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Comment by sroussey | Hacker News Reader

What’s valkey?

It's the Redis fork with the most resources and the most backing. It's well funded and it sits under the Linux foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...

and remains truly open-source, unlike Redis.

Redis from Redis Labs, available under a choice of its own license or the SSPL, is pretty close to truly open-source, IMO closer to it than the BUSL, which is another source-available license. It is pretty similar to the AGPLv3, and they even credibly applied to get it OSI-approved.

https://blog.tidelift.com/what-i-learned-from-the-server-sid... https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11291/how-to-...

What it isn't close to is the original license, which is a permissive open source license.

The license switch-up is why a fork was needed. Matrix did a similar thing with the AGPL which alas, doesn't have a major fork. https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/ Although it's technically still open source, they didn't do right by the contributors to it.

Every license is a unique snowflake, but if you're going to stay sane and get on with your life you need some categories and lines. Redis is not available under a license that is open-source in any of the usual senses - not OSI-approved, not DFSG-compatible, not FSF-approved. That is a big deal. Matrix remains open source under a license that meets all those criteria. It's not a technical distinction, it's the line in the sand that stops open-source from being whittled away to nothing.

If the new license is so similar to the AGPL, why did they not pick AGPL as one of the license options in order to keep a well known OSI-aproved license?

Yes, picking the same license is at least some security against a backdoor of some crafty IP lawyer.

It's not truly open source if the most basic freedom, freedom to use code for any purpose, is not fulfilled.

I hate that people feel the need to so strongly attach the generic term open source to Open Source InitiativeⓇ OSI Certified™ license's marketing (anti Stallman) propaganda as the one and only true open source. Redis' license is open in all the ways that matter.

OSI has nothing to do with being anti-Stallman. (I think the most anti-Stallman person is, unfortunately, Stallman himself, having done so much to destroy his own reputation.)

Even Stallman would agree that nothing can be open source if the freedom 0, freedom to use software for any purpose, is not provided. SSPL does not grant this freedom.

fork of redis https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey just before the transition to their new source available licenses

Ah thanks. Is this by AWS or similar?

Yes: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...

> Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey.

Interesting to see Google there. They have LevelDB.

I've only looked briefly at leveldb, but IIRC redis is _hugely_ more featureful than leveldb (which I'm sure is a great fit where it's used).

Redis and LevelDB are very different, with different use cases.

LevelDB is a key-value storage library that writes to disk. It's the sort of thing you could use as the storage layer for a relational database.

On the other hand, Redis is an in-memory key-value database server.

Cloud providers offer productized versions of Redis, so their interest in Valkey should be obvious :)

Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community rallied behind Big Tech instead of a small startup though. Just saying.

The community rallied around a community fork with an open source licence instead of a VC funded startup with a penchant for changing licences.

Around competitive prices and terms rather than a monopoly.

> Yep. It is still a bit ironic that the community rallied behind Big Tech instead of a small startup though. Just saying.

The community rallied behind the project that ensures the software they care about remains free and open and available to all without the risk of being blind-sided.

Microsoft appears to be the only major player that isn't going with Valkey and established some sort of licensing deal with Redis [0].

[0]: https://redis.io/blog/introducing-azure-managed-redis

Microsoft also last year released their own Redis-client-compatible key-value store, Garnet: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

Persistent key-value database with network interface https://packages.debian.org/testing/database/valkey-server

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