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.
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
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.
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.