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Comment by _3u10 | Hacker News Reader

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And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter.

Based on the open source license redis had before, what did aws do wrong? They didn't even have to contribute back, yet they did.

Investors of redis based their SaaS offering on open source and community work. Now that they achieved critical mass they want to reneg on the license.

There are multiple hosted Redis providers, not just Redis Labs and AWS.

I'm not sure why Redis OSS couldn't live on as open source product, while companies (including Redis Labs) offer managed Redis solutions.

It's nearly impossible to compete with AWS on hosting. People host their stuff on AWS, it's so much easier to take the fully integrated solutions of AWS than a third party vendor that they have realistically no chance of competing. That plus the fact that a competitor wanting to sell to AWS customers would have to host their own offering on AWS for bandwidth cost and latency reasons, and being forced to pay a competitor to play is always a sign that unfair competition is going on.

The rule of thumb is that you should be either be a platform or participate in the competition on that platform but never do both (applies to App Store, Amazon Marketplace, etc etc)

It does live on. It’s called “Valkey” now.

> And redis doesn't want to pay contributors. Same gist, same shortsighted take on the whole matter.

People who parrot these mindless rants on licensing purity would do well to learn what Redis inc actually is, what's it's relationship with Redis.

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

The Garantia Data rebrand and narrative reframing as the inventors of Redis is one of the greatest marketing efforts in OSS.

> It doesn’t want to pay license fees.

When a business is strong-armed to pay for something, doesn't it make sense to spend the money on an alternative that is cheaper, more reliable, trustable, and preserves its control?

Yes, of course. That is a major reason why people use open source. And since AWS was a contributor to Redis, why it would be absurd for them to pay license fees on a project they helped build and maintain.

So if I develop a niche feature relevant to a handful of people and contribute it upstream, I'm entitled to a free perpetual license to future software updates, even though a select few core developers, who are by and large paid Red Hat employees, do all of the work? I'm sorry, but Amazon didn't do much for Redis. I'd argue that they did the exact opposite: Indirectly defund the people who did all of the work to make Redis happen. Given the forced opportunity to fund the core developers, they noped out real quick to gain more control over costs and the software project itself. I hope that Red Hat learned their lesson and use strong copyleft licenses in the future to avoid this toxic situation.

Yeah, they probably could/should.

It'd take a lot to get developer adoption and buy in to a separate product that AWS builds themselves, so they adopted Redis. Easy money. It's easier to piggyback on something that won while making lots of money from it and say "well, I helped..." if things chanbge. Then, they chastise the creators as bad people once the gravy train stops.

AWS benefited from hosted redis before contributing. It wasn't adopted out of benevolence. They're still doing it with Memcached, for what its worth.

"Chastise the creators?"

Redid Labs did not create Redis. They were the original leeches in this, in a way, from my understanding. They just bought the trademark from the dude who actually did create it.

Someone else made more money on the property they were trying to appropriate from the community, so they decided to add an artificial barrier to competition and found out what happens when the other players are bigger than them.

Redis is just one option that AWS offers. They have their own, separate technologies as well. But people were looking for managed Redis, so AWS started selling managed Redis.

Redis Inc also wanted to sell managed Redis, but they can't compete on price/features with AWS, so they instead used the leverage they bought over the Redis community to make Redis effectively non-FOSS.

AWS doesn't depend on Redis. They only have a Redis managed offering because people keep asking for managed Redis. They were also actively contributing to Redis. They really did everything right here, but it still wasn't enough for Redis Inc.

Note that I am not affiliated with either AWS or Redis in any way. I don't even use it in any of the projects I work on. I've just been following this conflict because I am interested in the way open source communities work.

Do you think it’s trivial to operate a reliable and scalable Redis hosting service?

The whole open source model is scratching each others back but your own just a little bit more. But you make it sound as if aws was hypocritical for contributing and at the same time making money with it. Well ehh, isn't that the whole deal?

No, not given the people who created Redis, built distribution, made it a standard didn’t get paid. Open source isn’t about letting someone else gain from your work. It’s about openness. That’s why it’s of course in AWS’ benefit to support a fork. They claim to have helped the project therefore should be trusted going forward, despite latching onto it after the work was done to gain adoption. That’s fairly controlling and manipulative.

See my above comment; Redis Labs did not create redis.

The company that owns the name “Redis” did not create the software.

Were the creators of Redis responsible for making it a standard, or was it some early cloud "influencers" who stumbled upon it and promoted it in their resources?

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