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Redis is no longer OSS (fosstodon.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 66 points 2 years ago (2 children)

https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-licensing/

This is the announcement.

This is a disappointing outcome but one that I think has been coming for a while. Amazon has profited off of Redis without giving much back for quite a while (at least I recall this being a complaint of the Redis folks, perhaps others have evidence to the contrary).

This is pretty clearly an effort to bring AWS to the table for negotiations.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    ${CORPORATION} has profited off of Redis without giving much back (...)

    I don't understand this blend of comment.

    If you purposely release your work as something anyone in the world is free to use and change to adapt to their own personal needs without any expectation of retribution or compensation, why are you complaining that people are using your work without any retribution or compensation?

    More to the point, why are you singling out specific adopters while leaving out the bulk of your community?

    It makes absolutely no sense at all.

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There's generally an understanding (the GPL folks think it's naive -- and this makes their case) that if you use open source software you should give back to it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    And yet fuck all people do. Ever.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Absolutely not true. I know this is just my experience, but I've worked with plenty of devs who've contributed prs and/or donations back to OSS projects in the past, and all my former employers have opensourced at least some of their software

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The GPL people are naive too because GPL doesn't always prevent it either.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It does, AGPL for servers, GPL for applications... If you make changes they have to be made available or you're breaking the law.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    You only have to give back if yours literally redistributing a modified version of the thing.

    If you use the software without modifying it directly (such as building on top of it, or building something that uses it), then that's allowed.

    Also if you make use of the software commercially, without necessarily distributing it, then that's also allowed. For example, Google could (I think they actually already do) modify the Linux kernel, and use it all across their company internally. They don't have to give back, since they don't distribute it.

    And last, if you don't modify the software but charge people using it, that's completely allowed.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    If you use the software without modifying it directly (such as building on top of it, or building something that uses it), then that's allowed.

    (IANAL)

    Not in the case of AGPL (use over the network and IPC counts as distribution -- presumably proxying the request is insufficient to disable this clause) and even in the case of GPL that's a very problematic position to put yourself on. You're basically talking about invoking a foreign process from your primary process to avoid licensing constraints and that comes with a lot of limitations as to what you can do.

    You can modify the GPL program to support more things via IPC but then if that program needs to touch a customer's computer, you have to contribute at the very least those notifications and any related improvements you made to make that possible or any new feature which makes more sense to be in the tool you're calling than your tool building on top.

    And last, if you don't modify the software but charge people using it, that's completely allowed.

    Yes, but who's paying for that? If it's a server hosting company, they'll pay the hardware rental fee, fair enough. However, you can't reasonably sell that software itself, people will just build it themselves.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    ElasticSearch tried this and lost hard already. OpenSearch has already out paced it in features and performance and ES is effectively dead. Such a braindead exercise to see Redis follow suit

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Opensearch outpaced elasticsearch? This article from April 2023 states otherwise

    OpenSearch saw over 3 times less code commits on core, and 14 times less work on important modules

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I wouldn't touch ES with a barge pole. They wrote their own gravestone imo. Check out the quality of the docs today between the two, and the SQL support. commits != quality or features

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The article goes more in depth about those points and ES comes out on top. OS is basically tailored to AWS, so outside of AWS it becomes less meaningful. But saying OS outpaced ES is a little disingenuous IMO

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Such a braindead exercise to see Redis follow suit

    I agree, this sounds like a desperate cash grab.

    I mean, cloud providers who are already using Redis will continue to do so without paying anything at all, as they're using stable versions of a software project already released under a permissive license. That ship has sailed.

    Major cloud providers can certainly afford developing their own services. If Amazon can afford S3 and DynamoDB, they can certainly develop from the ground up their own Redis-like memory cache. In fact, Microsoft already announced Garnet, which apparently outperforms Redis in no small way.

    So who exactly is expected to pay for this?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Can someone explain the benefit of letting AWS use your product, then throw resources at it to improve it to get and advantage over your product, basically providing a much better product to their users than you would be able to. But they do it without any need to contribute back. I don't see the benefit of this to the opensource community at all, but people here seems to be quite passionate about it so you must see this differently than I do. So, please explain your view on how such a situation is beneficial to the OpenSource community.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    FOSS has spent the last few decades operating under the assumption that companies would give back for the greater good if they found value and grew dependent on a project. What they didn't understand is that corporations are parasites who only care about immediate profits, and are more than happy to abuse the honor system indefinitely. There isn't any benefit to FOSS to continue operating under this model, which is why FOSS is shifting away from licenses that permit leeching for profit.

    It's no different to how corporations have worked to destroy the social contract, and do everything imaginable to evade taxes, offshore labor, corrupt our political systems, and not give back to the economies that incubated them and enabled their success — at some point you have to tell them to get fucked, stop being a fucking parasite, and pay their fair share... If they don't give back and improve things for the majority, they don't deserve to profit from it.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The idea behind making your software fully open source is that you don't care either way. And everyone is free to do as they please.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No, that is not all the idea. You might have that idea, but it is not a basic idea at all. To keep something open (as in open source), you must put restrictions that prevents it from closing.

    A government is not more free just because it lacks any restrictions, about becoming a dictatorship. It is just less restricted at this point in time. To ensure a free society, there needs to be restrictions in place that ensures it stays free. The same applies to software.

    Many seems to believe that less restrictions means more free or open, that is not true. It is just less restricted.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Oh no,sorry,that's sorry of what I meant: if you desire additional restrictions you'll need a license for that - as the redis devs are doing now, in fact.

    Which is fair. Quite fair. But if you do something less restrictive, you quite intentionally go the "dont care" route.

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