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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

It is a fork of the latest oss release right? I thought some completely new implementations were introduced.

It's not just a fork, there have been two releases on Valkey that improved performance and memory efficiency. There is a lie that Redis likes to spread that only their own employees were working on the core engine at the time of the fork, but most of the engineers on Valkey came directly from having worked on Redis OSS. A recent example is we modernized the hash table a bit: https://valkey.io/blog/new-hash-table/.

Nobody wants to deny that Redis got from contribution from external developers. But it is fundamentally true that for like 8 years almost every substantial contribution was created by people working for Redis, and that later we got something that was still a small part compared to the total.

There are the commit histories, the GitHub contribution graphs. Everything is public. The current code base was written for the majority by a few single folks, for another small amount of the sum of all random people in the community, for a smaller part by people that now work at ValKey.

this lwn article supports the argument that many cloud providers contributed back to Redis: https://lwn.net/Articles/966631

> It is also hard to reconcile the claims that cloud providers do not contribute with the actual commits to the Redis repository. A quick examination of the commits since the 7.0.0 release using gitdm shows 967 commits over that time period:

    Top changeset contributions by employer
    (Unknown)         331     34.2%
    Tencent           240     24.8%
    Redis             189     19.5%
    Alibaba            65     6.7%
    Huawei             50     5.2%
    Amazon.com         50     5.2%
    Bytedance          19     2.0%
    NetEase            13     1.3%

> Binbin Zhu, of Tencent, is responsible for nearly 25% of the commits to the project. Some of the contributors without a readily identifiable employer surely are Redis employees, but it's clear that the company has not been working alone.

If you go into the GitHub of any of the forks, and check the contribution page, you will see this data is not correct. Probably all my commits are into this "unknown", since I push with @gmail.com account without being part of any organization for most of the time.

This is likely some partial data of some specific fork or alike.

The LWN article is examining the 976 commits made after the 7.0.0 release. I don't think you had any commits during that time?

As is typical for software projects, early authors will be disproportionately represented in revision histories. I am still the #4 contributor to the Anaconda installer [1] originally used by Red Hat Linux, then RHEL, then Fedora, and others, despite not contributing to the code base for two decades.

[1] https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/graphs/contributors

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