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.
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.
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.
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.
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.