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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

From the CEO blog post - https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/

>This achieved our goal—AWS and Google now maintain their own fork

Was this really the goal though? Forcing your biggest users to fork your software and maintain their own divergent version is not really good for anyone. Sure, Amazon and Google (or AWS and GCP - type confusion in the source material) now have to contribute some more engineering hours to the open fork, but why would anyone still want to use Redis now that there's a permissively licensed alternative maintained by the same cloud hyperscalers who will end up running it for you?

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Yeah this take kind of surprised me, you really wanted Valkey to be the default option for cloud customers ensuring they'll have no migration path to your own offering? I just don't get it. You were getting $0 and now you're getting $0.

How often were people migrating from AWS Redis to Redis Cloud in the first place? I'm guessing not a lot.

+1. Not a lot, I'd guess. Every time I've used Redis (or ValKey in more recent times), latency more than 20ms or so would have been terrible.

I've seen workloads perform better without caching at all at 30ms

Isn't it though? They weren't contributing before and they weren't paying Redis corp before, now they are at least contributing to a fork (and still not paying Redis corp).

Presumably some of the things being worked on in Valkey, etc can be upstreamed back to Redis in some form (not entirely straightforward since it is a hard fork with a diff license, but concepts can be borrowed back too).

e.g. apparently Valkey has introduced some performance improvements. Redis can implement similar if it seems worthwhile. Without the fork those performance ideas might have never surfaced.

They were contributing a lot. So Redis-the-company lost a lot of engineering expertise when they all left for valkey.

> They weren't contributing before

That is not true. Companies like AWS had paid staff working as OSS Redis core maintainers before the licencing schism. This talk of "achieving their goals" is just bluster serving no reason other than damage control.

I don't get it, why don't gcp and aws just pay the Redis company instead of paying their own (expensive!) engineers to maintain a fork?

Because they think it's cheaper/better for them.

Are there compensating benefits? For web browsers, having multiple, competing implementations is considered good.

Are there benefits to the ecosystem? Possibly.

But the person you replied to was talking about Redis's goal, and I don't think it's likely their goal had anything to do with having a competitor to themselves around. Even if they did want that, they could've just bankrolled (or engineered) a fork; changing a license to one that causes your largest users to do the work themselves is a rather roundabout way to do it.

I can almost kind of see the large users needing to work together on a replacement, meaning that replacement might as well be open-source, meaning Redis can get future improvements that were funded by the fork users (who Redis was upset wasn't paying them) as a semi-vindictive, semi-useful goal. But it's still roundabout. If that was really the plan, it could've been articulated better in this postmortem to make it clear the "goal" bit hadn't just been BS'd.

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