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Comment by tonyhb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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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