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Comment by orochimaaru | Hacker News Reader

They paid antirez and I'm sure compensated him for his efforts on redis. I haven't heard antirez being "kicked out". There may have been a separation of ways when redis inc. decided to not be truly open source, but I haven't heard of them being abusive or unethical with antirez.

So yes, antirez started it. He owned the trademark and gave it off to redis inc. and was compensated for it. I am not seeing why this has to be controversial.

I don't like what redis is doing. But they're within legal rights.

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Yes, nobody says that there's something illegal here. Were it so, Redis is high enough profile project for someone to take a legal action.

But this is a takeover that is slowly draining the value from the community and directing it to private pockets. E.g. Redis is now source-available.

There are still compatible alternatives: https://valkey.io/ (C, a direct Redis fork) or https://keydb.dev/ (C++, an evolved Redis fork), both BSD-licensed.

I wish RethinkDB was more alive :-\

My point is the lesson here should be to wary of tools that don't have a foundation backing them. I have nothing but the highest respect for antirez. But redis never had a foundation. That makes it susceptible to be source-available. The same with Elastic search.

I think the best option against this action by Redis Inc is to move to valkey and use it to incorporate features that Redis Inc considers "enterprise licensed features". If there are big players in valkey, there should be a move to setup a foundation for it - so that it doesn't get taken in to be source available again.

> But redis never had a foundation.

In theory Redis could have had a foundation. It didn't. Instead the project owner opted to sell it to a corporation. This doesn't happen by accident.

What indeed has a foundation is Valkey[1]. It's backed by the likes of AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.

[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...

> But this is a takeover that is slowly draining the value from the community and directing it to private pockets. E.g. Redis is now source-available.

I think you're fooling yourself into believing that Redis was ever a community-owned project.

The truth of the matter is that the guy who developed Redis ended up selling Redis to a corporation. Since then he bailed out, and the corporation that owns Redis is now going through great lengths to monetize it.

The faster you forget about Redis and switch to alternatives, the better you'd be.

No one is saying what they did was illegal, but you'd have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make a case for it being ethical and in the spirit of open source.

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