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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

I believe that Redis has an agreement of sorts with Salvatore Sanfilippo / Antirez, the creator of Redis.

Amazon / Google / Microsoft made a massive mistake by not hiring Antirez, it's chump change for them to throw him $1-2M a year at him so he can work on Redis for them full time.

Has anyone asked Filippo if he still wants to work on Redis "for them" though? The fact that he stepped down suggests he doesn't.

He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.

Again, it's chump change, these companies drop that kinda money all the time in aquihires..

> He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.

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.

He worked there for 5 years. It probably didn't feel "random" for him.

Same with many open source creators.

Plus some great projects don’t even get (monetary) contributions from large corporations. I think because it could weaken their legal position.

This makes me think - is it actually bad for Amazon/Google/Microsoft, that they now have to pay a licensing fee to Redis?

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.

they don't have to pay. they offer a Redis-compatible service. whatever it is, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares. (sure, in practice they just forked it. but it was not AGPL-like when the fork happened, so ... c'est la vie)

Microsoft announced on the same day as the Redis license change that Azure's managed Redis offering will continue to run against the latest releases: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-...

Meaning that Microsoft is "paying to play" with Redis Ltd... while I have not seen any announcements from AWS or GCP.

I do wonder if Microsoft kicked this all off by telling Redis Ltd that they were willing to pay beforehand.

Yes, this seems likely since there is almost no way that an announcement from Microsoft would happen so quickly. There were months of back and forth of licensing meetings prior to this with Redis Labs and Microsoft.

Microsoft would never just announce something like this on a whim.

Microsoft has its own redis alternative: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

I mean I love redis, but Amazon Google and Microsoft all probably have readily available in memory key/value stores at hand. Throw a little money and they can make it redis compatible, so we wouldn't have to re-write any code.

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.

It's all about branding and name recognition: they all profit from Redis via their cloud offerings. They have a strong incentive to support it and to have it as a viable open source project. Similar to other key opensource infrastructure.

Then their cloud-specific solutions are the up-sell (and lock-in).

Not just that - there's a significant ecosystem around Redis. A huge number of client libraries and tools.

Which is why Microsoft's new drop-in replacement works with all those things. It could gain traction - who knows.

> It's all about branding and name recognition

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.

AWS has been pushing MemoryDB, which is redis compatible storage, works with the redis clis and supports Redis features.

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.

Already done. We are talking about a key/value store here. I don't get what all the histrionics is about.

They have engineering resources to maintain a fork, which they've made. https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey

Good products == low valuations it would have stunned the investors if they focused of quality instead of marketing.

This. Why not support the projects a company uses in ways that go beyond the traditional ways of hiring employees in the form of physical bodies that defy traffic jams to spend large parts of their day in a physical building? There are some larger companies that employ open-source or third-party developers of course, but it seems to me that if your product is built around a technology or framework, it would make sense to invest directly in that project – share a developer resource as it were – instead of hiring an extra person in-company and make sure your use case and reliance is covered in the future.

Both the internet and open-source enable alternative employment and funding models that up until now might have not have been sufficiently explored.

This is actually pretty common. My company did exactly that with an Apache project founder. I know of several others. They still work on their own project, but have to shift priorities.

Sounds like that's basically what happened here, too, except not with Google. I'm not sure why.

VMware (Pivotal, if I remember correctly, which was part of VMware) hired him for a while, about a decade ago. They did a huge mistake as well, because they didn't take advantage of him at all.

*one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn’t mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis.

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.

> 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.

Yep. Precisely. Licenses are working as expected. People that spin this as “stealing” are simply showing their own lack of understanding.

I think everybody here understand that you legally can fork bsd code under a new license. I think you and them differ in what you think is morally correct to do for an open source maintainer in the specific context of the redis project.

(I don’t know enough to be in either camp.)

When I chose BSD for Redis, I did it exactly for these reasons. Before Redis, I mostly used the GPL license. Then my beliefs about licensing changed, so I picked the BSD, since it's an "open field" license, everything can happen. One of the things I absolutely wanted, when I started Redis, was: to avoid that I needed some piece of paper from every contributor to give me the copyright and, at the same time, the ability, if needed, to take my fork for my products, create a commercial Redis PRO, or alike. At the same time the BSD allows for many branches to compete, with different licensing and development ideas.

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.

I totally agree. Still I hope that many great projects under BSD and MIT will keep being actively developed under that very license, but I also enjoy the freedom of knowing that I can do more or less what I please with the code.

> *one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn’t mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis.

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.

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