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Comment by _msw_ | Hacker News Reader

This exchange makes me sad. I know we can do better.

I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job. I don't understand why people who have dedicated a lot of their time and emotional energy to keep open source ways alive and help build a community effort are attacked because they work for a company that needs to be made the villain in the narrative.

Of course Redis is free to copy BSD licensed code that Valkey contributors add to the project [1]. I only wish that the blog post about this advancement in Redis would give some credit, rather than claiming "We also improved the performance of CRC64 calculations" [2].

We can all do better, and engage with one another with mutual respect and admiration for what has been freely given.

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13638

[2] https://redis.io/blog/redis-8-0-m03-is-out-even-more-perform...

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> I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job.

Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work(yes some random collection of repos and 2 PRs here and there is not the same thing) compared to how much it has benefited from open source. (I know I know OSS allows for all that so not claiming anything wrong). But it does show what the company policy must be towards open source (Consume all you can, contribute only when absolutely essential for the company barring exceptional circumstances).

> I don't understand why people who have dedicated a lot of their time and emotional energy to keep open source ways alive and help build a community effort are attacked because they work for a company that needs to be made the villain in the narrative.

Antirez is not attacking anyone above. English is not his first language and he is just putting out some of his thoughts (which people are free to disagree with but those are what he thinks), like how you casually slipped that you didn't get credit for one commit copied from valkey (where the copier is giving due credit in the PR by linking the source PR and the authors inline). So they copied a PR from valkey, and the redis blog post should give lots and lots of credits? If that was the standard, so many of AWS services will spend all their reinvent time giving credits to their source OSS projects.

> Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work

This may have been true a decade ago, but things are quite different now.

> compared to how much it has benefited from open source.

This is the nature of digital public goods. We are all going to disproportionately benefit from digital public goods relative to what can be produced as new digital public goods. No one will ever, EVER be able to "contribute proportionately" given the endless bounty of software made freely available for all to use.

> If that was the standard, so many of AWS services will spend all their reinvent time giving credits to their source OSS projects.

The observant should notice a change in this over the years. For example, the announcement for Amazon Q Code Transformation [1] acknowledged that OpenRewrite was used under the covers, even though it was an implementation detail that didn't have to be disclosed...

Of course these disclosures and good-faith intentions to engage on open-source community terms under long-established community norms don't always work out the way we hope. [2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/upgrade-your-java-applicati...

[2] https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-tools/issues/1443

> No one will ever, EVER be able to "contribute proportionately" given the endless bounty of software made freely available for all to use.

so it sounds like we need a license mechanism that enforces this, fairly, based on potential ability to contribute

idea: a benchmark to give a required level of contributions, maybe a logistic function of revenue generated/company size and time since initial usage

and if you fall beneath it, your license is terminated

carefully calibrated such that a burden is only placed on very large companies

Just make it closed source (or source-available) and give out no-cost licenses how you see fit. You are the author, you decide what to do with your code. This is a well-supported model too, plenty of products are like that.

There are plenty of licenses around, lack of alternatives isn't why people use MIT or Apache.

> I don't understand why so many people think that it's impossible to have open source in your heart while working for a big company in your day job.

The employment contract you signed.

My friend, Amazon being legally allowed to behave like a schmuck doesn't imply the community can't point that out and complain about it. AWS (legally) exploits open source projects, and that's a fact.

There are many actions and behaviours in life that are not illegal but actively worsen society at large if you do them. That companies that are the main contributors to OSS are forced to take drastic measures is just consequence of AWS not being a team player, you should have at least the decency of not commenting here.

PS. I don't have a horse in the race, I'm not a Redis user, I'm just appalled by your behavior.

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