms. A key draw of
| permissive licensing is that anyone _can_ fork and put new
| work under new and different terms.
|
| Who would promise perpetual maintenance for nothing? What
| organization would sign up to be the only one that _can 't_
| change terms for improvements?
|
| I don't think "social contract" makes sense here. There's
| no sovereign power involved. In the sense used, "social
| contract" essentially means "not in the contract"---as in
| not in the terms. It's a back door for saying things that
| were never put down ought to be treated like they were in
| the license file, just because one side really wants them
| and doesn't want to DIY or pay for them.
|
| If there are disappointed _expectations_ , that's another
| thing. But being even very disappointed, and being able to
| find other like-minded people who would prefer no
| disruption and new freebies forever, doesn't make unfounded
| expectations enforceable, nor should it.
|
| I'd be extremely careful speaking of any singular
| "community". And of assuming that everyone in it expected
| Redis or another similar project to work just like Linux or
| other exceptional projects. Most devs dealing with open
| source have a project relicense---among many others than
| simply grind to a halt---at some point in their career. For
| some devs, Redis may have been the first. Others "adopted"
| Redis knowing the risk and accepting it.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| > With open-source software, a license is as much a social
| contract as it is a legal one
|
| Says who? I completely disagree. A license only applies to
| the _current_ work done. It does not compel someone to keep
| dedicating time to a project for free because they also did
| that in the past. People are allowed to change, even if
| they once released some code under a different license.
|
| Is the old code still available under the same license ?
| That's the only contract I care about , both legal and
| social.
|
| I am just as much a member of this FLOSS community as
| others , and I never got the memo about this social
| contract story. I don't think it's true. My trust hasn't
| been affected at all.
|
| I understand your point I just get annoyed being lumped
| into it. Not everyone feels that way.
|
| (But of course my opinion does matter _less_ than actual
| contributors to Redis ! That's totally fair.)
| bruce511 wrote:
| I read this as you saying...
|
| You gave us a bunch of stuff for free. You are now putting
| some conditions on that for new stuff you do. And that
| makes me sad.
|
| I get the "feelings" part of this. When the world changes,
| even for the better, it can make us sad.
|
| Equally this license better supports the stuff I am getting
| for free, and penalizes some giant corporation with buckets
| of money. And I keep getting stuff for free. So (frankly)
| I'm happy.
|
| So meh. Is trust broken? Is the community harmed? Should we
| expect more moves along these lines? Do I see all decisions
| as clearly black and white - good or evil? Or is there more
| nuance?
|
| For those upset at AWS no longer getting Redis for free,
| you can of course fork it and carry on developing for AWS.
| Those who don't like new redis can carry on running the old
| one. Those who want new redis can, well, download and use
| it.
|
| Frankly they didn't hurt my feelings. They're developing. I
| still get it. I'm happy, not sad.
| space_oddity wrote:
| And it's obviouse that when contributors feel their efforts
| may be co-opted or undermined, they're less likely to
| engage
| KingMob wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Thing is, this sentence could equally be applied to the big
| cloud free riders.
|
| Why should anyone, business or volunteer, write software
| that benefits FAANGs that don't pay their fair share?
| happyraul wrote:
| I'm no fan of FAANGs, but what is "their fair share"? The
| entire point of OSS is that they don't have a fair share
| to pay. It's entirely voluntary.
| 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.
| smolder wrote:
| Put another way, many people have contributed to Bezos'
| bottom line for free. The restriction is annoying but there
| should probably be a better way to get a piece of that huge
| value for everyone who generates it, mostly thanklessly. Some
| kind of OSS tax proportional to profitability would make some
| sense, as annoying as that might be to implement or deal
| with.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| This idea is similar to what some countries do around
| music: artist register with an government identity that
| collects copyright fees from venues that play music - live
| or otherwise (bars, clubs, theatres included).
|
| The government identity then distributes those monies to
| the artists according to playlists collected from said
| venues.
|
| It works for big acts, for small acts the overhead tends to
| consume the payouts.
| jillyboel wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You can do this without fucking over past contributors.
| Just... Don't change the license. Then still do all that
| other stuff. They're not contradictory.
| 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.
| enugu wrote:
| One of the motivations of copyleft licenses like GPL which
| are a part of open source, was the freedom for users to see
| and modify code. The fact that the user works with the
| software in a browser rather than inside a native app is a
| technicality which shouldn't mean that the principle
| becomes invalid.
|
| Of course, this makes it harder for developers to monetize
| their work. But, instead of framing the discussion in terms
| of these conflicting interests and finding a balance, the
| term 'open source' becomes a debate target (even though the
| OSI definition includes AGPL which is also radioactive if
| one wants to monetize the work.)
|
| So we have three parties 1) Users 2) App Developers who
| write commercial closed source code for the user facing app
| 3) Dependency Developers who write code used by App
| Developers.
|
| (There is a simplification here as 2 can be a startup
| writing selling a closed source dependency used by other
| developers)
|
| Just as App developers would like to monetize via user
| payments, some licenses allow the same option for
| Dependency developers while simultaneously allowing source
| code to be available and modified.
|
| The basic idea behind such a license is 'free of cost and
| inspectable/modifiable code for almost all users, but
| commercial for large companies making a significant revenue
| from the software'.
|
| There needs to be some work done, to make the license
| predictable - which users it requires to pay, and the price
| involved.
| 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.
| inopinatus wrote:
| I can only beg your pardon for my lack of emotion or
| delicate language in offering these admittedly blunt and
| unflattering assessments.
| 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| switched away to what? To a source-available license? copy-
| left?
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Initially to a PolyForm license[1], which I then forked to
| create my own[2]. I informally refer to it as an "edu
| source" license (the source available is primarily
| available for educational purposes).
|
| [1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/strict/1.0.0/ (hn
| discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24804223)
|
| [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-license
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Successful open source projects historically involve a bunch
| of companies lowering their costs by commoditizing expensive
| commercial functionality. Server operating systems, version
| control, programming environments used to be very expensive.
|
| Linux, git, Python, Postgres, etc weren't about getting rich,
| but about making something cheap and easy.
|
| The paradox of these single company backed OSS projects is
| somehow making a big chunk of it free/open but collecting
| money off of other services. To me, I'm not sure that's
| worked yet. Many will even say that these companies aren't
| really doing open source in the traditional sense, but acting
| as commercial vendors that let you look at the code.
| _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?
| gpderetta wrote:
| Affero GPL-style copyleft licenses are an option, although
| they are treated as radioactive by most companies. A clause
| that triggers the extensions over GPL only for companies
| beyond a certain size might make them more platable.
| eudoxus wrote:
| > although they are treated as radioactive by most
| companies
|
| Isn't this reason enough to not consider it an option?
| hnfong wrote:
| AFAIK, the main issue of the GPL family of licenses is
| that they are rather poorly drafted. The GNU project has
| great evangelists but ideological-minded people make bad
| lawyers. Their licenses are long winded and hard to
| interpret, and often make assumptions about unsettled
| bits of copyright law. Their legal theories (eg. "GPL is
| not a contract") have been rejected by courts.
|
| In short, if you're a company wanting to use some AGPL-
| like license, you'd probably want to use a license that's
| better drafted over the original AGPL.
| gavindean90 wrote:
| Can you link some info on the portion about contracts
| having been rejected by the courts? I'm having trouble
| finding specifics on that myself.
| tzs wrote:
| I'm not sure it even matters.
|
| If it gets to court you've got a plaintiff either
| claiming that defendant violated copyright or the
| defendant failed to follow the terms of GPL.
|
| In both cases the defendant will respond that they
| followed the terms of GPL.
|
| In both cases the court has to determine what the license
| means and then whether or not defendant followed the
| terms of the GPL. To do that the court has to decide what
| those terms actually mean.
|
| For that I don't think it matters if GPL is considered to
| be a "contract" or "license" because as far as I have
| been able to tell the rules of interpretation are the
| same no matter how you characterize the document.
|
| Maybe it could make a difference in the remedies that are
| available if plaintiff wins. If it is seen as not being a
| contract then it might be that the only remedies would be
| those under copyright law. Those would generally be an
| injunction ordering defendant to stop infringing and
| monetary damages. Actual monetary damages would be near
| zero so plaintiff would probably ask for statutory
| damages.
|
| If it _is_ seen as being a contract then potentially the
| remedy could include an order that the defendant release
| their source code. If the GPL infringement was
| distributing binaries without making source available
| this would probably be the remedy plaintiff wants.
|
| Ordering the defendant to obey the terms of the contract
| is called "specific performance" and I believe is usually
| disfavored by courts if monetary damages are sufficient
| but since infringing GPL generally doesn't cause any
| monetary losses to the copyright owner and the whole
| point of the contract was to make source available I'd
| expect a decent chance plaintiff could get specific
| performance.
|
| Note that this means that it is actually better for GPL
| to be seen as a contract.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Historically collecting damages were not the goal of GPL
| enforcement. Specific performance, or stop infringement
| by no longer distributing the software were the remedies.
| The latter is not always an option for the infringing
| party, and that's what submits them into compliance.
| hnfong wrote:
| TBH I don't know why the FSF had been pushing for this
| 'not a contract' narrative for so long either.
|
| Maybe bad lawyering. Or some aversion to anything that
| looks like an EULA or that kind of radical-ideological
| shit.
|
| PS: I found this link when digging in my archives:
|
| https://www.technollama.co.uk/us-court-declares-gpl-is-a-
| con...
|
| That the GPL is a contract hardly came as any surprise to
| people familiar with the law. Lawyers and judges view any
| collection of terms as a contract, and tear-open licenses
| are the norm these days. But the FSF had its own reasons
| to say it's a license, reasons that might be more
| important to the philosophy of Free Software than the
| court. Contracts require consent between two parties who
| join in the contract, if they are to be enforced. The GPL
| (and many other licenses that come with products) doesn't
| have a signature page, so there is no explicit consent.
| If there is consent at all, it's the implied consent that
| has become standard for "tear-open" licenses. Your
| acceptance of the license is indicated by some action, in
| this case integrating the code into your product. The
| default under copyright law is all rights reserved, which
| means "you can't do anything with this" with some minor
| exceptions that are called "fair use". Thus, if you
| integrate the software into your product, distribute it,
| or perform some other action that is restricted by
| copyright, you must have accepted the license because
| your alternative would be all rights reserved. Thus, the
| FSF asserts that the GPL is a license because they feel
| consent isn't really necessary, they don't want to argue
| about consent in court, and they believe that they can do
| all of the enforcement they need using a complaint of
| copyright infringement. Also, tear-open licenses were a
| much more foggy issue in law when the GPL came about. And
| then there's the philosophical matter:
| hnfong wrote:
| I didn't say contracts being rejected by the courts.
|
| I said the FSF had a legal theory that "GPL is a license,
| not a contract", which was rejected by the courts.
|
| Some reading: https://www.technollama.co.uk/us-court-
| declares-gpl-is-a-con...
|
| Further cases:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24478769
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Being radioactive is the reason why it is considered an
| option.
| girvo wrote:
| > Should there be a similar standard license for open source
| infrastructure?
|
| Yes, I think there should be. The tech world is basically a
| monopoly at this point, and that's dangerous for a thousand
| reasons. The _least_ those monopoly owners can do is
| financially contribute if they want to use these tools.
|
| It's sad to me that the tech world is rallying around Valkey,
| which is Big Tech's fork: AWS et al are the ones behind it.
| We continue to give more and more power to the biggest
| players.
| Sloowms wrote:
| I think it comes down to the initial choice to make something
| open source. At that point you're well aware that big
| companies might use your code and profit more than you ever
| will. If you don't want that, don't open source and they will
| never use your code.
|
| It's having your cake and eating it when you get popular by
| being open source and then add restrictions when you have
| success.
|
| I think there should be a change to licenses where the
| trademark is tied to the license. You can go proprietary but
| you can't take back the name.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| What is wrong with a non-commercial open source license for
| those that want to use your software for personal use and a
| paided up commercial license (something like Business
| Source License[1]) for the big tech corporations of the
| world?
|
| How much open source software is being incorporated into
| closed source software and then being resold back to the
| original open source developers - to get an idea, check the
| licenses on a Apple phone (Settings -> General -> Legal &
| Regulatory -> Legal Notices)[2]. It's the who's who of open
| source licenses! I wonder how much Apple has contributed to
| those projects? Perhaps each FOSS developer mentioned there
| should receive - at least - a free iPhone ...
|
| The argument of "social contract" or "moral rights" or
| whatever else a FOSS developer faces when changing their
| license to something that prevents BigTech making money off
| their work is unfair and unnecessary. Its their work, their
| choice. Just as politicians aren't held to the promises
| they made yesterday, so too are FOSS developers human and
| can change their direction/mind and license.
|
| In addition to this, many have vested interests in these
| companies continuing their use of "free" (in the sense of
| money) software since they are themselves shareholders or
| employees. License fees effect the bottom line of those
| corporations. Imagine AWS paying a license fee for their
| Linux boxes ...
|
| A corporation also has a "social contract" to fulfil, yet
| its the FOSS developer that needs to fulfil theirs first.
| Or perhaps a corporation only faces "legal contract" and
| for the sake of profit, a "social contract" isn't
| applicable to a corporation. In which case, neither should
| a "social contract" be applicable to a FOSS developer -
| when dealing with corporations.
|
| [1] https://mariadb.com/bsl11/
|
| [2] can also be viewed online --> https://gist.github.com/g
| orenje/a775f44bb9307852911f7f353466...
| 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.
| hgs3 wrote:
| > Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis
| project for free
|
| It's worth noting that the bulk of the code was written by
| antirez with only ~12 others exceeding 100+ commits [1]. And if
| you continue scrolling the number of commits-per-user drops off
| fast. It's striking given how famous the project is.
|
| [1] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors
| softwaredoug wrote:
| It goes far beyond the actual codebase to the long tail of
| supporting projects, conference talks, blog posts, etc
| dig1 wrote:
| Agree. Writing code is (TBH, only a tiny) part of the
| project - creating packages for different OSes and distros,
| testing, filling bug reports, promoting project, writing
| tips and ticks, articles... Many projects remain unpopular
| not because the authors aren't actively maintaining them
| but because these essential components are missing.
| reconditerose wrote:
| As one of those 12 other people, number of commits is not a
| good metric in this context. When you have a single
| maintainer, like antirez was for a long time, he could commit
| 10+ commits for a single small feature but I needed to get
| someone else to approve my commit before merging.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| The license change is a necessary evil, otherwise BigCo will
| continue EEE and extract value from the project without giving
| anything back. It's time to hit them where it hurts. The world
| will be a better place if Google collapsed tomorrow. FOSS must
| adapt to SaaS and the modern rent-seeking behaviors of BigCos.
| kqr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| By "used to be" you mean for a brief period in the 2000s,
| right? Because this extremely generous open source landscape we
| have seen in the past 20 years were not the normal state of
| software for most of software's existence.
|
| A generous open source landscape is something we -- you, I, the
| readers of HN -- have to actively maintain by shouldering the
| burden of maintaining the correctly licenced software. We
| cannot trust this important job to profit-making corporations.
| osigurdson wrote:
| MIT + popularity = commercial license
| space_oddity wrote:
| Yep, when people contribute to a project, they invest more than
| just code; they invest trust in its principles
| berkes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm not familiar with what's happening in this Redis licence
| change.
|
| But if it was Open Source at version N, and you built your
| business (or stack, etc) on top of that, N will remain forever
| available to you as FLOSS, not?
|
| Is the problem maybe that ppl expect future updates,
| maintenance to remain Open Source? Something that, AFAIK, no
| Open Source licence guarantees? So, misaligned expectations?
|
| > That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis,
| there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling
| projects.
|
| It's not new. MySQL, Redhat and many others have done this for
| ages in the floss community.
| alecco wrote:
| Note his "build a business on it" angle. It's not an open
| source problem. Greedy techbros want free support forever
| from the community while contributing almost nothing back.
| Same for large corporations.
|
| They see this as "rug pulling". I think developers need to do
| a lot more of that for things to change.
| thanksgiving wrote:
| OP 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.
|
| What is it that changed from AGPL in SSPL that was
| absolutely needed? Why can't we have an AGPL 1.1 or 2.0 if
| it is a breaking change? I am not saying anyirez is wrong.
| I would like to learn why this was necessary, if at all.
| alecco wrote:
| > What is it that changed from AGPL in SSPL that was
| absolutely needed?
|
| https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8028
|
| Big cloud players would put a thin layer on top and
| ignore the AGPL.
| bojanz wrote:
| What I dislike about the license change is that by trying to
| extract an extra dollar from Amazon&Google, the entire
| community gets hurt in the process.
|
| Can I "dnf/apt install redis" on my Fedora or Debian install? I
| cannot, it's no longer packaged because it's no longer open
| source.
|
| Can I go buy a shared hosting plan and get Redis? Or a small
| PaaS that sits on top of AWS? I cannot, because we have decided
| that every hoster is now as exploitative as Amazon, regardless
| of their margin.
|
| For decades we lived in a world where someone could sell you an
| Apache server and a MySQL instance without having to pay money
| to Apache or MySQL. We can change that social contract, but
| like all tariffs, this one will be paid by the end users, not
| by the companies providing the service.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for a PaaS.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > For decades we lived in a world where someone could sell
| you an Apache server and a MySQL instance without having to
| pay money to Apache or MySQL. We can change that social
| contract, but like all tariffs, this one will be paid by the
| end users, not by the companies providing the service.
|
| Yeah, but the Internet community at large took care about
| funding. MySQL always had the commercial support leg to stand
| on, and Apache httpd... looking at the contributor list [1],
| it's a healthy mix of universities, large companies (IBM,
| HP), ISPs (Vodafone, Cable & Wireless), hosters (Rackspace),
| small consultancies and individual private contributors.
|
| In contrast, the megacorporations are largely absent from
| FOSS contributions (the exceptions being Netflix and
| partially, where it suits them, Google, Microsoft and Apple).
|
| [1] https://httpd.apache.org/contributors/
| bojanz wrote:
| Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by Ampere,
| AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai,
| NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical, Chainguard,
| Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud, Oracle, Percona,
| Snap Inc and Verizon[0].
|
| There is enough interest in sponsoring the development of
| infrastructure software. But if you want to build a
| "commercial arm", get VC funding[1][2] and earn millions,
| then it will never be enough. And I can't say it's
| unreasonable to want to do that, it just ultimately ends up
| being against the long-term interests of the project as a
| whole.
|
| [0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/valkey-welcomes-
| new-pa...
|
| [1] https://redis.io/press/redis-labs-raises-100-million-
| series-...
|
| [2] https://redis.io/press/redis-labs-110-million-series-g-
| led-b...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by
| Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean,
| Memurai, NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical,
| Chainguard, Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud,
| Oracle, Percona, Snap Inc and Verizon[0].
|
| Took 'em long enough to realize. I 'member the Heartbleed
| catastrophe and what pittances OpenSSL got [1]. And as
| always, there's an XKCD fitting just too damn well [2].
|
| > And I can't say it's unreasonable to want to do that,
| it just ultimately ends up being against the long-term
| interests of the project as a whole.
|
| That's the thing... conflicting interests, incentives and
| most especially _expectations_. Let 's say I'm unhappy
| with the current state of managing a fleet of hardware
| servers and VMs, especially after the VMware disaster.
|
| I could bite the bullet and pay VMware. I could go and
| get OpenStack running. It would be an utter pain to set
| up and run (because it is funded primarily by
| universities who don't have the constraint of
| "administration time effort" because that's what you have
| aspiring student volunteers for, but instead do have the
| constraint that it's hard to get hardware so OpenStack
| has to be flexible enough to support a ton of crap that
| any enterprise would have sent off to e-waste a decade
| ago). I could go and get Proxmox up and running, but it's
| AGPL so corporate legal may chew up my ass. Or I could
| whip up my own orchestrator, fit to work for my needs,
| and say I open-source it... and it might even be decent
| enough others may want to use it as well.
|
| But then, many of these "others" won't be willing to pay
| for support, but they'll flood the Github issue tracker
| with all kinds of stuff that _I_ now have to care about
| (because who wants to present a Github repository with
| dozens if not hundreds of open issues?), tons of feature
| wishes and demands (because obviously while I may run
| Cisco network gear for SDN, someone else may be a Juniper
| or whatever shop, and wants integration for that), and in
| the worst case someone gets 0wned because of some
| vulnerability that I might not even have realized - and I
| get the shitstorm for it, my name gets dragged through
| the mud like it was for OpenSSL or log4j.
|
| So, basically I'm left with the choice between either
| accepting being labeled "lazy" (for not caring about "my
| project" enough) or to raise enough money to get the
| product competitive with what the other players are
| offering, and the only way for _that_ is to go the VC
| route. And unfortunately, unlike old-school "startup
| capital", modern VCs want (or rather, because they're
| following spray-and-pray in their hunt for the 1-out-
| of-100 unicorn chance, _have to aim for_ ) the
| expectation of insane hyper-growth.
|
| And then, one day, Amazon might go and say "hey, this
| FOSS thing is pretty cool, we'll add some glue code to
| integrate with IAM, backups and high availability, a
| fancy web UI and sell it on towards our customers". And
| suddenly, people would flock towards Amazon, who'd not be
| required to contribute back (because I chose either the
| MIT or GPL license to make adoption by others easier)...
| but I as well as the investors who enabled the product to
| grow to the stage where it was usable and popular enough
| for Amazon to commoditize would not see a single cent of
| it.
|
| And everyone but Amazon loses out. I may be lucky enough
| to have gotten a few years worth of salary from VC
| funding (the reality is, most startup founders prioritize
| ramen lifestyle), the VC and their investors in turn lose
| out because why contract with me when they already got a
| frame contract with AWS, and the developers who worked
| with me also lose out for the same reason.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7575210
|
| [2] https://xkcd.com/2347/
| mattmanser wrote:
| One of my clients is using OpenSearch instead of Elastic.
|
| Big mistake. It's already behind elastic search, and
| worse too. It has bugs, weird behaviour and updates are
| already slowing.
|
| On top of that, elastic have cunningly changed parts of
| their offerings to mean OpenSearch users can't use the
| elastic examples. For example they completely changed
| their .Net Core library so all new documentation in
| elastic is totally useless for OpenSearch.
|
| They've added a way in the dashboard to run SQL for quick
| queries, etc. The OpenSearch version of that is buggy as
| hell, and for all intents and purposes useless because if
| you get the SQL wrong it just shows a blank screen
| instead of the error.
|
| I'd be very aware of those problems, which appeared
| pretty rapidly, when going to these big corporation
| supported branches.
|
| You are asking for trouble and are totally dependant on
| the company keeping that branch going who have little
| incentive to maintain or improve it now you're locked
| into their PaaS.
| easton wrote:
| Sort of. "Locked in" is a strong word, considering Redis
| will run on AWS just fine, either by buying their product
| or spinning up a couple EC2s and `docker run redis`
| (which is allowed under the license since you aren't
| reselling it). Yes, harder than clicking a button in the
| AWS console, but it's not like you're stuck completely.
|
| I understand it more for OpenSearch, because scaling that
| is annoying, but Redis has built in cluster mode stuff
| that works fine without having Amazon's magic control
| plane.
|
| (we're also using OpenSearch hosted by AWS but not for
| anything complicated, so haven't encountered what you
| have. seems like Elastic 7.10, frozen in time, which is
| fine for us. they forked the old version of the .NET
| library for people to continue using, but I guess you
| need to use the archived docs.)
| Towaway69 wrote:
| How do they manage the payout to the individual
| contributors?
|
| If I fix a typo, do I get a payout at the end of year for
| my work?
|
| IMO that's what it comes down to, that contributors that
| work for these companies have they contributions
| reimbursed through their salary. Other contributors might
| not earn that salary.
| matsemann wrote:
| How much did AWS and those contribute until they got
| locked out of using Redis? That's what's interesting.
| That they now have to sponsor an alternative isn't
| exactly surprising.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > Can I "dnf/apt install redis" on my Fedora or Debian
| install? I cannot, it's no longer packaged because it's no
| longer open source.
|
| to be fair that's more an issue with linux distrib than with
| redis
| SergeAx wrote:
| > you could pick an open source project and build a business on
| it and expect that the project would stay available to you
|
| Why not just stay on the last version with the license of your
| original choice?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > 1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis
| project for free - both in terms of code [...] it was under the
| understanding that project would remain under the same open
| source license.
|
| The whole point of the MIT/BSD licenses versus licenses like
| the GPL is to not be limited by that.
|
| > It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust.
|
| It feels like total ignorance from. If such license change
| bother you, you should only contribute to projects that are
| licensed under GPL or similar licenses and that don't force
| contributors to sign a CLA.
|
| I don't like current Redis license, but nobody lost any code
| and any contributor can still contribute to any fork that
| started using the last open source version.
| no_wizard 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 - 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
|
| I'm not seeing this being a factor in the broader community of
| users. Redis is still 'go-to' solution in its space. Haven't
| yet had anyone bring this up.
|
| >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.
|
| I think the biggest thing is - that you acknowledge- that
| companies (particularly big businesses, like the cloud and
| service providers) build entire lines of business on this tech
| without contributing back, monetarily or otherwise, or even
| worse, try to shorehorn a project into prioritizing what they
| want over what may be better for the long term health of the
| community.
|
| These license changes I've seen so far are all attempts to
| address that. How else are they able to do it with any long
| term success? They already aren't getting the funding they're
| looking for, clearly, while businesses build multi million and
| in some cases billion+ dollar businesses on top of the
| technology.
|
| I'd argue that old permissive licenses aren't sustainable in
| the long run for any project like Redis
| 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.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| yeah! much better than FT.SEARCH monstrosity...
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| > But I feel that in general given that the new license is
| IMHO good for almost every user
|
| That is the nub of the sticking point.
|
| The new is OK for people who only care about getting things
| done. But for people interested in building and being part of
| a community, giving as well as taking, not so much
|
| This:
|
| You may not make the functionality of the Software or a
| Modified version available to third parties as a service or
| distribute the Software or a Modified version in a manner
| that makes the functionality of the Software available to
| third parties.
| nijave wrote:
| I care about getting things done but don't want to take on
| the risk of an encumbered license and the volatility that
| comes with license changes.
|
| To me, these products are booby traps that are more likely
| to need replaced in the future when something changes
| again.
|
| Put another way, it's a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem.
|
| There's so much gray area in these terms you have to keep
| the lawyers involved not only in the initial indentation
| but product features in the future to make sure you don't
| accidentally cross a very poorly defined line.
| worik wrote:
| > I care about getting things done
|
| Yes. But you care about more than just that....
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| I hear you, but at the same time it was badly done. I've been
| referring to Redis as "a proprietary fork of Valkey," and
| that message has clearly resonated.
| tommica wrote:
| Isn't that just lying?
| progbits wrote:
| Why? The original opensource lineage is valkey, it just
| changed the name. Redis is where the oss history forks
| and turns proprietary.
| matt_kantor wrote:
| That's like saying Xfree86 is a fork of X.org, MySQL is a
| fork of MariaDB, or OpenOffice is a fork of LibreOffice.
| "Forking" is an event that happens in time, so project A
| cannot be a fork of project B if A existed before B.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| They both were the same project with the same codebase
| and the same contributors before they split. It was as
| much project A as it was project B.
| matt_kantor wrote:
| > It was as much project A as it was project B.
|
| Valkey is as much Redis as it is Valkey? Then why isn't
| it called "Redis"? Clearly there's a distinction or the
| fork would never have happened. Is Redis also as much
| Valkey as it is Redis?
|
| Names signal who has control over a project, not anything
| about its history/implementation/license. Otherwise every
| piece of software that goes through a rewrite should
| change its name.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Projects also don't necessarily change names when control
| over them changes either. It's the Ship of Theseus kind
| of thing. There is no single property that would delimit
| when software stops being itself. And the name is hardly
| the most important part.
|
| After all, the identity of ever-changing entities is
| ephemeral and is only in our heads.
| Spivak wrote:
| > is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what
| they can do with the code
|
| I think the thing that hurts a lot of folks is the one thing
| they wanted to do with Redis is use a managed version of it
| in AWS. And now they can't. We're trying to figure out our
| migration path right now and it's almost surely going to be
| Valkey.
|
| Large vendors were never going to pay up and so it's all loss
| for everyone involved. I have to do work, every project that
| works with Redis has to do work to support Valkey now, the
| eventual divergence will force people to pick a side which
| will probably also be Valkey for everything other than the
| client libraries Redis Labs personally develops. It's a mess.
|
| Open core proprietary add-one for new fancy AI features could
| have avoided the split and gotten you in the door with big
| cloud vendors willing to sell your add-on in the marketplace
| with revenue sharing. They did it with Bedrock and Anthropic
| is making bank off it.
| saghm wrote:
| It sounds like your opinion is that the communication around
| the relicensing was the issue rather the relicensing itself,
| but from the standpoint of the people who decided there was
| enough of an issue to switch away from Redis, is that the
| case? As an outsider to the Redis community both before and
| after the schism, I don't know that you're wrong, but I have
| to imagine that if I were someone concerned enough to
| consider forking (or switching to a fork), I wouldn't be
| happy with someone involved in the project making a blanket
| statement about whether my motivations were actually about
| the licensing or not. Ironically, this seems like it's
| exactly the type of communication that could exacerbate
| concerns around licensing.
| antirez wrote:
| One thing is the normal user concerns, that are granted,
| and I understand and respect them. Another thing is
| forking, that in the specific case of ValKey was an effort
| whose impulse was provided by companies having an economic
| damage because of the license switch. So I think those are
| two orthogonal questions.
| saghm wrote:
| Hmm, I think I see. If I understand correctly, your
| opinion is that independent of the motivations of the
| forks, independent users switching to the forks could
| have been avoided with better communication? I guess
| that's a fair stance, although I'm not sure I fully agree
| with it. From what I can tell, there's a fairly large
| contingent of open source users who won't be happy with a
| license being changed to something they don't consider
| open source regardless of the rationale.
| matsemann wrote:
| How many, outside a few vocal voices, actually cares about
| the licensing? My company would choose Redis 100/100 times,
| because it's the known and trusted brand, and not some fork
| they've never even heard of. And the license change doesn't
| affect us in any way.
|
| Additionally, I think it's a bit entitled to be so up in
| arms about a product everyone is using for free. There is a
| big issue with how open source is unmaintainable to do in
| our industry, and I applaud Redis' attempt at trying to fix
| it.
| saghm wrote:
| I don't personally have a strong opinion about relicenses
| to try to prevent competitors from selling cloud-bases
| services (either in the case of Redis or in general; if
| anything, having worked at MongoDB at the time when it
| was relicensed to SSPL biases me a little bit in favor of
| companies who do relicenses like this). My perception is
| that there's a non-trivial contingent of users who
| migrate whenever something like this occurs, but you're
| not wrong that this might be influenced by a smaller
| number of louder voices.
|
| I do agree with you about open source developers being
| within their rights to maintain as they see fit. My
| personal philosophy is that while open source maintainers
| have no obligation to maintain in a way that conforms to
| user expectations, users still have the right to voice
| their opinions on that (although the maintainers are free
| to ignore it, per the previous point). To me, the
| distinction that matters isn't about whether users are
| "entitled" or not but whether they're voicing opinions
| about an open source project (including decisions about
| how to maintain it) versus personal insults at
| individuals. I don't see anything wrong with someone
| being vocally upset about a license change; I just also
| don't see anything wrong with a maintainer choosing not
| to care about it.
| leosarev wrote:
| I'm a vendor of some packaged on-premise solution. We are
| using a Redis as a cache layer inside. Risk of being forced
| to GPL out our installer is unacceptable for us.
| antirez wrote:
| In your use case, you could not even use the AGPL,
| basically? Is that what you mean? Thanks. That would be an
| interesting point, but it goes over the borders of the SSPL
| itself. Would be more BSD/MIT vs all the rest.
| 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.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Yeah, even if the split isnt entirely about licensing (and I do
| think it mainly is), the rest is a result of the licensing
| changes as well in terms of the implications and side-effects.
| Its the way people felt rug pulled and eroding the trust, which
| is now forever lost.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| you can see there is shift from roots in redis. original over-
| the-write protocol was human-redable by design. now more and
| more over last couple years API and instrumentation, docs, gets
| non-human readable at all (mix of ASCII and hex binary
| encoding, say in FT.SEARCH, speaking of FT.SEARCH it is barely
| readable even when in non-binary form...)
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| also, lack of japanese and korean support... and non-
| willingness to integrate this when developers native speakers
| even want to and volunteer to improve it.
|
| something is off in redis execution
|
| hope with this guy comes back it improves!
| alecco wrote:
| Techbros and large corporations still have the original source
| code they built their business on. What they want is free
| community updates and support forever while they give almost
| nothing back. So it's not a licensing problem. It's not a free
| software problem. It's a "free as in beer" support problem.
|
| AGPL only slightly prevents this by forcing them to share their
| changes to the source. And usually this is not very useful to
| the community, anyway. And very little effort. And the same
| people scream it's an evil license. They want free (as in beer)
| stuff forever and it's not just the source code. It's very
| ungrateful of them.
| nijave wrote:
| That's not been my experience. My limited experience at a
| large corporation was "throw money at vendors for enterprise
| support"
|
| The bigger issue was startups and small/medium sized
| companies with limited technical support and limited money to
| buy enterprise support or in-house experts. These are the
| same companies heavily leaning on managed services from
| vendors like AWS.
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| Thanks for a great reply.
| 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.
| debugnik wrote:
| But SSPL is already a modification of AGPL, so its terms
| don't seem to have be sufficient.
|
| The SSPL's network provision also requires SaaS companies
| to release the source of any other services and APIs they
| made the original software dependent on; hard to tell if
| that's still a valid copyright licence or more of a
| contract.
|
| Contrast them with EUPL, which represents the strongest
| copyleft the EU commission thinks a licence, as opposed
| to a contract, could get away with under EU directives
| (ignoring its compatibility clause). I'm personally wary
| of AGPL/SSPL not because their terms, but because the
| viral claises are likely to be a legal fiction where I
| live.
| 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"
| strbean wrote:
| Small indie providers should absolutely be able to sell
| their MongoDB / Redis / XYZ as a service, but they should
| absolutely also be required by the license to contribute
| back their modifications to the software.
|
| Like I said, I understand the complaints about the line-
| drawing issues with these licenses. I don't understand
| the viewpoint that the current state of OSS, where
| hosting != distribution, is acceptable.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| So just use AGPL. It covers hosting, it requires
| providing modifications, it's actually Open Source
| without caveats.
| tzs wrote:
| AGPL covers users interacting with the software remotely
| through a computer network which is not the same as
| covering hosting. There's often overlap but if it really
| is hosting that a project doesn't want to allow then they
| need something other than AGPL.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If you want to _prohibit_ hosting then yes you 're going
| to need a non-OSS license (by definition), but that's
| moving the goalposts: I was replying to a post that said
| others _should_ be allowed to sell the software as a
| service, but that they should be forced to share their
| changes even if they 're "hosting" and not
| "distributing"... AKA the exact point of the AGPL
| existing.
| tzs wrote:
| AGPL's tying that to users remotely interacting with the
| software over a computer network still leaves a lot of
| uncertainty about when it applies.
|
| Consider this case. Suppose there is a chess server that
| users can interact with remotely over a computer network
| to play chess against other users or against a chess
| engine.
|
| On the same host that is running the chess server there
| is a database server, which is only accessible via a Unix
| domain socket on that host. The chess server uses that
| database to store game scores, an opening database, and
| some endgame databases.
|
| The database server is AGPL. Are users of the chess
| server entitled to the source to any local modifications
| that have been make to the database server?
|
| Does it depend on whether it was the people running the
| chess server who modified the AGPL code or of the
| modified AGPL database was provided by the hosting
| company?
|
| Most of the incidents I remember where a software
| developed was unhappy with someone offering a hosted
| version of their software were cases where the hosted
| version was mostly being used by clients of the hosting
| service and being accessed over the hosting services
| internal network rather than cases were someone was
| hosting a version of the software to provide that
| software's services to end users.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Yep. It is exactly the same as with Oracle - you can use
| it IF you buy the license... but this also has
| requirements of playing the Vendor game and as provider
| you really use freedom to really take care of your
| customers
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| I think the "root" of the problem goes to what is the
| purpose of Open Source ? I see a lot of VC Funded founder
| convinced what Open Source should make their business
| model easy, hence licenses such such as SSPL should be
| called Open Source.
|
| I believe Open Source is about software users and
| maximizing their freedom, which among other things choice
| of truly independent vendors in all circumstances, as
| such non compete licenses as SSPL are not
|
| Are they better than Oracle-like proprietary licenses ?
| Of course! but they are not Open Source
| 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."
| strbean wrote:
| That's not even remotely what I'm saying.
|
| I'm saying if a company modifies open source software and
| distributes it, they should be required to distribute the
| modified source as well. I'm further claiming that
| providing a hosted service is a form of distribution.
|
| > "free for everyone... except them - they make too much
| money."
|
| Free for everyone, and if you make changes to improve it,
| and let others use the software you changed, you
| contribute those changes back. That's the basic principle
| of OSS, no?
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _That 's the basic principle of OSS, no?_
|
| No, only for GPL. If the project has a BSD or MIT licence
| you may distribute the compiled version and keep the
| changes secret.
| snoman wrote:
| Apologies for the caricature.
|
| It's clearly up for debate, but I've always thought that
| imposing obligations for how people use the product/code,
| or implying obligations for what the project is "owed" by
| users, isn't free as in freedom, or beer. So I _don't_
| think it's a basic principle of open source. I think some
| people want it to be though.
|
| I get it though. People see aws et al making a business
| model of hosting FOSS and making boatloads of money doing
| it, and they don't like it.
| stephenr wrote:
| What loophole was being abused that caused Redis the
| company to pull the proverbial rug?
|
| The "big evil corporation" that usually gets referenced
| is AWS. One of the core comitters to the Redis project
| when it was open source, was paid to do so, by AWS, and
| continues to be paid to do so, on the open source fork,
| ValKey.
|
| It's fine to make an argument about "take it and give
| nothing back" when comparing the potential differences of
| permissive vs copyleft licenses. I likely wouldn't agree
| with you about which is ultimately a better choice, but I
| think it's fine to make that argument there.
|
| But this isn't a hypothetical. It's an actual situation,
| where a permissively licensed project had significant
| outside contributions... and still people are screaming
| about "the evil mega corp"... who is now even more
| involved in maintaining a permissively licensed fork of
| said software.
|
| I'm far from an AWS fan. I avoid it whenever possible,
| and I've made good money migrating customers off of AWS'
| overpriced services, but I've yet to see a single example
| of them doing anything that fulfils the "evil mega corp"
| shoe, w.r.t Redis.
| 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
| slavik81 wrote:
| Why would the Open Source Initiative bless a non-open
| source license?
| 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.
| stephenr wrote:
| People keep talking about how the licence change was to prevent
| the likes of AWS from "taking and giving nothing back"... and
| completely ignore that AWS was paying an engineer to contribute
| to Redis in a significant way.
| 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.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Most of the Facebook companies are still called Facebook, see
| for example FACEBOOK IRELAND HOLDINGS UNLIMITED COMPANY
| https://opencorporates.com/companies/ie/466405 and some of
| its connected companies.
|
| Still, you'd probably need a license steward to keep the list
| of companies up to date, and you'd keep the list in an annex.
| Alternatively you'd need to pick some objective thresholds,
| such as "more than 1 T$ market cap or more than 100 G$ global
| annual revenues". This is the approach the EU followed with
| the Digital Markets Act.
|
| (I'm not saying that I'm endorsing such an approach.)
| 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.
| tommica wrote:
| I got similar experiences with Claude, it's so convenient to
| use it to get an idea for a concept and being able to go
| back-and-forth with it about some kind of a feature that
| needs to be built.
|
| > 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 part from the original commenter resonates so well with
| me. Working basically as a solo dev, it's fantastic to have
| something that provides feedback and can challenge the ideas
| I have, so that the final result is good.
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I have self-respect and have no problem contributing to
| projects with a CLA and copyright assignment. I recognize
| that I don't control what happens with my contributions, as
| I have consciously agreed to their terms. Controlling what
| happens in the future of a project simply has never had
| anything to do with my motivations for contributing to a
| project.
| 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.
| _msw_ wrote:
| Disclosure: I work for Amazon.
|
| AWS never offered a service based on the AGPLv3 version of
| the MongoDB server. Therefore the change of license terms
| to SSPLv1 was not directly caused by Amazon's use of the
| software as part of an offered service, and had no impact
| to Amazon DocumentDB as an independently developed
| interoperable protocol implementation.
|
| There were cloud providers headquartered in Asia that _did_
| offer AGPLv3 based MongoDB server as a service.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| The BSD license doesn't allow changing it to another license
| any more or less than GPL.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Yes it does. You can make a private, proprietary app that's
| just tweaking a few bits of a BSD project. You can't do
| that with the GPL.
|
| Following that, unless the project has a CLA (so that the
| owner of the project reserves all rights of the code that's
| contributed and essentially owns the contribution), any
| contributions made under the GPL cannot be made closed
| source, can't be switched to an incompatible license, etc,
| because the contribution itself is GPL'd.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Creating a commercial version of a thing is not a license
| change.
| Osiris wrote:
| I look at bun in the JS ecosystem like this. They are open
| source for now but also backed by VCs. They will have to make
| money at some point.
|
| I have no interest in engaging with that product just to have a
| new pricing model thrown my way and disrupt everything.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| You don't need to ask people to rely on your promises. Just
| make sure that you are not able to do a rug pull, and explain
| that. It's generally pretty easy (just don't require a CLA) but
| you can make it clearer. For example, clarify that you don't
| own everyone's copyright by writing a copyright notice which
| includes all of the project's contributors.
|
| There are some practical suggestions at
| https://reuse.software/tutorial/
| matsemann wrote:
| What would you feel if you did all the work, but other
| companies made all the money by redistributing your software?
| Wouldn't you find that unmaintainable in the long run?
| 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.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Thanks for sharing a bit of your internal thought process on
| career and life decisions. It's very interesting for me to see
| how people at different stages of their career think of these
| things.
|
| I think this licensing fracture that's happening across the
| industry is unfortunate, there's a been a lot of broken trust.
| The SSPL is on the face of it more reasonable than the BSL. It
| clearly states that it only becomes viral when "offering a
| service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the
| value of the Program". So it seems it should be pretty safe to
| use Redis as a cache or session store within a larger system.
| Contrast with hashicorp, which forbids use in any product they
| consider a competitor. But I also empathize with people who are
| scared of using _any_ license that's untested in court.
|
| Tangential: I love Inconsolata as a terminal font (and I
| appreciate the "hacker" aesthetic of a monospaced blog) but
| perhaps consider using a body font for your longer articles.
| Although I'm sure most of your readers know how to change the
| font if they want to, one of the great things about plain HTML :)
| stanislavb wrote:
| I love that Antirez is on Bluesky and not X. We should all turn
| off X and migrate out of that toxic platform.
| howlingowl wrote:
| Disagree. Bluesky is a political circle jerk echo chamber
| designed for weaklings who need authorities to hold their hand
| in the face of dissenting opinions.
| stackskipton wrote:
| At least Bluesky isn't hostile to people without BlueSky
| Accounts. I could read his entire Bluesky account despite not
| having one.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Why say Claude is ahead of the rest? (I don't keep up to date,
| only using mainstream tools in ides)
|
| Right now I use Amazon Q to buy integrate into phpstorm and its
| ok. It's free so a major advantage.
|
| Is it just terms of using their chat models?
| film42 wrote:
| I think it just depends on what you're working on. In my
| experience, Claude usually has the edge over ChatGPT for most
| coding or logic problems; however, there are situations where
| Claude goes too deep the wrong way and ChatGPT wins out by
| staying more high level. Claude and ChatGPT are also "free"
| too, btw.
| Tiberium wrote:
| The author is of course mainly talking about the fact that the
| current Claude models are one of the best for programming. Only
| o1 can rival 3.5 Sonnet, but o1 is way more expensive and takes
| more time to run.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| Think of it as "taste".
|
| People have different tastes, artists and chefs have different
| tastes.
|
| Claude and ChatGPT are crafted by different people hence you'll
| only see these nuances once you experience it first-hand, and
| you might not even be able to articulate it very well, you'll
| just find yourself gravitated towards one thing over another.
|
| I suggest you try both.
| stephenr wrote:
| I think there are two important factors here that the author
| overlooked:
|
| - the vast, vast majority of end users will get their software
| from a package manager, and for something as relatively feature
| stable (for what the vast majority of people use it for) as
| redis/clones, there's a good chance it's coming from a distro
| repo. Practically no one is installing it by building from
| source. The licence change means it won't be (at least new
| versions) in those distro repos any more, but the direct fork and
| spiritual successor (valkey) likely _will_ be, and in some cases
| valkey will likely take over the redis name in those repos.
|
| - this isn't the first time Redis the company has pulled this
| kind of trick, and I think it's foolish to believe the community
| is going to hang around and wait for the next time they say "I am
| altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further"
| mmaunder wrote:
| I'm amazed Antirez didn't fork Redis and start fresh like Monty
| did MySQL. AWS, Azure and GC would be thrilled to support his
| work on an OSS fork. After 9 years surely any contractual
| constraints have expired? Maybe a sense of moral obligation? Or
| perhaps Redis Inc recruited him to prevent exactly this?
|
| Either way we all very much appreciate the work you have done.
| Redis has been a game changer for many of us running small
| businesses on tiny budgets.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| He has stock options in redis labs, so existing financial ties
| - although he mentions in his blog his comp for coming isn't
| wild, I wonder what the option package looks like
| Cpoll wrote:
| > He has stock options in redis labs, so existing financial
| ties
|
| I was thinking "just divest," but they're not public yet, so
| you're right that it's a possibility.
| alberth wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised no one has mentioned Commons Clause.
|
| https://commonsclause.com
| gavindean90 wrote:
| Seems like that explicitly allows SaaS kind of offerings so it
| wouldn't si what Redis wants as I understand.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Perhaps because it's old news and a failed model which
| companies have now started rolling back (see ElasticSearch)?
|
| https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...
| zacksiri wrote:
| I've been a redis / elasticsearch user since the early days.
| Seeing these companies grow has been sources of inspiration for
| me.
|
| I'm glad you're back and look forward to redis's future. There is
| still a lot of work to be done.
|
| In terms of licensing there is no right answer, large companies
| evidently abuse opensource, at the same time community is
| required to make projects like redis / elasticsearch grow.
|
| This is a good move and I think the future is long with redis. So
| much to explore and so much more that can be done.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| whatever floats your boat man, thanks for redis!
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| btw qdrant did some interesting benchmarks against redis and
| elasticsearch here
|
| https://qdrant.tech/benchmarks/
| ralusek wrote:
| Truly psychotic community response.
|
| History of this pattern:
|
| - There is an open source project, someone wants to work on it
| full time.
|
| - They set up a SaaS version of their project.
|
| - Other SaaS interlopers eventually come about, but typically
| none of them can keep up with the main project's SaaS offering as
| they're at cutting edge and usually most competent and familiar
| with the project
|
| - Then, a player like Amazon comes in and simply competes on the
| infrastructure front in a way that the original SaaS offering
| can't compete with, nor can anybody else.
|
| At this point, the original project isn't able to exist as a
| business. If your reaction to this is "that's fine, the community
| can take over from here." Then that is literally the exact option
| on the table today. From the very moment that Redis Labs was made
| non-viable by AWS under their original license, the fork was
| right there for the open source community to take over. It's
| _exactly_ the same as if the company had gone under. Go nuts with
| it.
|
| But then when it comes to the license they come up with: it is
| literally the most obvious and reasonable thing I could possibly
| think of. Do whatever you want with this software, just don't
| release the project directly as SaaS.
|
| It is so crazy to me! Nobody's labor was stolen. Every
| contributor to every patch of the project's work is preserved
| under the license under which they contributed. Go make Rediss.
| Go make Reredis. Or just keep contributing to Redis, knowing we
| can all keep using it, we just can't go make Reredis Labs. I
| think I'll survive.
| ribadeo wrote:
| This piece, while providing context, makes me question basically
| everything about Redis, despite it's lovely API.
|
| Antirez extolling the virtue of the current LLM wave of hype
| coupled with his bizarre apologism for Redis Labs behavior is
| less strange than "why is this guy not 1)personally extremely
| wealthy 2)having reserved some key powers and control from Redis
| Labs from day1 such that he could have steered this, aka why
| content to be a somewhat powerless entity throughout the whole
| story of what happens to rhe software he wrote"
|
| I also felt like the entire essay felt milquetoast as if Antirez
| was assigned to do damage control and upon recitation of the
| actual events, felt the need to defend his own choices to
| himself, as if he didn't even believe himself, defensive?
|
| I have a huge amount of respect for the core design and its
| philosophy, FWIW
| ribadeo wrote:
| "Hapless" is the word that comes to mind. I mean, if the OSS
| you write gets commercialized and you aren't the one
| commercializing it...
| saghm wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, even though I'll probably never
| write anything remotely close to as popular as Redis, if by
| some cosmic accident I accidentally make something open
| source with enough popularity that it could be made into a
| business, I wouldn't have any desire to be the one to do it
| because I have zero interest in owning or running a business
| in the first place. I don't think it's really that bizarre or
| hard to imagine that someone like making things that people
| find useful but not want to have to spend the immense time
| and emotional energy into being in charge of turning it into
| something that makes a profit. Some people are genuinely not
| motivated by money beyond enough to be comfortable, and I
| firmly believe that's not a bad thing!
| matsemann wrote:
| Why do you think they would be extremely wealthy, given it's a
| product they're giving away for free, and it was everyone else
| (like cloud providers) making money off of it?
| o_m wrote:
| Redis is valued at roughly $2 billion. The author owned all
| of it at some point. It is not strange to assume they would
| be wealthy.
| Jonanin wrote:
| What's truly bizarre is the popularity on this site of
| questioning someone's own stated experience with finding LLM
| tools useful. On a site called hacker news, that usually
| celebrates useful computer tools. I'll never understand the
| obvious luddism here.
| musha68k wrote:
| I love redis. I'm sure the vector feature vector will turn out
| great as usual.
|
| So yeah, of course rooting for antirez and his family to get a
| nice slice of the AI cake!
| vinay_ys wrote:
| When someone puts a significant and useful software under an open
| license (like BSD) and nurtures a vibrant open-source community
| around it, sure, everyone else can definitely take it and use it
| for free. But nobody serious will use it just because it is free.
| They will consider other intangible but critical aspects like
| risks to themselves w.r.t future viability of the project,
| ability to get custom work done to it or around it, keeping up
| with hardware and software ecosystem trends etc. These things
| have second order implications - how healthy the broader
| developer ecosystem is, is there a broad base of core committers
| we can hire, how easy it is to upstream our changes, who else is
| using it at similar scale, criticality, cost efficiency; is
| commercial support available (sometimes 3rd party commercial
| business support ecosystem is essential due to
| regulatory/compliance reasons), do hardware vendors actively
| participate in the open-source community and ensure it runs well
| on their hardware etc.
|
| Apart from free users, even the contributors have very similar
| considerations for their participation.
|
| But the starting point is the license - it has to be a clear and
| unambiguous open-source license that is widely well-understood -
| especially w.r.t the blast-radius or infection radius of the
| license. Does it infect the library code that is linked/loaded
| into it? Does it infect the independent binary/processes that
| scaffold around it (say, control-plane, orchestrator, proxy etc)?
| What are the obligations if it does? If we have to get lawyers
| involved to answer these questions because it is a custom license
| that is vaguely written or it has never been challenged in a
| court or the license holder is of unknown reputation, these are
| huge red flags.
|
| Another equally important consideration is the motivations of the
| stewards of the project. While this isn't explicitly stated, one
| cannot be naive about it. Contributors and users will have to
| consider a gamut of scenarios - best/base/worst scenarios and
| make their judgement. With smaller steward organizations, there
| are one kind of risks while with larger organizations open-
| sourcing there are other kinds of risks. If they are competitors
| in some way that's another challenge. If there is no natural
| alignment of use-cases functionally or non-functionally, that's
| another issue etc.
|
| With recent changes in Redis, all these things have become less
| clear and straightforward.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| wish redis worked better with the community! improved language
| support (japanese, korean) for FT.SEARCH; accepted contributions;
| listened to devs for API design (some of it just so odd); made it
| convenient to contribute to redis (and not a giant wall of
| ice...); profit sharing with contributors to redis would be great
| too...
| Amekedl wrote:
| bro is entering his midlife crisis
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| I think Valkey now took over redis maintenance and I don't expect
| bigger users will reach out for Redis anymore. It seems like a
| better maintained project at this point. In my opinion, the
| licensing changed things permanently.
| dev0p wrote:
| Amazing read, thanks for sharing.
|
| And thanks for building redis! It's an amazing piece of software,
| no idea how we managed to do without it.
| wg0 wrote:
| Were these cloud companies, their product managers and execs were
| not ethical enough to contribute let's say just 2% of the revenue
| to the base open source projects and even directly label it as
| "Open Source Sustainability Surcharge (OSSS) in the invoices and
| UIs?
|
| That would have been enough to stop forks and license switches.
| May be a little less wines, watches, women and yatches for the
| execs though.
| nijave wrote:
| I think this is much less straight forward when the OSS is
| glued to a commercial company.
|
| Giving money to a competitor is different than giving money to
| an open initiative.
|
| Does Redis Labs give back to the Linux Foundation and OpenSSL?
| wg0 wrote:
| Good question. But I still believe a percentage based revenue
| share would have been a far greater deal than none at all.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It's too late for Redis, IMO.
|
| We loved it at the start, but it's really hard to get it to
| scale.
|
| The official client library for C/C++ is missing Cluster support.
|
| The cloud offerings (MemoryStore) are a rip-off.
| wslh wrote:
| With all due respect, would it be more transparent for antirez to
| disclose whether he holds equity in Redis Labs and, if so, how
| much? While I understand he signed documents transferring
| ownership to Redis Labs, it seems ethical, especially in light of
| recent controversies, to clarify his position. Transparency on
| whether he benefits from Redis Labs' decisions, or even a
| statement acknowledging that he cannot or will not discuss this
| would help address potential conflicts of interest and maintain
| trust within the open-source community.
| antirez wrote:
| It is literally written inside the post.
| wslh wrote:
| Thanks for the reply, I assume then the "no interest" is "no
| equity". Again, with all due respect to you, not trolling.
| antirez wrote:
| I mean that I wrote I have stock options, as before to
| rejoin. This was an important disclaimer and disclosure to
| provide transparently the situation.
| neomantra wrote:
| Thank you antirez for all your OSS and social contributions. I
| love reading both your code and your prose. Welcome back and I
| look forward to the next chapters.
|
| Something stated periodically, and certainly in these comments,
| is how the license upset Redis OSS contributors. I understand
| there are many perspectives on the story, but this is generalized
| projection to support a viewpoint.
|
| Speaking just for myself as an Redis OSS contributor -- a very
| very minor one but I've spent hundreds of hours dedicated to
| Redis dev over the decade -- I wasn't bothered by it with respect
| to my donated time or IP. Beyond that, my opinion is that license
| holders have the right to do as the licenses permit, including
| changing it.
|
| Without a survey, we don't know about the rest of the
| contributors and do we somehow weight their approval by the
| extent of their contribution? In the end, these opinions don't
| matter directly and what matters is the actions individuals and
| organizations take, which KV store they chose to support with
| time or money.
|
| Clearly some contributors and their backers didn't like the
| change and forked Valkey. I have since started collaborating with
| Valkey. But as antirez pointed out how it would go, it's because
| of technical grounds, not because of license angst. Valkey was
| open to rejiggering its Lua integration, something Redis wasn't
| open to previously; so I took the opportunity to advance that
| with Valkey.
|
| As Redis becomes useful to me again, e.g. with this Vector API, I
| would collaborate there too. We can have different tools for
| different purposes. Either way, it will be interesting to see how
| these two codebases advance...
| datadeft wrote:
| I am not sure what is going on with k:v stores and I do not
| understand how to hell we ended up with Redis. Using Redis in
| production for some time I am not impressed.
|
| Redis does not natively scale across multiple cores in a
| traditional multi-threaded sense, you can still scale it
| horizontally (across multiple machines or instances).
|
| This horizontal scaling is also problematic. Some of the cloud
| solutions we used would die during a scaling event.
|
| I went on the hunt to find an alternative but not sure what to
| replace it with. At this stage the interface has to be Redis
| compatible because devs really like it.
|
| I found this so far: https://medium.com/@shafreeck/titan-a-
| distributed-redis-prot...
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| technologisty wrote:
| Welcome back, Salvatore and thank you for the post. It's good to
| have you back in the fray.
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