Redis Renamed to Redict
andrewkelley.me
andrewkelley.me
When I stepped back from Redis, I formally left it in the hands of the Core Team the was constituted by Redis Inc. (the one that included three Redis Labs programmers, one from AWS, one from Alibaba), but this was a formal act from my side: with the BSD license any third party can fork, change name, continue the project with a different trajectory and with different goals.
BSD code is a common good, and everybody can impress new directions, if willing to do so.
Yes, it may end up that Redict has the backing of the community, and Redis falls behind, but we shouldn't act like all the mindshare isn't currently with Redis (the brand).
Moreover the current situation with Redis is not closed-but-maintained VS forks-possibily-without-development-force, because the SSPL is a quite open license. To put our destiny in the hand of what OSI approves or not is crazy IMHO. Actually for OSS to be viable in the future, we likely need many other licenses based on copyleft, that allows new projects developers to say, OK, I can use an open license because I have some protection from megacorps. Don't get fooled by a minority of strong voices, if you check Hacker News comments about Redis licese change, you will see that at this point many, many folks get that.
Stallman was now almost erased from collective memory but with GPL what happened was exactly what was happening now with SSPL. Initially copyleft was used, and later stronger copyleft was used in successive versions / modifications of the license, like AGPL. So this problem is not new and people a the core of the Free Software movement addressed them in a very similar way decades ago. But now suddenly if a small company goes along the same lines, that is a violation of everything, while big companies like Amazon posing a major threat to future of OSS is fine.
I think many people's disagreement here is that Redis broke its promise to always remain BSD (https://redis.com/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/).
I don't think you can say "yes but you can just fork it", because that ignores the reality that, sure, maybe eventually that fork will win, but right now the main fork (Redis) has a huge head start.
I agree, that's why I don't ever want to say that something "will always be X". Otherwise people might be upset when I have to break the promise.
I'm not saying this to you as the creator of Redis, by the way (you already said you've been away too long for that), just as one random HN commenter to another.
I guess on one hand, be careful what you promise, on the other, be careful what you believe.
The SSPL isn’t the same as the GPL. The GPL is a tool that was invented to advance the Free Software movement agenda: protecting the freedoms of users of software. The SSPL does not do that. It protects the interests of companies that want to maintain exclusivity in offering software services.
This post from SFC can explain the problems with this far better than I can in a HN post: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...
It's simple to see things from the POV of other smaller but yet VCs-backed companies only, when evaluating the damage of Amazon. Things are actually more complex. For instance OpenRedis was one of the very first Redis SAAS services ran by the same folks that contributed to Redis in the first days, that provided the logo and so forth. Guess who is also impacted by the Amazon monopoly?
The “free rider problem” has been used to justify licenses that protect the interests of software authors since before we called it “open source”, long before Amazon was made a scapegoat.
“The free rider problem is when someone is allowed to package free software in non-free or less-free bundles, and that's precisely the area of the GPL that I thought I needed to do something about in making the Aladdin license”—Peter Deutsch, October 1998 [1]
The point I am trying to make is that legal tools like the Aladdin Free Public License and SSPL do not protect FOSS, or advance the social movements that have produced a bountiful commons of digital public goods. Those that craft those tools and apply them to their works have every right to do so, but they do so because they choose to do so, not because a company like Amazon “forced them” to.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041013082602/http://devlinux.o...
I’m all about increasing the private provision of public goods. I don’t think that licenses that give firms exclusive rights to monetize the goods they produce advances that goal. That’s just the status quo of firms being landlords of their intellectual property, extracting rents from others who want to enjoy them. That’s just proprietary software, which is clearly a useful thing for society to have.
The thing that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth is when you apply your resources to produce common goods, and then one party declares that you are somehow a “bad actor” while changing the terms to enclose the goods and exclude you from enjoying that common good.
Luckily with FOSS, those who are excluded can move their efforts elsewhere. But the future goods will not be the same. And I think that’s a shame.
As a vendor/developer you surely can chose not to provide software users some freedoms, but when lets not call it Open Source
More in this https://peterzaitsev.com/open-source-perspectives/
My blog post is an appeal for users to choose one branch over another.
Forks of large projects happen when something bad is going with the source (why fork something huge when things are going ok?), and marks the source as poisoned.
Renamed means... It just changed name, everything is already, nothing to see here...
Sure there is the mindshare on the name but people in IT for long knows what means when a fork of this size means.
Is the new license (LGPL) going to be problematic for infrastructure providers to offer a managed Redict?
So it is a fork, but we might as well accept that what is currently named Redis will slowly (or quickly?) morph into something unrecognizable, what with the focus on generative AI and commercialization...
I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it.
What part do you think is strange?
To me, the article presents an alternate narrative that (in my opinion) rightly calls out relicensing of F/OSS as the actual fork since it’s being done in a (usually) hostile manner against the wishes of the community that lifted it to be relevant in the first place.
I think the crack at Drew is (maybe) fair given the explanation of redemption, but also unnecessary. Drew’s hardline software freedom advocacy is the relevant information to the story. His promise of redict’s safe harbor is backed up by his profound stewardship of other projects.
(And I’m not a fan of Drew myself.)
For many people, Redis is an open-source in-memory data store. Redict is closer both in spirit and in legal usability to the Redis people have been using for many years compared to whatever got the Redis trademark now.
If I do an `apt-get upgrade`, I don't expect to schedule calls with lawyers. I imagine most repos will switch to either this one or some other "renamed" projects, with the package name "redis" pointing to one of those.
1. redict, maintained by drew de vault, which takes the stance that redis is finished software, works well, and just needs its existing feature set maintained and bug fixed
2. redis, maintained by redis labs, which seems to be experimenting with generative ai for the sake of adding features, and which practically needs to stay on the feature churn treadmill so that they can keep trying to extract a profit from it
the author's (quite reasonable) position is that regardless of who gets to use the name "redis", the product that people know and love is going to live on as drew's branch of the fork, not redis labs'.
* This position conflates a license to use a product with the product itself. That's not how intellectual property works!
* The blog post author is unilaterally speaking on behalf of a community, but it isn't clear that the author has ever contributed to Redis (has he?) or is a major part of the Redis community (is he?). I understand that he is a very accomplished coder and have heard many positive things about Zig, but where's the relation to Redis?
* Ditto for Drew (maintainer of the fork in question), has he ever contributed to Redis or is he a major part of the Redis community?
fwiw some people said this same thing about MySQL vs MariaDB, claiming (absolutely incorrectly) that Oracle's MySQL is the "fork". In that case, it wasn't a license change (MySQL is still GPL), but rather people that just didn't like the change in ownership. So it seems people will just invent mental gymnastics to justify this "X is really just a fork of X" when they don't like a decision by the intellectual property owner.
In the MySQL/MariaDB case, the people saying this "MySQL is actually the fork now" were largely not terribly visible members of the community. And the Linux distributions who mapped the "mysql" package onto "mariadb" created a giant mess, since MySQL has remained more popular than MariaDB, and the two are absolutely not compatible with each other.
Anyway, if you don't like Redis Ltd or what they've done here, that is fine and understandable! But it doesn't mean you can unilaterally declare that their product is a fork of itself, and the "real" project lives on elsewhere, and expect most people to go along with this as if it is a reasonable position.
Ah! And here's the two projects discussing merging efforts: https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv/issues/18
I agree though I would rather see them choose to stick to BSD and work on creating community of vendors (rather than Redis Labs monopoly) perhaps some purely Open Source, others proprietary.
The old development community is regrouping under https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv. As of right now we don't intend to change the license, we just want a more balanced governance that prevents a corporate entity to make this type of choice. We are currently planning a five person governance, with everyone coming from a different company. (We would love some independent maintainers, but there weren't any at the time
Agree with the other comment, this was written weirdly. Can't place my finger on why though.
Because the community has a bunch of redis protocol compatible choices and I don't understand why pushing redis in particular over others is the right choice.
Drew had the opportunity to make money with this fork by hosting it on SourceHut, and potentially creating subscribers out of redict contributors. Instead, he chose to host on Codeberg, a German non-profit, that is more GitHub like. I think, this alone, shows that (in this case) it’s about community and preservation over everything else.
I’d still expect the size of redict’s community to be big enough to convert some folks to paid. But maybe I am overestimating the size of that community since the Redis company took over?