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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

What I mean is that even after the project leader tells you it was just some confusion, the Github project still is marked as BSD, and nothing is written in the original announcement clearly stating that Redis would switch license, it is a bit strange that the information continues to spread regardless of what I continued to say.

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"Redis is an example of this paradigm. Today, most cloud providers offer Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from software that was not developed by them. Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed"

Crying fake news (which has been co-opted to mean "real news that I don't like or that you shouldn't pay attention to") completely undermined your statement. Yes, the original announcement wasn't just unclear, it is very clearly drawing a line that "this must be changed".

I admit that the communication was not great, but the announcement never said Redis would switch. Maybe I'm a bit biased, because before Redis Labs doing this license switch, we internally even agreed about taking the core BSD, so the goals of the company were always clear, regardless of the fact that this page in the company web site was unclear. But "Redis switching license" was factually incorrect since the start and never stated anywhere.

> but the announcement never said Redis would switch

> Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed

https://redislabs.com/community/commons-clause/

It sounds a bit different when not taken out of context:

> Redis is an example of this paradigm. Today, most cloud providers offer Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from software that was not developed by them. Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed. Redis Labs is leading and financing the development of open source Redis and deserves to enjoy the fruits of these efforts. Consequently, we decided to add Commons Clause to certain components of open source Redis. Cloud providers will no longer be able to use these components as part of their Redis-as-a-Service offerings, but all other users will be unaffected by this change.

But Redislabs extensions were AGPL, not BSD beforehand.

Yeah, there is literally no way to read that except as a statement of intent to move BSD-licensed Redis into Common Clause, even if that wasn't the first step taken.

While this is being portrayed as a communication error, that strains belief—it sounds a lot more like an after-the-fact effort to deal with massive blowback at the very clearly stated intent.

I understand what you mean. I think you called it "fake news" because you were frustrated about reporters/bloggers/twitter personalities spreading a story without bothering to do any research to see if it's true (because the story is dramatic and easy to spread). The reason people are having issues with you using that term is it has developed a strong association with state-sponsored propaganda campaigns (see: Russia during 2016 election) rather than just lazy, half-assed "journalism", which is what this was. Both of these are real problems, but I wouldn't call the latter "fake news" because it wasn't manufactured by a party intending to harm you. It was just journalists being lazy.

"Redis’ permissive BSD open source license allows them to do so legally, but this must be changed" (extensions are AGPL, so this can only refer to Redis core)

But yeah, blame lazy journalists.

> Crying fake news (which has been co-opted to mean "real news that I don't like or that you shouldn't pay attention to") completely undermined your statement.

You realize that antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo) lives in Italy, speaks English as a second language, and isn't exposed to the US political climate, right? Crucifying him for the US-coloquial subtextual connotation of his word choice is pretty uncharitable.

Being charitable to the speaker isn't beneficial when a very large contingent of readers were coming away with the wrong impression. Hence why they changed the wording.

It remains that the official statement from the company has incredibly misleading wording, so it seems suspect to attack people who might "misinterpret" that, though. Uncharitable, even.

There are two usages for the term "fake news".

The original one was news that's completely made up without reference facts. This term was created to describe sites that generate fictional news stories to support an agenda or get clicks.

The second one is news that is negative about you. This usage was created as a deflection from the actual problem of fiction being sold as fact, and has become the primary usage. It is an attack on news not for whether it's correct, but for how it makes you look.

Neither of these apply to an honest miscommunication, and they both describe the people who misunderstood the announcement as malicious enemies rather than the concerned fans of Redis they more likely are.

I understand both your meaning and frustration. But I think acjohnson55's point is that the phrase "fake news" has become a loaded term. I avoid it because it may imply things I don't want to.

I understand your meaning. The problem is that the phrase "fake news" in the United States at least is associated with a specific political party. Your message will be less well-received by part of your audience as a result. Perhaps you are fine with that, though.

EDIT: antirez updated the post, so this is no longer relevant.

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