The race to replace Redis
lwn.net
lwn.net
So we as developers don’t have to scramble to replace redis in our SAAS apps and web based software.
This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.
Redis’ blog post: https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-li...
Some projects require signing copyright transfer before making commits (legal document claiming that you are a) copyright holder and b) you transfer those rights to them ie CLA [0]) so single entity holds whole copyrights.
They usually have a GHA that checks it when proposing PRs.
It doesn't look like redis has any of this.
So they run RedisLabs purely on trademark + admin rights on GH on redis/redis.
If that's the case then they also cannot legally change licence of code that's already there because they're not sole copyright holders of that code.
ps. as a side note that's why ie. SQLite doesn't allow external contributions at all, even though their code is Public Domain – because they can legally claim full copyright/authorship.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
Public domain isn't the only form of free software. You can literally use it in exactly the same way as you did before. Nothing has been taken away from you.
Does this address your concern?
One of the well known flaws of capitalism, in the 'bad, but everything else is worse' sense.
The "Free for all except mega cloud corps" license changes are to disrupt this status quo which currently sees the mega cloud corps with impenetrable moats from capturing most of the value of OSS products others spend their resources into building, AWS are then able to use their war chest profits to out resource, and out compete them, using their own code-bases against them.
It's unfortunate organizations need to resort to relicensing stop this predatory behavior, but its clear in AWSs 20+ year history they're not going to change their behavior on their own.
Doesn't AWS employ Madelyn Olson? I mean, AWS have paid for Redis development.
Not exactly a leech.
But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.
> Yep still the biggest leachers
Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever they want. That's not leeching.
So whilst their previous license allowed AWS to leech off them, it's now been relicensed to prevent them from profiting off their future investments without compensating anything back.
You do understand that AWS profits not off redis but by offering redis as a managed hosting provider.
Microsoft and Google do to, it's just that they're not as popular as AWS.
They're not re-skinning or re-selling Redis, they're selling a separate product - the managed operations for operating and scaling Redis.
You may not appreciate this (most on HN never do - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) But the value is evident to thousands of customers.
AWS takes most of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back
We’ll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also never created redis). Both contributed to its maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We’ll see which fork wins out.
I've called AWS's hiring of a single developer a token hire that they then go on to write flowery PR posts about to camouflage their predatory relationship with OSS vendors.
For concrete numbers they contributed 165/12111 commits for a total of a 1.36% of the commits.
Whilst that qualifies as a valuable contribution to any project, it's also dwarfed by the 350M investment in Redis Labs and doesn't absolve AWS from being a called a "leacher" by helping themselves to the majority of the profits whilst contributing relatively nothing back.
It’s funny that you would use commits to quantify investment from AWS, but you’d use $ to buy shares in future profits to quantify investment from redis labs. Why not use the same yardstick for both?
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Everyone who put in effort into redis did it knowing the license. There’s nothing wrong in relicensing future commits. There’s nothing wrong with forking. There’s nothing wrong in using whichever fork works better for you.
You’re insisting up and down that AWS and others were leeching because they didn’t own the copyright to redis. I’ve never heard this interpretation of OSS before, but sure maybe you’re right. But we’ll see which fork comes out on top a year from now.
If you don't want others to monetize your work, don't license it under a license permitting them exactly that.
Specifically: have the major cloud providers ever created a successful FOSS database, cache, or fulltext search index project from the ground up? By this I mean, a FOSS project with its own protocol, own community from scratch, not a fork or a re-implementation or based on another FOSS project, nor a late-stage company acquisition.
I'm struggling to think of even a single example. Even for broader infrastructure (not just db/cache/search), there's few examples, only Kubernetes comes to mind rapidly.
If the cloud providers are widely practicing "FOSS for thee but not for me" with respect to creation of new infrastructure projects, that's predatory and unsustainable.
Yes, but there’s another explanation. Repeating the same mistake countless times and expecting a different outcome is naivety.
I suppose I’m not understanding the point of your position. Software authors cannot fix a licensing mistake by changing the past, but they can use a different license moving forwards.
Wait, does any language team ever created a successful implementation from the ground up ? No, they all base their work on some hardware people ! They are predatory !
Wait, does any hardware manufacturers ever created a successful product from the ground up ? No, they all base their work of some software ! They are predatory !
Rather, it's a question of cloud vendors repeatedly building open source competing drop-in re-implementations of external db/cache/search products when those original products switch away from FOSS licenses to survive, despite the cloud vendor being a million times larger and better resourced than the original db/cache/search developers. The cloud vendors aren't building something on top of these products (like your examples), but rather they are aiming to competitively replace these products and capture the mindshare of their communities.
This strategy allows the cloud vendor to skip the hard steps of developing a unique product from scratch, designing a client/server protocol from scratch, building a community from scratch, and so many other things.
Separately, the cloud vendors do also build their own unique db/cache/search products, but they just don't ever make them source-available or self-hostable when they do so -- let alone FOSS. That is what makes the pattern of behavior predatory: the big cloud vendors use their dominant positions to bring non-FOSS products to the market, while using FOSS re-implementations to destroy competitors who dare move away from FOSS themselves.
None of the 3 examples you described above are in any way related to this scenario.
It's lose/lose!
Code contributions from amazon would've been leeched by other parties using redis as well - something which amazon is accepting (and probably encouraging).
Basically Redis Inc is the one making the fork, which retains the Redis name since they purchased it from antirez.
But if you think AWS would have any shred of ethics when it comes to a topic like this, you’re much more optimistic than I am.
Again, it's chump change, these companies drop that kinda money all the time in aquihires..
It sounds like a very bad deal for the likes of Amazon et al. The likes of Amazon offer Redis alongside memcache just because cloud adopters might want to use a memory cache service,but there is no value in buying trademarks for it.
I mean, just take a quick look how Amazon offers managed RDBMS, and how the specific DB is just an afterthought behind a compatible interface.
People seem to think that just because some company has cash that they should mindlessly spend it on things that add absolutely no value.
Plus some great projects don’t even get (monetary) contributions from large corporations. I think because it could weaken their legal position.
I feel like there’s an argument that these kind of licensing terms are almost beneficial to ‘big cloud’ because the cost/effort of all of these arrangements might dissuade smaller companies from trying to compete in the hosting and managed-services business.
Meaning that Microsoft is "paying to play" with Redis Ltd... while I have not seen any announcements from AWS or GCP.
Microsoft would never just announce something like this on a whim.
Redis is great as an off-the shelf component, but it's not exactly rocket science to re-implement for a big corporation. So redis doesn't really have any leverage in my opinion.
Then their cloud-specific solutions are the up-sell (and lock-in).
Which is why Microsoft's new drop-in replacement works with all those things. It could gain traction - who knows.
I don't think so. The only thing they need to let their customers know is that they offer a memory cache service that is compatible with this or that interface. Whether it's Redis, memcache, Garnet, or whatever it might be, it matters nothing at all. All they need to do is ensure clients can consume their service, and that is it.
This whole thing sounds like a desperate cash grab that fails to argue any point on why it's in anyone's best interests to spend small fortunes on nothing at all.
I suspect in the long run, Amazon will eventually "pay" the licensing fee for customers that demand "Redis". But they will push everyone else towards their in-house fork of Redis that they brand MemoryDB or whatever. You will pay more for the Redis licensed version and AWS will steer you away from it, but it will be there if you are adamant.
This is already happening with Aurora, which has Postgres and Mysql compatible versions. If your company is big enough for special pricing, then you know they want you on Aurora. The pricing discounts for Aurora are insane (50%+) compared to what you might get on a traditional Postgres of equivalent size (20%). They will probably do this with MemoryDB and Redis eventually. Redis is available if you really need it. But this other thing that they maintain is discountable to half the cost of the other one and it becomes a pretty obvious choice.
Both the internet and open-source enable alternative employment and funding models that up until now might have not have been sufficiently explored.
Sounds like that's basically what happened here, too, except not with Google. I'm not sure why.
It’s a community effort and this is just as rude to the community that built it as they are claiming SaaS vendors are being to them by not “giving back”.
This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing free software is about as logically sound as expecting compensation from someone when you give them a gift.
Ironically this happened because the community was using the BSD license instead of the GPL, when the former allows someone to fork the code under a different license.
If the big cloud providers wanted to stick it to them, they would create their own fork of the code under the GPL and make substantial contributions to it so that one becomes the main one.
(I don’t know enough to be in either camp.)
When authors pick a license, it's a serious act. It's not a joke like hey I pick BSD but mind you, I don't really want you to follow the terms! Make sure to don't fork or change license. LOL. A couple of years ago somebody forked Redis and then sold it during some kind of acquisition. The license makes it possible, and nobody complained. Now Redis Inc. changes license, and other parties fork the code to develop it in a different context. Both things are OK with the license, so both things can be done.
A different thing is what one believes to be correct or not for the future of some software. That is, if I was still in charge, would I change license? But that's an impossible game to play, I'm away from the company for four years and I'm not facing the current issues with AWS impossible-to-compete-with scenario. I don't know and I don't care, it does not make sense to do such guesswork. What I know for sure is that licensing is a spectrum. I release code under the MIT or BSD, but that's just me. I understand other choices as well. What I don't understand is making the future of open source in the hands of what OSI says it's correct and wrong. Read the terms of the license, and understand if you are fine with them.
This is a false equivalency. No one is defining "creator" as "wrote all of the thing". When describing a project/product as a whole, there's a clear, massive difference between "creator" and "contributor".
Let's say you get a small patch merged into the Linux kernel, would you then call yourself "one of the creators of Linux"? The vast majority of people would not find this remotely acceptable!
How about proprietary software and employment arrangements. Let's say a Microsoft intern gets a few lines of code merged into SQL Server. Would you call them "one of the creators of SQL Server"?
Extending this logic to other words, would you say a company with N employees actually has N founders? No, because these words mean different things.
A (very) long time ago the Apache developers could have gone down this route.
> You can only run Apache under very specific circumstances!
Or memcached:
> You are only allowed to run a memcached server if you're only caching your own website!
We see how nonsensical this is
Redis organization doesn't pay any sort of compensation to developers who contribute to redis source code. I do not see any difference here.
Are we really counting contribution based on LoC? Haven't we over the decades decided that isn't valid? Guess every person that makes this claim should once again have their performance based on LoC...
Some simple examples, I'm not saying this is the case though. What if most of Amazon's contributions are high impact contributions where most of Redis orgs are simply maintenance or feature pushes. What if the same is true for a 1% contributor?
By your own statement doesn't Tencent then have a larger claim to redis that Amazon or Redis does?
I think they didn't include the LoC in the article as anything other than a broad estimate of contributions, perhaps for lack of any better measurements.
If they contributed to 5% of the code, and the code is open-source, then yes?
AWS employee Madelyn Olson was a committer on Redis since 2019. Since 2020, she was on the core team of maintainers.
> If you're looking for a primer on what is going on with Redis and why its license change matters, this is the article to read. As someone close to the situation, this is the best summary I've seen.
But the developers licensed the software at no charge. What kind of compensation are they entitled to then?
Sounds like a case of sellers remorse/take-backsies one of the problems that open source was aiming to solve.
I wonder how many bellyachers here contributed to Redis vs. just leeched. (Not a rhetorical question.) How many are just in the peanut gallery (just like I).
If I put in a commit, what is redis going to pay me for executing my code?
I like free money as much as the next guy, but VC isn’t it.
(And also I'd argue most of redis' value to users was already in place before the VC backed company got involved)
From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects, if you’re using these things at scale it’s much more economical to buy some servers and hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis. But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.
it is more expensive to buy managed, but you offload work. I would imagine toy projects are more cash constrained, and makes more sense to rent cheap servers and roll your own.
On the other hand, larger scale projects would rather pay to offload the work of managing and scaling redis.
Large scale projects can take advantage of economies of scale and hire ops people. I’ve found cloud support pretty lacklustre compared to having someone to talk to face-to-face who understands the whole stack for your particular application.
Of course conventional corporate wisdom says waste as much as you like on services as long as you keep payroll down, that may be a bigger challenge than any of the technical ones.
Where the value is or was is pure sophistry. You don't have a crystal ball, just like everyone else.
All this discussion is envious bellyaching from those that are probably leeches themselves. They just want the free gravy train running for themselves.
I mean, they've already changed licensing for parts of the project twice in 6 years. I have zero faith that they won't pull a Vader and change the terms of the agreement again.
> continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!)
I'd guess that > 99% of any "improvements" Redis the company make, will affect < 1% of users.
As has been pointed out numerous times, it's essentially "done" in terms of functionality - but as a VC funded company they have to constantly do "something", so they'll keep adding niche upon niche features, giving the resume padders at other VC companies something sparkly and new to spend their budgets on.
Meanwhile 99% of people just need a fast key/value store, and maybe half of those need it to be distributed/replicated, and maybe a third need it to run some kind of scripting (Lua) to do "in-db" operations atomically.
With the addition of native TLS several years ago redis is, for 99% of users "functionally complete".
Sure, new TLS versions will come along and need support, kernel or library features they use will adapt or have improvements, etc, but I think you're vastly over estimating the amount of "improvements" to expect that will impact the vast, vast majority of users.
> preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers
Look I hate AWS more than most people would find reasonable, and even I'll admit they're not the "bad guys" in this scenario.
The project was released as BSD licensed, so AWS could if they wanted, fork it, and offer a service based on that, and make any fixes/improvements just in their service offering.
They didn't. They had paid staff contributing back to the redis project, for a number of years. This was literally the goldilocks project of the OSS world:
Numerous massive tech companies who all have the financial ability to simply run their own fork, and the legal right to do so (due to BSD-3), willingly contributing to the maintenance of the project.
As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis (and HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the tech community in general: if an OSS project you rely on transfers control from it's founder(s) to a company, you probably need to consider continuing with a fork from the last open version, because apparently "(try to) monetise popular open source" is the newest way to win the douchebag villain award given to MBAs at VC funded companies.
https://docs.keydb.dev/docs/cluster-tutorial/
I wished they'd release some of their "Pro" stuff and/or internal-only features.
Or, even simpler, if the project is not contributed to some open source foundation, and does not have copyleft license - it's a trap.
If redis thinks you're making too much money using redis, they'll relicense it so you have to pay them to do whatever you are doing
Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already exists. They'll do so because it is to their advantage to not charge for the license fees Redis now wants.
> Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already exists.
And they most possibly will. Goodbye, and thank you for the fish!
You can find his contributor for both at:
* Me: @enjoy-binbin Out of curiosity, do you have a fuzzer to test out Kvrocks? Your recent great fixes seem like a combo rather than random findings :D
* Binbin: They were actually random findings.I may be sensitive to this, doing code review and found them (also based on my familiarity with redis)
In Solidity, where it's a serious security risk, before the language performed overflow checks itself, library authors would perform the arithmetic operation and then e.g. check if the result is larger than the original value in the case of a positive subtrahend [2].
[1] https://github.com/apache/kvrocks/pull/1581/commits/dc5140dd...
[2] https://github.com/KingdomStudiosIO/contracts/blob/51873b574...
Gompa also raised the issue on openSUSE's Factory discussion list.
After Docker was phased out, various distributions have adopted the compatible Podman as a replacement for Docker. It seems that a similar story is unfolding with Redis.
And then once Red Hat distros switched over to CGroups v2, which Podman enabled them to do, it meant that Docker wouldn't really work all that well anymore until they eventually switched to CGroups v2 also (which they eventually did a few years later). So that's why it got removed from the repos, at least originally.
https://wiki.debian.org/Docker
Docker is dyeing on linux podman will be the only one that remains.
And besides, that issue with root feels overblown in the era of single-user systems and servers as cattle.
Uh. No.
A related problem I've seen from other complaints made elsewhere is that podman does things just slightly different enough than Docker that it's not a true drop-in replacement.
We've seen that before; where distro maintainers declared software too dangerous/prematurely dead for a while. All it resulted in was community hosted repositories for the old software. (Read: this is why avconv failed.)
Red Hat at least had the muscle to force podman onto some people, but not everyone.
Every few years I try to replace my containers managed through docker-compose and it's always a sure miss. Before podman gained official support for the docker-compose spec, there was an unofficial podman-compose project that sort of worked save for a few podman incompatibility bugs here and there.
So I was delighted to try out the "official" docker-compose for podman. Quickly learned that there's no such package, the official podman-compose is just the same docker compose package, you just use it with podman the same way you would with docker. Despite this glaring inconsistency I decided to give podman a try (if you are going to install docker compose on your system might as well just use docker). Noped out when I tried to create a VPN with a podman container and it was failing requiring me to enable a kernel module (TAP or TUN can't remember exact error) to create a vpn.
Anyone who says podman is a drop-in replacement for docker never used docker much for anything more than running hello-world. I would only recommend podman over docker for someone who's new to containers and has never heard of docker before.
Those are pretty standard kernel modules for enabling userspace networking, which if you were using podman in rootless mode you need (along with another userspace networking package, slirp4netns). "Drop in replacement" does not mean there's not configuration to get it set up, it means it has the same APIs as another system.
I've been using containers for almost 10 years and with almost no fanfare switched to podman 100% like a year ago. Just because you expected to have to do nothing at all doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Am sure you can get over the kernel module tun creation and other limitations by using something like --privileged but at that point, why not just use docker if you are going to run containers "insecurely".
And for the sake of this argument, drop-in replacement means I can take my tools and move them over to the alternative with little to no extra work needed on my part.
Because at least you can tell that it's insecure, rather than insecurity being the default?
Also the "secure" defaults don't matter much if you have to manually jump through hoops in sysctl and modprobe to get things to work. Infact I could even argue that this introduces the risk of having an insecure server by misconfiguration.
I could be convinced Docker-on-headless-servers has been dying a while but the desktop variants are alive and well
The linked license file is moby's https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/LICENSE
I don't get it; does the new license prohibit it from being distributed thus, or is this a philosophical "need"?
> If it is proprietary, it cannot be included in Fedora. (Binary firmware is the only exception to this)
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden_items
Proprietary software is distributed through the unofficial RPM Fusion repo
And ftr, in my eyes, a project being created/initiated by ddevault is an asset, certainly not a liability.
I pity the fool(s).
He changed the license, moved the code, chosen the name and the direction all on his own without consulting anyone in the community.
His history had made me like that he forked it, but his actions and behavior towards the maintainers of Redis and absolute unwillingness to meet in the middle to collaborate really puts a hold on Redict being more than a fleeting thought.
Linux Foundation, core contributors to Redis and what seems to be the majority of the community is rallying around Valkey, so I don't see Redict going anywhere except in a niche subset of users.
The premise of Redict is to create a fork which is driven by a grassroots community rather than a commercial interest, and which is safe from this kind of rug-pull in the future and to press back against this broader trend of rug pulls by commercial vendors of free software. I invited collaborators from the start at every level, going out of my way not to instill Redict as a hostile takeover but as a community-led effort to create a future for Redis which is protected by copyleft. I talked with the people behind Valkey from the start of Redict and extended them a role in shaping everything from the direction and governance and infrastructure and tooling from day one, provided that we could find common ground on the license. Hell, @madolson, the primary force behind Valkey, signed up for a Codeberg account so that she could be made an admin on the Redict repository before placeholderkv even existed. She was removed only when it became clear that she was committed to her own fork and it didn't seem prudent to us to give admin rights to someone who wasn't contributing.
Redict was not refusing to collaborate or meet in the middle. The raison d'etre of Redict was to be a copyleft home for the Redis codebase, and if we could have found agreement on that then every other detail was always clearly indicated as subject to consensus and we proactively reached out to build that consensus, but were refused by madolson and the commercial interests that wanted to be in charge of their own fork rather than participate in a grassroots project.
Even the consensus they wanted on the license choice was, in the end, the consensus of the four commercial vendors. We tried to find a way of participating in this consensus-making process, but it wasn't made for us. Calls we made in public to use a copyleft license were met with resounding support on GitHub, to no avail.
Don't mistake four commercial vendors and the Linux Foundation for a community. I wish them the best of luck, and acknowledge that a corporate-led home for Redis is probably what some people are looking for. That said, I'm not okay with this narrative that Redict was not cooperating with the community, because it's just factually wrong and hurtful to boot.
I am keenly looking on to see if the people involved in Redict see it the same way. As a user of Redis, I would like to switch to one of these open-source forks, and to be honest one which is "done" and focused on maintenance, bug fixes etc. rather than new features sounds more attractive.
The BSD license in particular seems like a particularly bad way to run a business.
Or plan to make money with other people's love and free-time.
Many large orgs just say no to viral licenses, and in choosing AGPL, you put blockers to adoption.
Open core releases some of the project under permissive license, and keeps some private or under a permissions license.
We are all still trying to figure out how we can have sustainable open source where people can be paid to work on it full time
Do you have suggestions for alternative funding/support models? What is open core being replaced by from your perspective?
Personally I prefer the Adam Jacob trademark business model but it's not that proven and it can't be retrofitted.
There is certainly a difference between AGPL and BUSL style licenses. One of the new projects I'm using as some of their code with a BUSL style, but still open core primarily
It's not a technical blocker, it's a psychological blocker
Maybe the problem lies more with overreaching and trying to cash out?
At the same time, founders take money to build their idea into something more than they could do with a small team. An big companies are risk averse, having a small staff or being susceptible to "hit by a bus" failure is often a deal breaker
But the switch from AGPL to SSPL didn't do either of those things.
AWS still built DocumentDB to compete with Mongodb, and didn't use any SSPL OR AGPL code in the implementation (at least according to their FAQ[1]). And AFAIK AWS isn't paying mongo any royalties.
Well, yeah, its mostly a bad plan, because while it can block competition with your code, it doesn’t block substitution with other code that provides the same function, and if you aren’t one of the big cloud providers, competing in the same function market with bundled services from the big cloud providers, whether or not it is the same underlying code, is the actual problem you face when your monetization is based around “sell a hosted service”.
Would anyone have given mongo a look if it was a fully proprietary technology? They would have gone bust years ago.
There's nothing wrong with making money and being profitable. But they have to justify investments taken with greed. This license change is motivated by greed, not by "making money" fairly.
but at the same time, they want people to be able to use the software for free (esp. at the start), to kick-start the network effect.
In other words, open-core business models want to have their cake and eat it. If you are able to make lots of money off said software, we want a piece of it after the fact. But we dont want to take on the risk of actually looking to build a business and compete on the same.
GPL + CLA = bad. If you contribute to GPL Redis and transfer the copyright to your contributions to the Redis company, they can switch to whatever license they want.
SSPL + no CLA = interesting, I would love to see the Redis company open source their hosting stack because they are accepting external contributions.
Article doesn't mention it, but supposedly Microsoft uses novel algorithms and multi threading to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in throughput.
Now if they can commercialize it with Azure, it should be a credible alternative to Redis Enterprise hosting.
Isn't the point of CLAs that you can re-license contributors' contributions?
(That's not meant a gotcha, I just don't really know how this stuff works)
Either way you can see contributions to add more commands here: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/pulls?q=is%3Apr+add+comm...
With that said, I'm slightly skeptical of/worried about Garnet but the reason is different - it received a bit too much hype soon after going public and I'm concerned it will be subject to corporate politics that often plague projects like that.
It’s a stack they are looking for but keep missing right under their nose.
I don't know if you were referring to the total install size of apps or to the licence or maybe just how annoying Mono was, but nowadays you can compile down to one binary, optionally with the runtime included. That makes it simpler for Linux sysadmins than Java or even Python, IMO.
It has nothing to do with the technical merits of the technology, but with suspicions of the intentions of the company behind it and a desire not to create a dependency on them.
It's an important disclaimer as someone might read this and go write another tool in Python + Tkinter (with terrible results).
It lacks so many improvements and advancements since the ancient version it was forked at, but because AWS already has an org's payments details, teams often refuse to look at Elasticsearch.
Even basic things like autocompleting queries have been WIP for half a decade now:
https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/sample-code/...
https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/...
The superiority AWS was slinging when they "bravely" took the mantle looks terrible in retrospect
Also you can just keep your data in postgres and use paradedb and stop having to deal with dramatically more expensive infrastructure and the JVM.
Just use this pre-V1 public beta software I stumbled upon instead.
The narrative that opensearch is some kind of unsafe abandonware is clearly nonsense when you read the commit log: https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/commits/mai...
All I can say is, sure, if you want elastic use elastic.
…but opensearch is fine. I use it and have no problem with it.
"It lacks so many improvements and advancements since the ancient version it was forked at"
to "opensearch is some kind of unsafe abandonware"?
Would love to learn the thought process here.
…but I mean, I’m not really up for playing the “pedantically correct about what he/she said” game with you.
Instead how about you comment on the point I’m actually making, which is:
opensearch is perfectly fine for most people.
For most people, there is no meaningful distinction between elastic and opensearch.
Opensearch is a healthy project which regularly receives updates and is widely used in production in large deployments.
If you have any meaningful or compelling argument why any of those three things is not true by all means, I’d love to hear about it.
> Also you can just keep your data in postgres and use paradedb and stop having to deal with dramatically more expensive infrastructure and the JVM.
That was the comment I replied to. If you thought OpenSource was pre-V1 public beta software I'm not sure why you're even opining on this.
> Is the idea that opensearch is not usable in production
No one said it's not usable in production.
> because of missing autocomplete?
We have an operations team that wants to do searches across 200+ fields for an embedded device's logs. The engine supports it just fine, but what kind of UX is it to expect them to do manual lookups of the fields available?
People with simple use cases of course can't imagine how important discovery features are.
Of course those aren't all the parity gaps, a random sampling of the ones I banged my head against:
- No Log Stream view, also critical for observability operations with any semblance of a reasonable UX
- No wildcard type, critical for machine generated logs having sane searchability. Searches are literally broken otherwise by false negatives.
- No nested fields in visualizations, can't visualize properly structured logs.
- Can't change indexes on visualizations, need to recreate the entire visualization.
- Can't use underscores at the start of a field name.
- Doesn't support auto refreshing fields which again, is terrible for embedding device logging
Elastic moved past basic search since the days OS forked it at, and now it's a genuinely nice choice for observability.
There's a literal report I wrote on the gaps there to justify going to Elastic before giving up on our slow RFP process. Every gap no matter how small is representative of what's wrong with OpenSearch: they don't have 1/10th the incentive to actually put comparable resources to Elastic behind it.
Especially when you have people lining up to make excuses based on the fact they're clueless about the gaps between them. Literal droves of people using it to provide a middling search experience to their users just don't see anything wrong with it.
> Even basic things like autocompleting queries have been WIP for half a decade now.
It's an open-source project. If this bothered you for half a decade, you could always submit a patch.
Apparently it didn't bother enough other people that no one cared to send a patch.
1. I'm not using Mac-jail-OS
2. I'm not insane to even remotely consider the possibility of using Windows
So, yea, I'm using OpenSearch.
It's not exactly a niche utility for observability unless you plan on hand searching hundreds of fields. But of course see my other comment for a list of the other observability fumbles they've made.
Elastic chose a pretty great time to start to give observability attention, and OS didn't keep up there. Meanwhile search is becoming more and more focused on integrating semantic search (which Lucene isn't particularly excellent at)
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2022/fall/copyright-assignment-...
A CLA may impact relicencing, it depends on the terms. A simple CLA may only say "I am the owner of the code and I release it under $LICENSE". The current Redis CLA also has a copyright grant, which gives Redis the company greater rights.
And the problem with the trademark model is that AWS, and especially Microsoft, already have established brand recognition with the people who sign the big SaaS and support contracts. The people who know what a Redis is are just nerds with no money, the real big shots do everything in Microsoft Excel.
And I think Open Source is based on the very few who decide to take it upon themselves to be the ones spearheading a specific project/task and share it with everyone else. Maybe it's not every single time me, sometimes it's you, sometimes it's Lucy or Mark, and that's how the roll keeps rolling for everyone.
So if a project goes down and nobody comes up to replace it, either it wasn't worth much or this is the time nobody took it upon themselves to do it (yet).
At the same time big corps use it as carte blanche to basically pirate software in a legal way, while following the letter of the licence.
Going back to the open core/demo versions (aka Shareware/Public Domain/Trials) is the only sustainable way to make a living.
aka, just sell software, rather than make it open source.
What is being balked at is the idea that you can use open-source as a foot-in-the-door marketing and growth hack, which you then reap after some level of popularity/network effect is reached. Some call it bait and switch.
Blaming big corps for "leeching" is just self-serving. They are doing exactly what the license allows them to do - a license for which was chosen at the start to allow for it! If you expected to be paid to make this software, don't opensource it.
Eh no. What an overly broad generalization to read. Whether it is enough to make a living is another question, but that does not mean one must paint all of the communities the same color.
You seem to believe that all open source projects are in this category. That is not the case. You also seem to believe that there is always one company doing the most work and everyone else is just leeching off. That is also not the case.
They bought an open source project, and now that the original founder has stepped away they're trying to squeeze it for all they can.
The "big corps" that you claim are using it to "pirate software in a legal way" (a) have been contributing to the formerly open source redis project, and (b) are now specifically forking it to keep maintaining it as open source.
Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
By using BSD license Antirez has freely given it to the whole world, not the name Redis but the code. No matter how big the corporations, the cloud providers are just using that code the way Antirez intended when he used the BSD license. You can't blame the cloud providers for that.
> Supermarket bills cannot be paid with pull requests.
But one can become famous by writing quality open source software and this fame can be used to get very high paying jobs.
Nor with increasingly unnecessary and niche features aimed at "enterprise" customers, it seems.
One could probably even argue that buying the rights to the name of a popular permissively licensed project is a terrible way to pay said bills.
How is it terrible?
The community has been doing the heavy lifting over the years and Redis Inc has been trying to reap the benefits off of that by providing the software as a service. Which the community was fine with. Turns out other companies with deeper pockets for infrastructure can do the same. Now Redis Inc is trying to save their broken by design business model by changing the license. This casts a whole lot of doubt on the future utility and licensing of the Redis project. And this is what the community balks at.
I, for one, will take the risk, reap the benefits and move on when factors are no longer conducive to my goals.
It's "buy the naming rights to an already popular piece of open source software and try to make a quick buck"
I'm sure that (FL)OSS core/demo versions is not the ONLY sustainable way to make a living. There is no need for hyperboles.
You don't even need to author software to sustainably make a living. Don't limit yourself.
I think it is valid to find this immoral. The solution is pretty simple though: do not contribute to open source projects that require you to sign a CLA.
Developers should be aware of that and, personally, I think contributors should never accept to sign a CLA. If the project requires a CLA, don't contribute.
What is considered immoral is to take the copyright from the contributors without giving any compensation.
I don’t typically ask people to RTFA because that’s against the rules, but you would have known all of the above if you bothered to read the article.
It’s like complaining that there are too many implementations on GitHub of the same thing.
You're spot on. People are bellyaching that the world doesn't operate according to their arbitrary rules.
Perhaps I'd be happier in a geocentric universe, but it doesn't make a non-geocentric universe bad per se.
People who use open source are very entitled. They'd be very angry also if the license was changed to GPL or AGPL.
I doubt most of this people have meaningful contributions to FOSS.
The company now known as Redis did not invent Redis, it started as a company trying to make money hosting other peoples' work. After it finally hired the creator of Redis, it specifically promised not to do what it has just done (move away from three-clause BSD as the license for Redis core) at least twice.
In the development cycle from 7.0.0 until a few days ago, Redis isn't even the majority contributor to the codebase. The largest single contributor is from Tencent. (All of this is in the article.)
If Redis had been doing all the development, had not promised it wouldn't move away from the license, then I might agree that people have little to complain about.
But this situation isn't as you've suggested here where a community is all about "take, take, take" from a company that's been doing all the work. The company was founded on the idea of trying to do what it now complains about Amazon doing, and their claims that cloud companies do not contribute is clearly false -- just look at the code contributions.
This is actually the good news as it makes it all but certain there will be well maintained Open Source Redis alternative.
https://cyberscoop.com/pwn2own-chinese-researchers-360-techn...
Redict is a pointless endeavor. Just stick with Redis 7.2 before the licensing change. Maybe change the binary name if it makes folks feel better.
Redis Labs is not the only contributors to the project, Tencent and AWS contribute as well.
For Redis Labs the open source license was a distribution channel which they benefited tremendously.
I'm not an AWS fanboy but they operate some hosted solution significantly better than the companies building the products, at least the core offerings, this is what happened with Elastic and MonogDB.
It is Redis Labs prerogative to change the license, but they can also build a product around Redis that will drive customers to them instead of AWS, an offering that will be hard to replicate.
IMHO making a business that is "reselling" server capacity that was bought from AWS and trying to make a profit, can come back and bite you.
Nothing wrong with charging for support.
I love passion projects as much as anyone, but there is a reason they are hobbies, and people need to keep a day job. Eventually it does get tiring to do support for free.
Edit:
Ok. I was talking OSS generally. I guess Redis is being bad actor if they are taking OSS work and running away with it to get the money, and not compensating the contributors. That is very wrong. I don't know history on Redis and assumed it was the contributors that founded the company.
It's a company surprising everyone by pocketing the money from other people's hard, unpaid work.
I'm not sure how nefarious this Redis move was. I guess I was assuming any move from 'free', to 'paid', will be met with some outcry regardless of how seamless they can pull it off.
Or in other words, it is always a messy transition?Big deployments generally need really good support and help to overcome scaling challenges. Who better than the library maintainers to offer that, and your customers have deep pockets.
Then on top of that, you run a business which basically creates proprietary Pro and Enterprise versions of a product which has tooling to operate the project at scale or in high uptime environments.
Then you offer your own cloud versions of the product as well (which I think Redis has been doing).
But in none of these cases are you creating a disincentive for anybody to use/adopt your product. You're simply creating value around the pain points.
Incidentally the most effectively way to stall a project according to the CIA is to have a huge guiding committee with clearly diverging interests.
Redis will win because it's focused on its users. It's competitors will lose. Like OpenSearch, like OpenCL etc.
It's no wonder our "freedoms" in the software world have slowly but steadily been shifting to look exactly like our "freedoms" in the physical world: artificial scarcity apportioned by the few using their leverage over systems which put you in a steel cage if you don't play along.
And here we are, arguing with each other using the terms of those who seek to enslave us to their control. The fact that these billion and trillion dollar tech companies even exist is a testament to our failure.
Maybe some kind of new license is in order. Open source, but preventing cloud redistribution. I don't know, I can imagine the issues with that as well. You want AWS out, but you probably still want the small up-and-coming CI/CD tool in.
The software is all there. Some dickheads forked a proprietary version. They got the name, which will be their consolation prize in their voyage to irrelevance; nice knowing you.
Meanwhile, what everyone uses marches on.
But Redis was BSD or BSD-like, no? Proprietary forks can happen with or without CLA, so it is moot.
I would say rather the opposite. If a developer contributes to a BSD (or similar) licensed program (under that same license of course), then at that point they are letting anyone anywhere do whatever they want with the code, as long as copyright notices are preserved. Then, if someone forks a proprietary version of the program (in a way that complies with that developer's license for those files) and that developer gets upset and tries to revoke the copyright license, that developer is the bad actor, not the forkster.
In the context of BSD-like permissive licenses, requirments for CLA, I think, would only be a form of legal safeguard against such situations, where people change their mind.
Yes you're right, I thought it was a copyleft license.
But now it is source-available with a CLA. Which in my opinion is a good reason to fork. I would definitely not contribute for free to such a project.
The article mentions half a dozen such forks. So not insane, maybe just a bit lazy ;).
The problem with these companies is that they actually were trying to make large returns for shareholders rather than simply earn enough to keep paying the developers.
Support is usually for big corporate clients, and the Cover Your Ass principle works in full force there.
"No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".
I mean, I get it, everyone wants to become billionaire, but best to be honest about it up front.
Afaik the non-discriminatory use is the only ideological hard line. I guess people can debate that forever, like with GPL and copyleft and such. But my edgy take is that most people don’t really care about deep ideology yet want something that promotes a healthy hacker- and small-business friendly open source ecosystem. Ideally, a simple, well-understood license that restricts “re-selling your product” and not much more, that you can slap on a project without a legal team, just like with the MIT license.
If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.
Would it be "viral" in the sense that, if I want to publish software that internally uses a Docker container running software with such a license, my own software can be used only by natural persons?
Not because you are distributing it, but because only natural persons can run the software.
At this point listening to them is at best pointless and at worst actively harmful. This is what happens when the last time you worked at a real job was some time in the 1980s.
It's not a hard concept to understand, but it does mean people can't steal from the commons so they spend a lot of time trying to not understand it.
I contribute with no expectation of monitory gain and absolutely zero desire for some random foundation or company that's part or almost always created later to make any money. If some contributors want to make money become consultants the "amazon problem" isn't a real one.
I love when Amazon or Google or whoever starts working with a project I'm touching it means it will normally get high quality contributions.
Now, Redis was AFAIK pretty much just written by antirez and maybe it could have stayed that way, but even exceptional individuals clearly want to move on eventually and you'll likely need a team of maintainers. Distributed data products are complex and need people who contribute more than nights and weekends.
The "cuts into their revenues" part usually mostly affects their ability to keep developing the non open source parts anyway, their SaaS dashboard, their billing, etc.
Take redis, you could never change it again and it's fine. There's no need to support anyone, it's complete software that stands on its own.
That's not what AWS is doing. AWS is selling management services. The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.
If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services.
Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there.
As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.
We have several in use by long-running open source database projects that have not felt a need to jump on proprietary source-available licensing, even though firms like AWS are indeed using their code and selling services.
AWS (and other big firms with hosted services) are also sponsoring those DBs with code and/or money, but in many cases the basic model predates the big push to the cloud, and other downstream businesses were doing that before AWS and other cloud hosts.
Open source DBs have been around a while, though. A minority of them trying to pay the bills with monopoly rents on hosted services is… much newer. Its how VC-backed DB-as-central-tech startups try to monetize, and, yeah, if you are going to do that, you need a proprietary license.
But don’t expect people to treat your DB like an open source DB, then, either. You can be Oracle instead of Postgres, but you can’t also expect to get treated like Postgres, instead of Oracle.
Well yeah technically the product is free but the value comes largely from unpaid labor. That needs to change if we want a healthy small business sector around larger open source products. It’s not based in opinion or ideological conviction on my end, but rather watching this frictionous and awkward transformation to BSL-style licenses happen over and over with small-mid-size companies who are building valuable products and want to be as open as possible while running a business.
> The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.
Indeed, and that’s a good thing, because it means a path to a sustainable business model is feasible! However, if you subsidize the product (make it free and open) in order to make it back in management fees, then you need legal rights to it. It could be “you have to use $PROJECTs own management product” but that’s quite narrow thinking. It’s a win-win for everyone else if mega-players like aws can provide their own management but they will have to rev-share with the project owner, on their terms. That’s a battle-tested model that works in all kinds of sectors, with much smaller actors.
It’s early. Everyone is confused. If I could define it, I would have provided a defintion.
At this stage, it’s about acquiring requirements and looking at prior art. And being humble about the solution space. No? If you don’t think there’s any problem today, then argue that point.
> By definition you cannot have an open source licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht".
By definition by what definition? There are already disagreements about what open source is, long before these business models. The problem solving comes first, and then there may or not be a debate whether about whether the solution fits better into an existing definition or a new one.
> Either you accept that […] or you don't open source your code
But why? Is this an intrinsic duality or an anccidental/historical one? Or is it about preventing scope creep of the open source term? The latter is easy to solve - don’t call it open source. Or at least defer the debate.
By the "Open Source Definition":
No, it is not, it is decades in, in a well-understood area. Some VC-backed firms (and the VC’s backing them, who see this as critical beyond the immediate firms) want to trade on the idea and popularity of open source without its substance because open source as has has been known for decades is not a viable foundation for the kind of business model that they would like, but has at the same time secured the kind of mindshare in the market that makes it difficult for proprietary software to achieve the kind of rapid ramp-up that provides the timing and combination of returns they want. So they’ve decided to spend a lot of effort making everyone feel confused at some ginned up new threat to open-source, which is not a threat to open source, not something that open source community hasn’t known about for decades, but just a problem for a bait-and-switch business model in which software gains traction trading on the cachet of open source and then rakes in monopoly rents that avoiding is one of the benefits to users of open source licensing.
They want users to see them like Postgres, but they want to milk users like Oracle. That’s the problem – a marketing problem for proprietary software vendors. The attempt to sell confusion is an attempt to conceal that that is all the problem is.
As always, Chesterton's fence applies: all of the 10 points of the OSD were widely debated at the time (as was its predecessor, the Debian Free Software Guidelines), so it's worth explaining why the issues raised then no longer apply.
FOSS acceptance is a grey area. Something has been tried with the AGPL, which is FOSS, however, it has been deemed not to provide adequate protection by companies creating similar products (while, ironically, being considered poisonous by companies using them), so the SSPL was created, but it hasn't been accepted as FOSS license because its intent was unclearly defined (http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...).
The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams.
If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT and be done with it.
If you're participating in a large decentralized project like Postgres, then having a big player like Amazon providing managed hosting is actually a huge plus because you get lots of contributions from the big players [0]. There's very little downside for a project like this, and lots of upside.
The only type of FOSS project that needs an "AWS can't use this" license is a project that is driven by a single for-profit company which decided to make their business model "provide a managed solution layered on top of AWS". Unsurprisingly, it's hard to compete with AWS on price when you're using AWS itself as your vendor, so these companies tend to be the ones that switch licenses to tell AWS they're not allowed to compete.
These companies almost certainly have their own legal counsel and they represent a tiny minority of FOSS projects, so it's not obvious to me that we need a new standardized anti-AWS license. Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time.
You're right that it's probably not a great business model most of the time, but what is a good business model to collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating years of your life to something loved by millions of people? It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service with ads, or something.
Yes, monetizing with a proprietary license, whether source available or not, doesn't seem unethical to most people outside of Free Software ideologues.
“The licensing model isn't unethical but competing ones are” isn’t why open source licenses became popular over proprietary (including source available) licenses, the fact that they commoditized the underlying software, enabled competing orojects evolved from the same codebase on essentially equal terms (which also allowed a competing project to fully replace the original if the original at some point failed the community) and, as hosted offerings became more common, the zero licensing friction for hosted solutions, that's what did it.
It does mean charging monopoly rents for a hosted service isn't a viable way to recover development costs and pay returns to VCs, but until fairly recently, no one was trying to do VC-backed startups around single open-source products with that as their whole business plan, and the arguments as to why that would be a bad idea were well developed by the mid-1990s
Redis Labs can start by compensating its external contributors (Tencent, Amazon, Alibaba among them) if they care about fairness this much.
That being said. Monetizing open source is fine so long as people are up front about from the beginning. People are upset because switching the license is effectively changing the rules in the middle of the game.
It is like going out to a restaurant and in the middle of your meal they change policy from having free refills to charging per cup. Either policy is fine, but changing policies is a scumbag move. A lot of people would have never sat down to eat there if the extra drinks weren't going to be free. Especially if free drinks was the sole reason a lot of them were going there.
Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller managed hosting providers and consultancies.
That is a sustainable funding model for an open source database project. What isn't sustainable is building a business around the idea that only your company will ever profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are shared with the whole community.
So you want to advocate that every future database / infrastructure company needs to burn part of their runway to hire lawyers to do the repetitive work of making sure they can both try to be open and try to continue to exist? Plus we, the users, get to try to decode reams of legalese instead of using a convenient three-letter handle for an industry standard, like GPL or MIT? This does not seem ideal..
> Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time.
The business model these companies chose was fundamentally broken. It's only fundamentally broken for a specific class of backend tooling.
I believe that future database/infrastructure projects should continue to use the FOSS licenses we all know and love and find a sustainability model that works without compromising the freedoms that make free software free. Postgres, Linux, SQLite, the BSDs, and many other projects in similar spaces have led the way.
In fact, the concept of the four freedoms as necessary parts of a more fundamental freedom is one of the things that I value the most about the free software/open source world.
In hindsight, I think that the probability that things turned out the way they did in this regard was relatively low, but the ideological drive of GNU and RMS made the world see the problem from a philosophical perspective rather than a practical one (even among people that don't fully agree with RMS/GNU/FSF).
“Source available” is a subcategory of proprietary, not “better than proprietary”.
> But my edgy take is that most people don’t really care about deep ideology
I think most people that orefer open source to proprietary software either care about the business benefits open-source provides over proprietary (including source-available) software or have an ideological affinity for Free Software, occasionally both.
If they approved SSPL they'd probably have to lay off a staff member or two.
Unity was like that before they screwed it up, I have heard of other systems as well but not sure since it's not my cup of tea.
The "major platform hijacks our code for the web" is a valid concern, but the FOSS people have always kinda gone "well fuck you for having these concerns". That's... I guess fine enough when the majority of FOSS wasn't part of a SaaS stack, but now that the majority of big name libraries and tools are, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the OSD is just too lacking for those concerns.
To be clear, this isn't a defense of SSPL or similar anti-Bezos licenses (the best one I've seen is the BSL, which transforms into a traditional OSS license after X years if you want my opinion), moreso an observation that there's a clear need here that can't be met by OSD. Paying developers on top of the FOSS model is hard; doing support favors entrenched suppliers because of the CYA problem (this is why AWS has the advantage they do) and I'm pretty sure that even if you do the support model, it usually just doesn't pan out.
The main reason 90% of these licenses suck is far moreso because lawyers will draft contracts and licenses in such a way for you that they'll always give you the advantage. The SSPL being borderline impossible to comply with is by design for example.
But I feel no such sympathy for Redis nee Labs. It was never their project. They took over stewardship and then effectively stole the project for themselves. They’re not even the dominant contributor to the core product.
Being a customer of the redis labs' hosted solution, we noticed several issues:
- RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's
- RLs solution is not even close to elasticache in its ability to scale
- when issues occur the organization internally moves incredibly slowly so simple issues can turn into prolonged outages
Moving to this licensing model will make it possible for them to better invest in these things. That said, given the quality of their offering and lack of investment in the actual redis platform, why would anyone continue to use redis after the license change? The cloud providers can fork off their own version and never look back!
I think they're shooting themselves in the foot here.
Its not cost effective if the service causes extended outages as you mentioned later.
So I view it as every major cloud provider with redis offering has its own fork. Except that Redis Labs also owns the original name. But it can go on as a stand alone project, like MariDB was spawn off after MySQL acquisition by Oracle.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657
[2] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors?from=2019...
> Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it.
Seems like a good alternative to a single company's spinoff: Many major providers working on this same project should result in everyone benefiting from it.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...
Open source services are in a weird spot. They spend tonnes of money developing it and big providers are able to cannibalise as soon as something becomes popular at very little cost to themselves.
I think we do need something between fully free and fully closed where cloud providers pay some kind of licensing. It’s a problem worth solving.
I say alot because its not like they can't still make money. They can still consult, they can still offer support or hosting but because theyre not making millions they want a "new" license.
Its stupid. you solve the itch then your done unless your doing maintance. people making open source software like paid software, constantly adding new features and changing things to justify their existance. You dont need millions in devs if your just solving a core problem.
A grand unified theory of software goods funding, if you will.
However, just like fewer homes would be owned if you didn't have mortgages, less software companies would exist without VC. It's basically a subsidy from the rich, endowments and pensions, to the rest of us (consumers because we get stuff for free, developers because it increases the demand and thus salaries for us).
I think VC is a net benefit to the world in terms of software delivered and companies built. I think OSS is a net benefit to the world because of the explosion of possible ideas and the leverage it lets developers have as they build on it.
I would love to see these two huge innovations in building software work together well. Haven't seen it yet, hence my original comment.
The historically 'good' open source companies like Sun got bought but the ones that weren't like Oracle. The selling support model alone does not seem evolutionarily fit for the market.
Now we have these VC-backed 'open source' companies that have a playbook wherein they appear open source at first. But when you dig deeper, you find that the heart of the thing is a closed binary.
The investors are going to want to be paid back somehow. And the business model of VC means that one of two things happens:
1. The company finds a way to 100x the return. Which, if you're a customer, might be a scary prospect.
2. The company makes an amount somewhat lower and, while it would be a good business for a non-VC company, they're considered a zombie by their investors. So, they are killed leaving you as a customer in a bad position.
I therefore trust non-VC backed companies substantially more to keep alignment with their customers long-term.
A workable model could be for instead companies that have legally-enforceable promise not to enshitify their closed sourced product. So that the product will always be aligned with the paying customer. The customer cannot be made the product at a future date.
I think it's pointless to even compare it to the Redis company; just about everything is different.
0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
> If the licensor advertises license terms and a pricing structure for generally available commercial licenses, the licensor proposes license terms and a price as advertised, and a customer not affiliated with the licensor has bought a commercial license for the software on substantially equivalent terms in the past year, the proposal is fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory.
If you haven't read Hal Varian's Information Rules, I highly recommend it. Check the publication date, then read it anyway, then reflect on the publication date when you're done. I found it very worthwhile.
I find it amazing how much money is being spent to ensure open source code doesn't end up in the hands of users and how many people are blaming the ones trying to increase user freedom.
Projects could still be funded by community users, but "venture funding"? That's how projects turn to shit.
Developers need a salary to pay the bills. Let's say that covers the first 40 hours of the week.
Those who are searching for significance outside their day job offer free labor as their "hobby". Maybe 10 hours a week?
For projects that want to move forward with some velocity it makes sense to make some of that development into paid day-jobs.
As projects get very large, there's a fair amount of overhead in just "keeping up". That erodes the 10 hours quickly. Further reducing the time to contribute.
So where is all this cash to pay employees coming from? Certainly not end users (as anyone who's tried funding an OSS project from users knows.) No, it comes from commercial companies (MS, Amazon et al) or venture capital.
This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux economy system only exist at the level they do -because- of big tech.
Of course, I painting with a broad brush, and there are exceptions, but the point remains. It's turtles all the way down, and those turtles are not funded by users.
>This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux economy system only exist at the level they do -because- of big tech
Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and not enthusiast and user focused.
Even ourselves, as devs, evaluate FOSS as to whether it's "useful" for our corporate/startup needs. This wasn't exactly the case, or at least not the main case for a FOSS project.
Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a desktop shell for corporate installs...
Except they kinda did. The foundations of FSF are born by academics working at institutions, getting paid salaries. The were devoting time certainly, and certainly in the case of RMS with passion and cause, but that work was definitely funded - usually by the university.
>> Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and not enthusiast and user focused.
I think we can drop the term "enthusiast". It implies tiny niche group with little practical value. I'm thinking of classic car "enthusiasts" who spend all their time under the car, and precious little driving it.
So let's talk about users. Users want full-featured reliable software. I would suggest all software, if successful, is user focused. (To he honest, I'm not sure what you have in mind with "corporate focused".) Firefox, to pick one project at random will seemingly live or die based on the individual user experience.
Equally take databases - there are s plethora of options to suit every use case. Need big powerful fast enterprise scale - Postgres is for you. Need small footprint with easy install - try Firebird. And a gazillion others. Surely such quality is a good thing?
>> Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a desktop shell for corporate installs...
Um. Sure it was. It was designed to offer a gui desktop on top of Linux. Who did they think would use it if not Linux distributions? Given that for decades "the year of Linux on the desktop" was a meme, I'm not sure it's fair to claim that distributions using Gnome to create desktops for business users was a surprise.
It's a very pure example where parties in competition each that have a use for some kind of software can shortsightedly develop their own versions of it in-house, but that duplicates a lot of effort. They'd be better off getting together with their competitors and collaborating on a shared version that suits their needs, avoiding duplicating effort and all benefiting from each others' contributions. They could do this by direct collaboration or by funding an independent organization that fulfills their needs.
Sure, this can go badly if there's a large difference in scale between the different parties and some can muscle others around. But it and similar models do work out at the scale of the Linux Foundation, Khronos, down to Mastodon, GitLab, Blender, Krita, Forgejo, even arguanly projects like Bitcoin Core.
There isn't the structures to facilitate this kind of regime shift. But there should be.
As part of that world, I also want livable wages and work-life balance for developers, so they can work on their passion FOSS off-call. And for students and programming enthusiasts to be more passionate about FOSS. Like in the 90s before the corporates took over FOSS.
If some FOSS still wouldn't exist then, I'm fine with that.
Do you need a faster compiler, or a better OS, or some cluster operator just to get your widget factory working? Don't build those in house, instead find others with the same problems and create an open source project together to work on them.
But don't try to sell open source software. It's essentially impossible to do that, it has been tried time and time again and success is rare, and huge success is basically unheard of (RedHat being probably the one single exception).
Sure, it is the commoditize your complement strategy [0]. But that doesn't help get complex open source products to market, it only helps with tooling.
Maybe you are right and there's no way to directly pair the freedoms of OSS with the capitalism of VC backed startup.
0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
A Microsoft Research, open source, performant, almost RESP compatible alternative (according to them)
https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
And not to forget Redict, also a fork, that is maintained by drew devault
Where this is coming from is having worked on a project where Redis was being used as a database and a cache, on different ports. And of course most of the dev team hadn't read the the manual because Redis "is simple and just works". And of course someone forgot to actually configure the Redis instance that was supposed to be a cache to actually _be_ a cache. And someone else thought the instance that was supposed to be a cache but wasn't was actually a database. And yet another had used TTL caching to solve all their performance issues. And pretty soon mystery bugs start showing up but sadly no one can actually REASON about what the whole thing is doing any more, but there's no time to actually clean up the mess because it's a startup struggling to stay afloat.
And I remember asking "why didn't you memcached for caching?" and the response was "Dude! No one is using memcached any more". So the technical decision for Redis was based on "what's cool right now".
Anyway... I feel a bigger rant brewing so I'll stop here.
But I think you described right the social behaviors of certain/common types of users.
https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB
[EDIT] whoops, didn't read the article, went immediately to comments for recommendations since that's what HN is good at IMO.
Also, just look at the amount of open bugs and their age [1]
They also recommend using swap for some reason, however if your memory usage reaches the point where swap is being used the performance is so bad that the machine may as well be dead.
It's been nothing but trouble, which is a shame because the changes they've done to redis have crossed my mind too. We'll probably move to Scylla.
It even suggests cloud providers did contribute, and uses bad data (git commits “by employer” w/o dataset) that basically contradicts their argument.
I may be biased, as I saw Amazon doing exactly what this article claims “maybe they weren’t”. But statements like this seem intentionally misleading, and easily disproven:
“Distributing a source-available version of MongoDB could be seen as a loss-leader strategy to reach developers that the company wagered did not care about open-source.”
MongoDB is still “source-available”, and on the same GitHub repo I’ve used since 2010. The SSPL only impacts cloud-providers, and has exceptions for cloud providers who release their source code.
The OSI doesn’t get to define open-source. Neither do I, but at least I was part of the community for ~20 years…
The OSI doesn’t get to define open-source.
The SSPL only impacts cloud-providers
From you people who know a lot about Redis, help me out here: For my Web site code (for my startup), I needed a key-value store. Soooo, it looks like I could use Redis for that.
But instead, wrote a little code using two instances of a Microsoft .NET collection class. Simple code. Plenty fast. Welcome programming exercise using .NET classes. Cheap -- no ongoing charges and no chance of charges in the future. And, no concerns about what might happen from politics, business, some remote service, etc.
Question: What am I missing by using my little DIY (do it yourself, roll your own) solution and avoiding Redis, work of other people, or a service from Amazon Web Services, etc.????
No, no, not at all: I admit, accept that no doubt Redis has a lot more functionality than the few pages of code I wrote.
My question was: My code looks like it will do what I need done, but maybe I'm missing something, i.e., maybe Redis has some features that very likely I should have?
If want to expand the question to other people, what is the chance that usually Redis is overkill, more functionality, code, complexity, considerations, ..., than needed? I don't know so am asking.
Or, I had a 2 wheel drive car, but did I miss a lot not having a 4 wheel drive car that I nearly always used in only two wheel drive?
You may need data persistence (keep the data live while you restart your process), cross-instance coherencies could be nice too, automatic data expiration too.
But if you do not, then it is ok!
My code that needs a key-value store is simple, short, just uses two instances of a .NET collection class.
I need NAT (network address translation) to keep affinity of each user with their one execution instance of my code, but I suspect that is automatic with Microsoft's IIS (Iinternet Information Server) that the code uses.
For persistence, the code needs that only long enough for each user connection. And for performance, I don't need sharding across several servers acting like a cluster -- maybe that is some of what Redis supports.
It appears that .NET has more functionality and performance potential (user connections per minute) than my project needs, so I'm trying not to try to master everything Google, Facebook, Amazon, a big bank, Walmart, etc. might need! So far, I'm pleased with .NET.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/collection...
It's thread safe so that if my startup is more successful than I'm assuming then I'll be free to do less on how to exploit parallelism from several servers. As it is, the code I wrote serialized access to the key-value store I wrote. Sooo, that could be a performance bottleneck.
I should review network address translation (NAT) and affinity of one user to some one server, instance of Microsoft's IIS (Internet information server), thread of execution, etc.
This will save you a lot of headache and get the best experience.
I'm the self-funded, sole/solo founder. So, I pay attention to the business, e.g., getting and pleasing the users, and also the computing. If successful, then getting paid for running ads, accounting, taxes, lawyers, floor space, employees, etc.
So, for now, concentrating on pleasing the users. Part of that is some original applied math. Users won't be aware of any math, but the math should be secret sauce and an unfair advantage. So, am also concentrating on applying the math.
For the software, trying to keep that simple.
Had a disaster, but before that had the Web site running: Mid tower case ($40 with a $20 rebate), $65 motherboard, 8 core AMD processor with a 4.0 GHz standard clock ($100 at Amazon), Windows 7 Professional, some 4.x version of .NET, IIS, ASP.NET, ADO.NET. As I understand it, .NET CORE came later and is more restrictive.
My project is only for a Web site; users will get to the site only via the Internet and a standard Web browser. E.g., I'm making no use of anything mobile. So, the project has no mobile app.
Am highly motivated (1) to stay with just Windows, soon Windows Server, and (2) to keep down, to zero, the investment of time to program on Linux, IoS, Android, etc. -- hope never to write any code for any of them. That is, I can get paid only from revenue from the business; while I have to write the code, and it's fun to do, that's all a business expense; I can't get paid for writing code. I'm assuming that Microsoft and Windows have a foundation plenty sufficient for my business objectives.
I have yet to move to a later version of .NET: Okay, I should, but, still, not looking forward to the effort. To me, the 4.x version of .NET I used looked fine. For another outrage, I wrote in the .NET version of VB (Visual Basic) and wrote no C, C++, or C#. I really like VB.NET, regard it as a nicely designed, implemented, documented language with plenty of features for what I need.
For what I wrote, the UI (user interface) is simple and traditional -- billions of people will understand it at zero effort, immediately. There is a huge range, world, universe of Web page design features I didn't use.
The timings I did show that the site is astoundingly fast, fast enough that if can keep the computing on average 50% busy 24/7, then standard ad rates will generate some gratifying revenue.
An 8 core processor with a 4.0 GHz clock is no toy, is a lot of computing.
Recently heard about Amazon and their AWS (Amazon Web Services) wanting the TLS (Transport Layer Security) version 1.2. Soooo, I checked, saw that I was using version 1.1, that 1.2 was available, so picked 1.2.
What I'm doing now is dirt simple: Have 1000+ Web pages of Windows and .NET documentation, so wrote just ~300 lines of Rexx code to extract the page titles from the HTML tags
<title> ... </title>
and make a TOC (table of contents) I can read into my favorite editor KEDIT and search -- then one keystroke to KEDIT will have Firefox display the Web page.
Want to do some more system management, get the site running again, do some revisions, do some marketing, and go live.
In short, my CEO-business hat has me think, for the foundation of .NET, it's good on features, is now old and likely quite reliable for the old features I will use, and seems plenty fast -- soooo, I know, I should be ashamed, that's good enough!
I know of no such, and you gave no examples.
> It seems you have not been even tangentially keeping track of any developments after... 2015.
You are attacking me personally or the content of my writing?
For your date 2015: A key to my Web site is some math, and it is original with me, from my research, and, thus, fully up to date! Uh, I'm able to do such math partly because I hold a Ph.D. in applied math from a world famous university; for more, I've published peer-reviewed papers in applied math, saved FedEx with some applied math for the BoD, taught applied math in some famous universities, both graduate and undergraduate, and, oh yes, published peer reviewed original research in artificial intelligence. Also taught computer science at Georgetown University.
There was a LOT going on in the Internet and the Web, HTML, SQL, etc. long before your 2015: Gee, there was a nice introduction to developing Web sites in
Jim Buyens, 'Web Database Development, Step by Step: .NET Edition', ISBN 0-7356-1637-X, Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 2002.
Yup, that's 2002, long before your 2015!
That book is an example of excellent technical writing. There are 15 chapters with nice introductions to each of VB.NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, database and SQL, one chapter for each, plus more -- all from 2002!
The book does not emphasize how to use JavaScript to make Web pages that jump around for no good reason, make users angry and leave, and hurt the ad revenue.
Net, in simple terms, what is new and important about my work is my original math; nearly all the rest of the tools used and features implemented goes back to the last century.
For some irony, and also a good lesson, consider Hacker News and its functionality and user interface, both that go back largely or entirely to the last century.
Uh, for "developments" since your 2015, for the back end, that has my original math which is fully up to date, and for the front end, i.e., the user interface, in general, in simple terms, for my Web pages, each new technique would be something more users don't understand and that, thus, might hurt the success of the site.
Let's see, since your 2015:
Pizza is really OLD, and Pizza Hut is worth $38 billion.
Hamburgers are really OLD, and McDonald's is worth $193 billion. Burger King, $34 billion.
My 1986 Chevy S-10 Blazer had good electronic fuel injection, no other digital electronics, and standard sealed beam headlights which for me made it as up to date as I want -- for anything since then, for me it's useless or annoying, more to buy, and more to maintain so I don't want it.