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Comment by treprinum | Hacker News Reader

Why would any startup ever get idealistic again and release their product under open license when big boys can just fork it and destroy their business? I think the dual AGPL/commerical licensing will be the choice of anyone with still some idealism left.

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There's nothing idealistic involved. Startups want users more than they want revenue. Thus they open source it, use VC money to cover the loses and then eventually try to squeeze those users for money.

Redis Labs also did not in any way make Redis. They came in later to exploit the already open source project for their own benefit.

Ok, I was mistaken then. I thought Redis Labs folks created Redis initially.

No, they didn't, although they misleadingly claimed to be the "Home of Redis" for a number of years. Then they hired Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), the author of Redis, and eventually purchased the copyright from him. Very sleazy outfit that fully deserves all the scorn poured on them.

If one sells a copyright to another, how can that be considered sleazy ? Someone made the sell - to make money I presume - and another bought it, to perhaps make more money ? Seems not that out of reach ?

I don't understand the bitterness around this debate, it seems most people are frustated that they have to pay for something that was free, but at the same time, they probably made money from what was free.

I totally understand, with todays mess of maintainers not getting paid in full, that at some point, someone wants money for their work. Be it a person, a company or you doesn't matter. But right has to be right.

I think we will see a lot of this the next 10 years, simply because we cannot afford maintainers not detecting backdoors in a code-review from some bad actor.

To clarify, they did not purchase the copyright -- they purchased the trademark, and are using it to attempt to capture the practical value of the copyright. The copyright is by far the more valuable of the two, but they do not actually own it. Of the actual valuable object (the copyright, i.e. the codebase), about 80% was written by people outside of the employ of Redis Labs né Redis Ltd.

Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific (see the comments on http://antirez.com/news/121 )

In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences?

>Are you sure? I'd asked antirez to clarify 6 years ago, and he said he had transferred the Redis IP to Redis Labs, without being more specific

Well, trademarks are a form of IP. But in any case the copyright was never antirez's to transfer to anyone. In the absence of a CLA with a copyright assignment, every contributor retains the copyright to their contributions, and licenses them to everyone else (Redis Ltd included) under the terms of the BSD license. Legally speaking, Redis Ltd's SSPL code is, in effect, a fork of the Redis BSD code, in the same way that Redict is.

>In any case, congratulations on the very fast release of Redict, rewriting references to Redis is not a simple s/Redis/Redict/g sed job. How do you feel about possible competition with the Valkey project, apart from the licensing differences?

Thanks for the congratulations!

As for Valkey, so far they've put a lot of time and energy getting the various corporate stakeholders on board with their fork and getting some marketing out (which is no small feat, to be sure, I shudder to imagine the number of lawyers involved), but they still have a lot of boots-on-the-ground work to do getting their fork up and running so it may be a while before our projects are interacting directly. From the limited communication we've had with them, it seems likely that we'll be able to collaborate insofar as reducing incompatibilities is concerned, maybe co-maintenance on the protocol specification, but not much more. Redict does plan on pulling useful patches from Valkey once they get the code going, though it's unfortunately not possible for them to pull from us unless they're on board with switching to a copyleft license -- and we encourage them to do so :)

The sleaze was in falsely claiming to be the "Home of Redis" at least 2 years before actually becoming so by hiring antirez (I remember seeing their huge billboards on Bryant & 9th in San Francisco, and it rankled).

Yeap it's interesting. Redis starts as a hobby project by Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka antirez) who eventually gets sponsored by VMWare as the project grows in popularity.

Then, another company that is offering a hosted Redis and support hires antirez and so becomes the 'offical' Redis company.

In 2020 antirez leaves and goes and writes a novel (called "Wohpe") instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_(company)#History

Antirez hasn't been involved in Redis in a long time.

This is a common enough pattern when open-source projects leave their roots and then, eventually, alienate theiropen source base. Perhaps the time is ripe for Antirez to come back and shepherd one of the forks, a bit like mariadb?

I don't know why people think AGPL changes anything here. The very first of this wave of moves to non-FOSS licenses, and the creation of the SSPL license we are discussing here, was Mongo moving away from the AGPL.

What these companies want is licenses which prevent AWS and other cloud providers from competing with them on their specific technology, regardless of how much those same companies are contributing to the technology. Redis is the most extreme example here - by all accounts I've read, Amazon was a major contributor, not just throwing bug fixes here or there. But that doesn't help Redis Labs, they want money, not code. And the AGPL would have done less than nothing to help stop Amazon from running their own Redis service: Amazon was already doing everything (or at least most things) that the AGPL would have required of them.

SSPL is just a figleaf. No one sane redistributes third party SSPL code without having a contract with the company, it's essentially proprietary in all but name. But it allows the company to maintain this air of open source legitimacy.

I don't see a fig leaf. All I see is dick.

Mongo didn't move away from the AGPL to keep SaaS providers from capturing value from the project, they did it so that they could capture more for themselves.

Well, I don't think they expected this change to increase the market, so they wanted to capture value from other providers to themselves. But even that was not guaranteed to happen, the only thing they can guarantee with this move is that others will capture less value.

They'll just put that clause in from the start.

And if it grew organically, well OpenSearch is not exactly thriving. One of my clients are using it and it's a massive PITA to be on it.

No idea how badly it affected enterprise revenue for ElasticSearch though, but ES is going to win that fight in the long term.

There are lots of loosely related forms of idealism, and plenty of projects will continue to be released under mainstream FOSS licenses because the ideals of the project don't include "make money for our investors" but do include "make this cool thing widely available because we think people will like it".

For the vast majority of open source projects, being used by (and, importantly, receiving contributions from!) the "big boys" is a Good Thing and something to be aspired to.

Open Source doesn't have to come from a startup with a business model based that one open source project.

And that's a good thing as it will provide a steady mechanism to fund the project. Of course there is the risk that it will result in an "open-core" model where the open source part is artificially slowed down to promote the commercial offering.

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