Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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I don't buy that justification. These two companies (and the others like them) set up a model for funding their business knowing full well that they would have to compete with others who were able to provide the same service they were. That's always been baked into FOSS—you can't plan around a monopoly when you're releasing your code for free, that's part of the trade-off you make.

When AWS and Co did provide hosting and provided it better than these guys could, now it's suddenly AWS who are the bad guys for using the FOSS software the way the license always said they could. Now we're suddenly supposed to ignore the terms on which FOSS has always been released and pick up our pitchforks against the big mean cloud provider.

Instead of sticking to the fundamental principles of FOSS (principles which they won business by openly espousing) and adapting their business to the fact that Elastic and Redis lost in the competition they knowingly set up, they fixated on hosting (on top of AWS and Co, no less!) as the business model and changed the licenses to give themselves a monopoly on it.

There is no possible way to compete against someone else who doesn't need to fund the development of the software but can still take in all the revenues and profits from deploying it as a service.

But that has always been true, from the beginning. It's baked in to the FOSS model and always has been.

If the companies had made a bad call in structuring their business and owned up to it I think we'd be having a very different conversation than we are. We're here because they failed to own up to it and instead tried to get people to raise pitchforks against AWS. Never mind that their intended model was the obviously doomed model of reselling AWS's hosting with a commission on top, and never mind that it was the trade-off they chose when they chose to release their software as FOSS and get the boost in adoption that comes with.

I do fully agree with antirez above that we need a new plan for funding FOSS. But I think that's a poor justification for the rug pulling and vilifying that the existing companies did.

You make it sound like there is a way to compete against the same organizations if they funded the development of the software - it's not possible to compete against hyperscalers, period. Now that Amazon is funding a fork, is Redis, Inc in a better or worse position to compete?

Not true, you can compete with the quality of the deployed service _separate_ from the development of the software. The quality of the service can include internal, at-scale optimizations that don't affect user-facing parity with the open-source software.

Open source companies with SaaS offerings need to have plans to differentiate themselves on hosting quality, not features. Yes, you can do better at hosting your own product than Amazon in many cases with customized, closed-source optimizations (that are unrelated to feature parity and does not intentionally limit the open-source/self-hosted form), support, etc.

> Not true, you can compete with the quality of the deployed service _separate_ from the development of the software.

That is true in a literal sense but (anecdotally) from the point of view of an engineer deploying ie; Redis, there is no real space for that angle of competition when the choice is between having to go through procurement hurdles to sign a contract with Redis Labs versus say; spinning up Redis on AWS which has zero hurdles because there is already an organization wide agreement in place for example.

The competition there isn't a level playing field as the deck is kind of stacked for most businesses where engineers don't have free reign to procurement what might be objectively the best hosting solution?

I've never really thought through this in any depth before now so don't consider this a great fleshed out argument, just an observation from my personal experience.

Honestly the idea that you can win by just being better is so deeply out of touch with enterprise that I assume anyone suggesting this doesn't understand the problem enough to be trying to argue against antirez of all people on Earth about this.

And that's not an appeal to authority: there just so genuinely and obviously is no such guarantee in enterprise that quality will ensure success that explaining it feels like trying to break down an elementary element.

Silly take due to how these resources must be distributed. Redis corp is paying developers to work on Redis itself, so they have less money to spend on building out a cloud offering. AWS was not paying developers to work on Redis, so they have more money to spend on improving their cloud offering (of Redis).

"Impossible to compete" is hyperbolic (you can almost always compete), but from a business fundamentals perspective it is not a level playing field and odds of success in that arena are very very low. And as my sibling comment points out, this is massively compounded by the fact that (by their very nature), hyperscalers are also hosting other infra for you, whereas Redis Cloud is only going to be offering hosted Redis. So even if the DX/UX is much better for Redis Cloud, it is still an uphill battle to convince corpos and even SMEs to split up their hosting like that.

Yeah, no. Customers will prefer to use redis in their existing AWS/Microsoft stack rather than use your deployed version in a different data center with a few micro optimizations.

They will pay Microsoft and Amazon, not you, the author of the software to use your software.

If you solely fund the development of the software, you own the feature backlog. If you can't use that as a competitive advantage, I don't really know what to tell you.

> now it's suddenly AWS who are the bad guys for using the FOSS software the way the license always said they could

That's not a fair representation of the objection. The thing under contention here is a behemoth freeloading for substantial profit. The reason it's viewed as bad is because that behavior undermines the community at large. Participants need to contribute back proportional to their benefit when realistically able lest the community decline over time.

It's conceptually similar to the disapproval employers with poor workplaces are subjected to. Even if they technically obey all the labor laws, by prioritizing their profits over worker health and well being they garner a bad reputation. "But we didn't do anything illegal" isn't going to get them out of it.

> The reason it's viewed as bad is because that behavior undermines the community at large. Participants need to contribute back proportional to their benefit when realistically able lest the community decline over time.

Why? No one has been able to articulate this for me. Why does Amazon using the software cause the community to decline? Doesn't it make the software more popular with broader reach?

When you give software away for free, you've given it away for free. You're producing it with the intention of it being used. Why does that suddenly become a problem when it gets used on a large scale?

> Why does Amazon using the software cause the community to decline?

It doesn't - at least directly.

> You're producing it with the intention of it being used. Why does that suddenly become a problem when it gets used on a large scale?

You're setting up a cause and effect here that I never put forward. It isn't the use itself that suddenly becomes problematic.

The behavior is the issue. If everyone else pitches in and you don't, you come out ahead. It's the game theory behind cooperative behavior. If only you abstain the community isn't necessarily worse off, but if everyone abstains then it is (ie compared to if they all contributed). The optimal outcome for the group as a whole is for everyone to pitch in.

I do get where you're coming from. Legally speaking it's quite silly for someone investing money not to proactively prevent this from the beginning.

This isn't about the legality though. It's about social responsibilities. Entities with more resources - individuals, corporations, and even governments - are generally held to higher standards in the public eye. The legal system alone is not sufficient to make society a nice place to live.

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