Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What's the track record of other projects that have gone too commercial and had their code forked like this? The only other example I can think of offhand is MySQL and MariaDB. I don't know what the market share of either is now. Do people still use MySQL? Does it generate profit for Oracle?

I think Redis Ltd. is vastly overestimating the value of their product. Redis is incredibly popular, but the vast majority of users are just looking for a simple in-memory key-value store for lightweight database use cases, caching, etc. I've used it in some way in just about all my projects for the past ~15 years.

The thing is, I don't care that it's Redis. I don't care about most of its features. I could have subbed in memcached or any number of other solutions. It would have been trivial and had no impact on my system.

I have no doubt that there are some power users who need advanced features of Redis, but I also have no doubt that Redict will be better, and that there will be companies who provide commercial support for it.

I'm just going to use Amazon ElastiCache for big projects, and continue not caring at all about what it is behind the scenes. And I'll s/redis/redict in my docker-compose.yml for small/personal projects, and that'll be the end of it.

I can't imagine a scenario where Redis Ltd. is relevant or profitable 10 years from now. Oracle can afford to lose money on MySQL forever, and treat it as a loss-leader for acquiring new Oracle DB customers or at least new MySQL service contracts. Redis Ltd. has one product and few people need support for it or care much about it vs. alternatives.

Edit: Or Valkey instead of Redict; either way, which exemplifies the degree to which I don't care.

Just passing by with a quick nit to pick:

>And I'll s/redis/redict in my docker-compose.yml for small/personal projects, and that'll be the end of it

FYI we're publishing to registry.redict.io, so s:redis:registry.redict.io/redict:g

https://redict.io/docs/redis-compat/containers/

Not that it detracts from your point in any way :)

THANK YOU, for making images based on scratch, rather than Debian or Alpine. It makes redistribution so much easier from a license compliance perspective.

And double thanks for providing an SPDX document for the contents of the image.

No problem :)

MySQL never changed its license. The fork happened due to concerns of ownership and direction, not a license change or "going too commercial".

MySQL is still widely used, including by a large portion of publicly-traded tech companies. That said, most newer startups seem to be choosing Postgres instead.

MariaDB is also somewhat widely used, but not nearly as much as MySQL. And MariaDB's commercial enterprise (which was VC-backed and went public via a SPAC) is not doing well.

>MariaDB is also somewhat widely used, but not nearly as much as MySQL.

I believe this is factually false. Consider just one datapoint:

https://repology.org/project/mysql/versions

https://repology.org/project/mariadb/versions

Your belief is incorrect. The links you have provided do not provide any data on actual use of these databases in the industry.

I've been working in the MySQL/MariaDB ecosystem for 21 years and am the creator/maintainer of a MySQL and MariaDB specific schema management utility used by hundreds of companies and with over 1.6 million downloads to date. I can tell you conclusively, MySQL usage in the industry significantly exceeds MariaDB's.

While I personally enjoy both systems and do hope MariaDB adoption increases, this doesn't change the facts on the ground. And unfortunately MRDB is a penny stock, Azure is dropping their managed MariaDB offering, Vitess has dropped MariaDB support entirely, AWS Aurora is compatible with MySQL and not MariaDB, Percona Server is based on MySQL and not MariaDB, and so forth.

I'll defer to your on the ground expertise as to the relative popularity of each, but I will point out that we're both working with anecdata here. I might also suggest that MySQL is losing a lot of ground to Postgres and I don't expect that trend to reverse in any case.

In any case it's not very relevant to this thread because you're quite right in pointing out that MySQL uses a free software license (GPL).

Yes, I mentioned the losing ground to Postgres aspect in my original comment. But that affects both MySQL and MariaDB, and still does not cause MariaDB to somehow be more popular than MySQL.

As for both working with anecdata, I mean sure, but what else is there? I'm citing my own business's direct experience with MySQL users and customers significantly outnumbering MariaDB users and customers, and seeing clear signs of that trend also being true at several much larger businesses (AWS, Azure, Percona, PlanetScale).

I suspect your view may be skewed by Linux distros / package managers having replaced MySQL with MariaDB many years ago. But even that is starting to change, see https://lwn.net/Articles/960630/ for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com