Redis is open source again

Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters?

Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software):

> On September 16, 2024, the Linux Foundation and Amazon Web Services announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.[15][16] Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation.

OpenSearch is Apache License 2.0. You can do whatever you want to/with it. How are Elastic the good guys in your mind?

> On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash.

That's specious reasoning at best.

The whole point of FLOSS is that anyone is free to use it how they see fit. Whether it's a hobbyist doing a pet project or a FANG using it as their core infrastructure, they are granted the right to use it how they see fit.

That's exactly why they started to use it to begin with. Isn't it?

When a random corporation decides to pull the rug on the established user base expecting to profit from the pain of migrating existing services, it is not the user base who is the bad actor.

> being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon

Can you elaborate on what exactly Amazon did to Elastic? I read all of their blog posts and the only thing I really got out of it was "they sell hosted Elastic cheaper than we can", which is hardly surprising given that Elastic really just packages up AWS/GCP/Azure cloud infra. That doesn't have to be AWS selling at a loss, AWS just doesn't need to pay itself.

And by all accounts I've read Amazon did contribute back to Elastic development up until Elastic switched the license on them. At that point they forked, but it's hard to blame them when they were deliberately locked out of the original project.

Most of the arguments I've seen against Amazon with regard to Elastic have tended to be very vibe-based. Amazon bullied Elastic because that's always what Amazon does! It's plausible, but it's also plausible that Elastic thought they could use Amazon's terrible reputation as a weapon against it without there being any substance.

I sure wish I lived in a world where anti-competitive regulators weren't a joke.

How useful if you can’t run it yourself, or for others?

That’s the whole idea, is it not?

> The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.

Yes, this would be the honest thing to do, but people don't do it because using a non-FOSS license loses you adoption. The step you're missing in your little timeline is that the only reason the project takes off at all and becomes big enough that anyone is making money off of it is because it's Open Source. Proprietary databases, programming languages, and similar have lost big time and that's not changing any time soon.

So what's really happening is that these FOSS companies want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to release code for free so that other devs will use it and then make money from the project while somehow banning other companies from also making money off it.

> Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily millions in revenue. Original creator / company doesn't get anything, and the hyperscaler isn't obliged to pay.

This isn't what is happening. A company called Garantia Data renamed themselves to Redis Labs and acquired the Redis trademark. They're not the original company, and they used a naming trick to present as if they are official (they are now, and nothing they did was illegal).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256757

https://www.gomomento.com/blog/rip-redis-how-garantia-data-p...

Or start with the AGPL from the start instead of a pushover license and sell alternative licenses to hyper scalers if they want it.

All companies should do this.. if anything so we know what not to use.

Any sort of proprietary product (be it fully closed source, source-available, or "open source with limitations") is always a risk. You were happily using database X, but they got acquired by Broadcom and now their product costs 100x what it was before. What do you do now?

That's why it is much safer to adopt open source - worst case is the company goes under, but you still keep using last released version indefinitely, and hope new entity (maybe even hyperscaler!) forks the code. Or make an in-house fork if you have enough resources.

"equitable source" license means it's not an option. That new product should really be much, much better than open-source alternatives to even be considered.

This breakdown hits hard because it’s not just about business models — it’s about trust.

Open source succeeded because it created shared public infrastructure. But hyperscalers turned it into extraction infrastructure: mine the code, skip the stewardship.

The result? We’ve confused “open” with “free-for-the-powerful.”

It’s time to stop pretending licenses are enough. This is about incentives, governance, and resilience. The next generation of “open” has to bake in counterpower — or it’s just a feeding trough for monopolies.

> The company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee.

Could you put a clause in the license that calls out those specific companies that you're concerned about and makes them pay, as well as any of their subsidiaries, a list that can be changed later?

That way, smaller businesses around the software can still exist, nobody gets concerned with the license too much because it calls out specific hyperscalers (no love lost on them in the community) and you still get them to pay their fair share.

Why do people try to ruin everything by SSPL that's overly restrictive and catches everyone else in the blast area, or try to write some clever license that would apply in all cases? Just call out the exact companies that are eating your lunch!

  Hyperscaler Anti-Freeloading License (HAFL): If you belong to any of the following companies, or are a subsidiary of them, or operate any of the given cloud platforms and want to offer the service there, pay up: Amazon Web Services (Amazon), Google Cloud Platform (Google), Microsoft Azure (Microsoft), Alibaba Cloud (Alibaba Group), IBM Cloud (IBM), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Oracle), Tencent Cloud (Tencent), SAP Cloud Platform (SAP). This list can be changed at our discretion.

> A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright.

A copyleft licence (not necessarily GPL, there is also MPL and EUPL) from the beginning on would result in (1), no need for a new license.

But people "don't want strings attached" and are happier with permissive licences, and then they complain.

"walking off with your money"

This is the heart of all of these stupid takes. There is no "your money" for anyone else to walk off with. Nothing was stolen.

If you want to sell software, or rent access to software, then just do that honestly forom the outset. And good luck to you on that. I will not consume it unless I have no other choice, and I will not contribute to it at all period, even tertially by for instance developing things that use it or help people work out how to solve problems with it etc. In other words just generally not invest in it, in all the different ways one might invest in something. But hey maybe you will make something indispensible and do it better than anyone else can, and maybe you will get a bunch of other customers.

If you want to benefit from the adoption and goodwill and army of free work that comes with open source, then do that.

The honest reason to work on open source is because you yourself have recognized how much utility you have been given fo free because of it, and wish to pay it forward and basically add to humanity as a whole. What you get back out of it is the same thing everyone else does, the use of the software itself, plus your name being on it.

But if you license something open source, and then care the TINIEST BIT what someone else does with it beyond adhering to the attribution and share-alike terms, then you have missed the point of open source. You are bent about being "robbed" of something that was never yours in the first place. You have no right to Amazon's billions, even the part of it that they made by hosting a copy of some oss software you happened to have written. Amazon is not selling your property, they are selling a managed hosting service. You have no right to the revenue from that. The software being hosted is a community resource there for everyone to use like the air or water, only even better since unlike Nestle taking the water from everyone else, everyone else still has the software.

If anything the supposed injured party in all of these cases are the bad community members because they are often only OSS disingenuously in the first place. They start off with MIT/BSD style licenses because they know a lot of companies are allergic to GPL. But WHY are they so intolerant of GPL? Because GPL doesn't allow them to steal, but MIT allows them to steal. So they start with an MIT-type license because it's "commercial friendly" and then later cry that someone "stole" their B S freaking D licensed software.

People that do that were never writing open source for the purpose of adding to the community pool in the first place. It's either dishonest or at best, possibly honest but in that case just unbelievably incompetent and ignorant.

Yep. Actually if Redis would end up in CNCF and Redis Labs could provide commercial hosting, extensions - this would be outcome I would be excited about

> Because fragmentation is apparently good?

I think it's more "they are no longer piggybacking off our work for free".

I also think what they actually wanted was that plus "...and they paid us".

An existing safety mechanism is to do exactly what Linux does: have a copyleft licence and no CLA. So that the copyright is shared between the contributors (so it's impossible to change the licence) and the licence enforces sharing your changes of the project.

Not everyone wants to be a CEO. Some people just wanna write some good code and contribute to the world.

I just wanted to make a tool to help developers. Then when the SaaS launched they instead focused on adding $$$ features instead of fixing bugs, and started heavily pushing their SaaS anytime you used the tool.

They ended up switching to a terrible model with a previous release where if you were a business or in anyway making money you now needed to pay for licenses and it was comically expensive.

The reality is I could have forked it but I don't have the time and patience to deal with everything that comes from a massive project.

Yes because "pics or it didn't happen"

I believe AGPL + time + contributors makes that very difficult. It also means that if you have a commercial product that uses Redis you need to open source your stuff though, so not net better imu. Please correct me if I am wrong.

The tl;dr is it's just a lockless hashmap attached to a TCP server with a log. Simple Get/Set operations are highly optimized, so with high batching they are able to efficiently fetch a lot of data efficiently. The architectures scales very well when you add threads and data access that is uniform.

It struggles a bit on certain types of workloads like hot keys, think heavy hitting a single sorted set. It's a cool architecture.

The readytorun zip includes a service exe, it does need 'sc create binpath= ' etc. to be ran as a service.

Conventional wisdom from 10 years ago on HN is that Microsoft Research just pays some top researchers (with commercially interesting, err, interests) to keep doing their thing. I wouldn't distrust anyone from there based on their employer. That is from someone who doesn't trust MSFT very far.

I don't see how it's worse?

https://github.com/microsoft/garnet/blob/main/LICENSE

It's MIT licensed?

I don't, would you like to explain?

? How did MongoDB rug pull?

Unless a CLA transfers copyright to the project owner, the copyright owners are every historical contributor to the project. Each contribution is owned by the contributor alone and they alone are able to grant rights to it.

A CLA often tries to mitigate this by making contributors give the project owners special rights at the time of contribution.

(Note that even if relicensed, this itself can never revoke licenses granted for prior versions unless that license specifically had revocation written into it.)

    > there are open legal questions about whether the GPL and its variants are enforceable.

GPL v3 also has a nice clause that allows companies to "repair/cure" their non-compliance.

    > Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.

your comment is logically defective

if that's your "good legal reason" to avoid the GPL, then it's just as much a "good legal reason" not to open source your work at all: if the GPL is not enforceable, that would mean you have used a non-copyleft license, which according to you is the thing you want to avoid for good legal reasons.

It's sad as an open source lover how money fucks it all

I said exactly that's a win of the community. But money are needed to pay the folks that work at open source software, and the companies that went for the SSPL were trying to protect their business (and, as a side effect, wanted or not, the ability to pay for such work). I believe the software world failed to protect open source software in the cloud era, but in general the environment that we collectively created made the open source software won.

I strongly suspect there was pressure from within these companies, among developers as well.

No its not.

Many people switched to Valkey and didn't even know it. A lot like how many users are using MariaDB but think they are using MySQL.

Several major linux distros transparently switched to Valkey and the users are none-the-wiser. On Fedora, for example, doing `sudo dnf install redis` just installs Valkey.

> it seems like existing users kept using Redis

Redis user since it appeared and I switched my servers (~15) to Valkey - partially because of the shenanigans, partially because Arch is moving Redis to archive.

In my current compagny (multibillions dollars kind of), most if not all redis has been replaced by valkey

Redis is a threat to the compagny and the licence change was taken very seriously, as all legal-related threat.

Lol feels a little hypocritical to complain about proprietary clouds, then take open source software from a competitor and embed it into your own

Is that why they're AGPL now?

Sure, but the impact of new customers and their decisions take a long time before they impact net statistics. All evidence I can find, regardless of domain or context, suggests Redis vs. valkey marketshare is something around a 99%/1% difference.

I wonder how that works legally with CLA. If the person who originally wrote the code is not the one who signs off the PR. I assume the lawyers have signed off on it.

Did they maintain the author's copyright notice as required by BSD-3?

Well, now that Redis is once again Open Source and even Free Software, that should change.

My guess is they are making it up. AWS has no public information, but there are some high profile customers that have migrated https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/customers/.

Without sources, it's a "statistically worthless" comment :)

Based on Internet-accessible services the number of Valkey servers is low (~120):

https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=valkey_version+port%3A...

Here's a chart of all Redis-compatible services (~55,000):

https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A6379+redis_vers...

My guess is most people are using Redis via cloud providers. Did any cloud providers switch away from Redis?

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AWS, GCP, surely are invested: they paid for ValKey, they forked to avoid doing revenue sharing with Redis in any way :D IMHO it's a matter of what the community does, and it, in turn, this depends on how well we are able to develop Redis.

It's not just licensing and hyper-scalers, it's also a matter of development quality and direction. For instance, now in Redis you can find substantial more stuff not available in ValKey, including hash items expires, Vector Sets that are very useful for a number of things, the probabilistic data structures just introduced with Redis 8, and so forth.

If Redis is superior then sticking with Valkey would just be throwing good money after bad. Hopefully those companies are competent enough to understand the concept of sunk costs.

Maybe Valkey has served its purpose in pressuring Redis into playing ball.

Just answering "why would". Whether or not Redis is better then Valkey or if it would be worth it to switch back is not something I know.

AWS and GCP offer valkey-based versions of products that are typically based on Redis, but those versions are currently, generally, preview-grade, and statistically zero customers are using them. They still offer the original, Redis-based versions of those products, which, statistically, 100% of their customers are using.

> My company has hundreds of apps (hurray microservices). That's where "hundreds of hours" seems pretty reasonable to me.

Sounds like a huge disadvantage in your company’s choice of software architecture to me.

My understanding is that Valkey was forked directly from redis. So assuming you migrate at the forks point-in-time, then it literally is the same code.

[dead]

That is even more ridiculous, at least switching to a clean fork of Redis has business reasons. Following the latest cultural fads, less so.

One would find it hard to believe how often we hardcoded "master" to every corner of the software that ever touches any VCS.

But why are they spending any time switching away from Redis at all unless they are a hosting provider offering Redis-as-a-service?

I wasn't aware the license had any negative affect on private internal use.

+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

> Would you rather contribute to MIT software where everyone can make proprietary fork?

In my case that is it.

I'm totally fine with people taking my MIT licensed code in a MIT licensed project and running with it.

However, working for free on someone elses code base knowing that they can always go commercial with it or do whatever they want while I and the rest of the community is stuck with AGPL, that is something I'd rather avoid, if possible.

Yes, the asymmetry is a problem. If the terms the company has to use my contributions is more favorable to them than the terms under which I can use their contributions, then I'm not into playing that game.

You can't win all the trust back at once, it's a process.