I wish he'd elaborated a bit more on what he thought it was about. My understanding is that it's 100% about the license. That's certainly why I'll reach for valkey instead of redis next time I need it. That's also what I've heard from everyone else in a similar position. What else would the community split be about?
We will not win back you as a user, and I respect that. But many, many users that see openness, good features and documentation, the github repository at the center of everything: I believe they will appreciate this, and can decide that Redis is good for them.
That is the nub of the sticking point.
The new is OK for people who only care about getting things done. But for people interested in building and being part of a community, giving as well as taking, not so much
This:
You may not make the functionality of the Software or a Modified version available to third parties as a service or distribute the Software or a Modified version in a manner that makes the functionality of the Software available to third parties.
To me, these products are booby traps that are more likely to need replaced in the future when something changes again.
Put another way, it's a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem.
There's so much gray area in these terms you have to keep the lawyers involved not only in the initial indentation but product features in the future to make sure you don't accidentally cross a very poorly defined line.
Yes. But you care about more than just that....
Valkey is as much Redis as it is Valkey? Then why isn't it called "Redis"? Clearly there's a distinction or the fork would never have happened. Is Redis also as much Valkey as it is Redis?
Names signal who has control over a project, not anything about its history/implementation/license. Otherwise every piece of software that goes through a rewrite should change its name.
After all, the identity of ever-changing entities is ephemeral and is only in our heads.
A lot of developers and users are sticking with the community and the license instead of sticking with the trademark holder.
> Names signal who has control over a project
Trademark is a specific form of intellectual property and there are many others. I don't understand how you got to that conclusion to be honest. A restaurant in my neighborhood had to change name recently because it was too similar to a big chain, does that mean it's a different restaurant now?
I think the thing that hurts a lot of folks is the one thing they wanted to do with Redis is use a managed version of it in AWS. And now they can't. We're trying to figure out our migration path right now and it's almost surely going to be Valkey.
Large vendors were never going to pay up and so it's all loss for everyone involved. I have to do work, every project that works with Redis has to do work to support Valkey now, the eventual divergence will force people to pick a side which will probably also be Valkey for everything other than the client libraries Redis Labs personally develops. It's a mess.
Open core proprietary add-one for new fancy AI features could have avoided the split and gotten you in the door with big cloud vendors willing to sell your add-on in the marketplace with revenue sharing. They did it with Bedrock and Anthropic is making bank off it.
Hum, I have not considered this aspect before - I mean I've realized that AWS probably cannot use Redis [until they pay back], but that users (customers) would be affected...likely I'm biased here cuz not using managed services of that sort, sat having Redis + Sentinel setup of our own.
Additionally, I think it's a bit entitled to be so up in arms about a product everyone is using for free. There is a big issue with how open source is unmaintainable to do in our industry, and I applaud Redis' attempt at trying to fix it.
I do agree with you about open source developers being within their rights to maintain as they see fit. My personal philosophy is that while open source maintainers have no obligation to maintain in a way that conforms to user expectations, users still have the right to voice their opinions on that (although the maintainers are free to ignore it, per the previous point). To me, the distinction that matters isn't about whether users are "entitled" or not but whether they're voicing opinions about an open source project (including decisions about how to maintain it) versus personal insults at individuals. I don't see anything wrong with someone being vocally upset about a license change; I just also don't see anything wrong with a maintainer choosing not to care about it.
I used to agree with this, but it now seems a rather narrow view of how open source actually works. Open source projects tend to make a big deal about being a "community," and this is certainly true of many that are backed by commercial vendors. To me the use of community does imply mutual obligations between developers and users or the word has no meaning.
Unless, that is, you think community is just a synonym for "marketing funnel."
something is off in redis execution
hope with this guy comes back it improves!
AGPL only slightly prevents this by forcing them to share their changes to the source. And usually this is not very useful to the community, anyway. And very little effort. And the same people scream it's an evil license. They want free (as in beer) stuff forever and it's not just the source code. It's very ungrateful of them.
The bigger issue was startups and small/medium sized companies with limited technical support and limited money to buy enterprise support or in-house experts. These are the same companies heavily leaning on managed services from vendors like AWS.