Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Sometimes the fork will gain traction and become the de facto "true" version (see Hudson -> Jenkins). Sometimes the fork will flop and people will largely stick to the original despite whatever caused the schism (see Terraform -> OpenTofu).
Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
> Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed it in a way that doesn't allow such. You can't recall a gift because you don't like how the recipient is using it. Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again.
The hyperscalers weren't selling Terraform though, Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings.
I'd say Elasticsearch is still the comparison to make here for a product that clouds just resold, then again, Redis the company didn't build Redis the software and their latest marketing smells more of VC hawkery than any reasonable pitch
> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it
If it wasn't open-source it won't be as popular as it is in the first place, Redis is also using ton of open source software or libraries for free.
Not defending AWS/GCP/Azure, I actually got my software used when i was young by a large company for free (not even a mention- Still using it i think, 5M+ Play Store Downloads), but that is the spirit of open source
I remember when we had the libav fork. Turns out 10 bickering idiots pronouncing the freedom revolution were ultimately not half as productive as one Michael Niedermayer.
> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process
Then build that UI yourself and sell it and make millions of dollars per day yourself, noone is stopping them.
Ah but you see there are 2 problems: 1/ "UIs" are harder than people think, especially by those that use that term derisively like you did. There are PLENTY of popular products that are basically just UI on existing data.
2/ AWS/GCP/Azure aren't slapping UIs. They're offering "managed operations" for these products. What is it? And sure, Hackernews is likely to scoff at that - we know how this site feels about dropbox -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
But if it didn't offer value, people wouldn't pay for it. Redis engineers are good at building a key value storage. AWS/GCP/Azure engineers are good at building managed operations. Combine them together and you've got the best of both worlds.
AWS/GCP/Azure aren't making money off Redis, they're making money off their experience in operating cloud infrastructure. And the free market wants to pay them to do so.
>Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see."
They are generally a
good thing, save for the poor souls that will end up maintaining a project that was started with them while they were still active. The success of the fork doesn't matter so much as the direction it inevitably pulls the original project.
The io.js drama gave us a huge step forward with NPM once their hand was forced. Hopefully some good ideas come of this too.
I'm actually surprised by how well received Valkey is right now, given that they forked not too long ago. Below are GitHub engagement insights for the two projects:
Part of the bet is probably that since Terraform is almost necessarily going to run on a cloud service that is already being paid for, the user might not care that a bit gets added to the bill.
Redis? I'm not sure. Like you say, they don't want Big Tech to slap a UI on it and profit. And, really, once they start competing on price (which they might sooner rather than later to keep people from going back to on-prem) you can guess they might use something that's free so they don't have to pay the license on a per-server instance.
Important to note that the "people" in this case is the company that bought the rights to the Redis trademark from the original creator and then took on $350M in VC funding. The community that created and supported Redis since its inception was not involved in the decision, and isn't getting any of the benefit.
I think Hudson -> Jenkins is not really a fitting example here, because it was more of a rename caused by Oracle owning the Hudson trademark. While Oracle halfheartedly indicated to continue Hudson on its own, from what I remember it was pretty clear from the start that Jenkins was the new Hudson.
>> Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see."
Whats funny about this one is as follows:
1. The license: BSD? LGPL? Do both... nothing says that you cant make the product available under both licenses. You prevent another rug pull...
2. The platform: Do both, Run the thing on GitHub like it always has been and back it up to the other platform. If MS makes GitHub into the next source forge... then you're already half way out.
3. The name: Not a hill any one should die on. Pick three, ask amazon legal to clear them or FSF legal to clear them and vote. Redict and valkey are both fucking stupid names... Yea you might have to live with storage mcstoreface but that would be better than either of the current options.
As for FOSS drama... Lacking any clear leadership, peoples ability to self organize is limited. These sorts of things happen all the time (systemd, x vs waylaid, how many unix forks?) The winning side is almost always the one with clear leadership.
What AWS/GCP/Azure provide with managed Redis is much much more than just a UI. There are a lot of technical issues that come with running Redis reliably in the cloud. I’d say UI work is probably 5% of that at most.
Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
I can.
Free software is, at its core, wage theft. It is truly unfortunate that so many people don't understand "big picture" economics, not the $2 for a loaf of bread economics, but the creation of value, it's consumption, and allocating resources to maximize creating the "right kind" of value. Most programmers "get" that writing code has value, hell tech companies will pay $5,000/week in total compensation just to do that, of course "coding for money" isn't the same as "coding on something you love", or are invested in, or does something you want. But here is the detail that so many miss, it is still $5,000/week "worth" of value. Whether or not someone is paying you to do it, there is still value there. And when you think about it is it all that surprising that putting that value into a thing doesn't make it something others might value too? Others who don't have the chops or the time to make it themselves? THAT is economics. And there are so many people who can see that value just sitting there and say, "Hmm, I bet I know someone who would value that, and I could get them to pay me some of that value in cash money in exchange for hooking them up." And it's game on buddy. And what is that game? Stealing the 'value' that would have been returned as a wages to a coder if they had been hired and keeping it for themselves.
You might as well decorate your front lawn with $100 bills and put up a sign that says, "These bills are decoration I forbid you from using them to go buy things for yourself." Sure some folks would respect that sign but a whole lot more would say, "Uh, good luck with that, and thanks for the cash."
If you write code for "free", no matter what license you try to put it under that "prevents" people from profiting off of it, they are gonna profit. You can either make it possible for them to profit and cut you in on some of that, or you can decide for yourself that you're okay with all of that value you created funding someone else's lifestyle.
Can someone ELI5 why I should feel bad about Redis charging massive companies like AWS and Google to use/sell/profit from their software? Am I really supposed to feel like Amazon is the good guy in this situation? As far as I can tell this change doesn't affect 99.999% of Redis users, but I understand I could be missing something?
For a lot of people, myself included, it’s ideological. It’s not about “feeling bad” for gigantic corporations, it’s about what FLOSS stands for. Something either is or isn’t free software, and for a lot of people that doesn’t matter, but it matters to me.
It affects users who were using hosted redis - there is no longer any competition. If you liked to use redis hosted by someone else (for example for lower price, or better integration, or something like this), it is no longer possible. It's Redis Lab way or highway, and they can jack up prices as high as they want.
Why, unlike Redis and Elasticsearch and Terraform, was there no big community fork of MongoDB when it was relicensed?
Cockroach, Materialize, and MariaDB were all also relicensed without massive backlash, I think. But I think that's because they had fewer users at the time.
But Mongo's was the one relicense event that didn't produce so much shock that a new fork came out of it. And Mongo's stock is doing great, if that's a good proxy for their overall success.
There were copious reference links in the article but the one that stood out to me and that I spent some time reading was this GitHub issues discussion on license [1] (but really on the differing opinions of two of the larger forks communities and values).
I am pleased that Valkey has made the decision to remain independent from the competing Redict fork project. The dogmatism on display in that thread is frustrating. It is one thing to stand by your own principles and opinions, it is entirely another thing to aggressively push your opinions onto others. With the two projects remaining independent, we will get to see which kind of community stewardship results in project success and longevity. The alternative, I fear, might have been technically minded people being railroaded by ideologically driven zealots.
Dogmatism and zealotry are words we probably mostly associate with religion, but I think they apply exactly to the kind of people I would proactively exclude from any public community I was trying to build.
If AWS and other cloud providers gave if only 0.1% of the profit they generate out of these open source projects back to the developers we probably wouldn't have this problem. Unfortunately they don't and it's only fair that eventually those developers take it in their own hands. It's not a great situation but it's certainly understandable.
The post is a little conflicted? It starts by saying he likes redis becasue it was a great fit for his personal vector db he wrote on top of it but then goes on to say he's worried about the future of the company for focusing on ai support, which is what he was already doing with it? I'm not sure I really get the concern about trying to support ai needs though. Atleast it's relevant compared to making changes to a stable kv store for the sake of change.
Are these redis forks just vocal terminally online internet people fighting, like most people don't resell redis and don't care, don't comment or get involved?
I really don’t get why Redis didn’t keep the same license but with an addendum that companies (where this applies to the ultimate parent company) that have more than some huge amount of revenue (say, $5 billion), can’t resell it. Similar to the license provision for the Llama2 model. That wouldn’t upset people nearly as much, since it would only apply to a handful of hyper scalers, and then Redis the company could cut deals with all of them to make a bit of money. Now they will end up with much less because of these fully open source competitors that were only created because of their foolish license change.
I thought the author was bringing in genAI for little reason...then I clicked through. For some reason storing vectors and chats is core to Redis' vision of its future. (https://redis.io/blog/the-future-of-redis/)
I'm, generally, a mobile dev so I'm not familiar with redis. My handwave-y understanding is its a in-memory key/value DB.
I don't understand how that brings anything to the table for genAI. Couldn't the pitch read the same if you were mongoDB, postgres, whoever?
Also, my goodness, my eternal enemy, the idea a vector DB is something different than keeping a store of file -> pair<string, list<double>>.
The odds you need a vector DB unless you're doing insanely high scale stuff with AI are very low. If you're doing consumer stuff, please use ONNX and keep the pair, and thus the file, local and private.
Redis will be used for genAI as it's always used: answer queries faster. Users are not interesting in waiting, answers need to be immediate. Plus reducing load on whatever you got behind Redis is a nice bonus.
A vector DB is the complete opposite of what you describe, it maps list<double> to pair<file, string>.
The queries it's good at are not "what vectors map to this filename", but "what pieces of text are closest to this vector, and what metadata do we have about them?" This is a non-trivial problem to solve if you don't want your queries to be O(n) where n is the dataset size.
This is useful because AI models can transform any kind of content (usually text or images) into vectors, in a way that content similar in meaning is transformed to vectors that are close to each other. This can be used e.g. find all documents related to your search query, even if your search keywords are never directly mentioned, to find articles similar to the one you're currently reading, to search images by their descriptions, or even to see how closely a user submission matches "undesirable" content, like spam or porn.
I agree that specialized vector databases are a little silly though, considering that Postgres and others have vector extensions now.
at work we're still at the pre-fork drama version of elasticsearch, it works and leaves us open to pick whichever direction we want to go at a later date when we need it. The same will be for redis, it works, no need to stay up to date.
My prediction is that Valkey will be the dominant "fork" moving forward. I don't believe the Redict team's prioritization on their niche values is going to resonate well with businesses that are going to end up both using and contributing to development in this space..
However I think the RESP is going to become even more of a standard protocol that many viable implementations support moving forward. Microsoft is working on Garnet, and I can imagine other major cloud providers having their own implementations or forks at least.
It seems to me that dual-licensing AGPL + commercial and no CLAs is the best way to go.
AGPL ensures no one will serve your software via network without also showing their code (which they can avoid by buying commercial licenses and thus funding the project) and no CLAs ensures that the project can not be relicensed without every contributor agreeing. (after all, if really every person can agree it is a good idea there might be some merit to it).
No CLA for commercial license would mean that any contributor retains copyright to their work. So, you mean they get proportional dividend from commercial contracts? Is there a precedent? I'm honestly curious.
I really like Redis, used it a lot in the past, but I just don't see a place for it in a modern, cloud-hosted architecture. A central cache just doesn't make sense in any scenario I can imaginewhen considering the cost/performance curve (my imagination might be limited though).
[+] [-] hnthrowaway6543|1 year ago|reply
Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
[+] [-] dainiusse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] snotrockets|1 year ago|reply
I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed it in a way that doesn't allow such. You can't recall a gift because you don't like how the recipient is using it. Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again.
[+] [-] Comma2976|1 year ago|reply
I'd say Elasticsearch is still the comparison to make here for a product that clouds just resold, then again, Redis the company didn't build Redis the software and their latest marketing smells more of VC hawkery than any reasonable pitch
[+] [-] vdfs|1 year ago|reply
If it wasn't open-source it won't be as popular as it is in the first place, Redis is also using ton of open source software or libraries for free.
Not defending AWS/GCP/Azure, I actually got my software used when i was young by a large company for free (not even a mention- Still using it i think, 5M+ Play Store Downloads), but that is the spirit of open source
[+] [-] styfle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cube2222|1 year ago|reply
I might be in a bubble of course, but from what I've seen, I've been positively surprised by the uptake of OpenTofu so far!
I do also expect OpenTofu 1.7 to be more interesting for people to migrate to, as it'll include a bunch of OpenTofu-exclusives.
[+] [-] davidw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stefan_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] deanCommie|1 year ago|reply
Then build that UI yourself and sell it and make millions of dollars per day yourself, noone is stopping them.
Ah but you see there are 2 problems: 1/ "UIs" are harder than people think, especially by those that use that term derisively like you did. There are PLENTY of popular products that are basically just UI on existing data.
2/ AWS/GCP/Azure aren't slapping UIs. They're offering "managed operations" for these products. What is it? And sure, Hackernews is likely to scoff at that - we know how this site feels about dropbox -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
But if it didn't offer value, people wouldn't pay for it. Redis engineers are good at building a key value storage. AWS/GCP/Azure engineers are good at building managed operations. Combine them together and you've got the best of both worlds.
AWS/GCP/Azure aren't making money off Redis, they're making money off their experience in operating cloud infrastructure. And the free market wants to pay them to do so.
[+] [-] ramesh31|1 year ago|reply
They are generally a good thing, save for the poor souls that will end up maintaining a project that was started with them while they were still active. The success of the fork doesn't matter so much as the direction it inevitably pulls the original project.
The io.js drama gave us a huge step forward with NPM once their hand was forced. Hopefully some good ideas come of this too.
[+] [-] sdesol|1 year ago|reply
https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&nb=all
For a longer case study, you might be interested in Elastic and OpenSearch
https://devboard.gitsense.com/opensearch-project?id=e766e581...
Both projects are quite healthy, but Elastic is still clearly more popular.
[+] [-] lenerdenator|1 year ago|reply
Redis? I'm not sure. Like you say, they don't want Big Tech to slap a UI on it and profit. And, really, once they start competing on price (which they might sooner rather than later to keep people from going back to on-prem) you can guess they might use something that's free so they don't have to pay the license on a per-server instance.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
Important to note that the "people" in this case is the company that bought the rights to the Redis trademark from the original creator and then took on $350M in VC funding. The community that created and supported Redis since its inception was not involved in the decision, and isn't getting any of the benefit.
[+] [-] karmakaze|1 year ago|reply
For Redis there could be space for both, but if I want anything larger than a single instance I'd just sooner use MS Garnet[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39752504
[+] [-] geek_at|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zer00eyz|1 year ago|reply
Whats funny about this one is as follows:
1. The license: BSD? LGPL? Do both... nothing says that you cant make the product available under both licenses. You prevent another rug pull...
2. The platform: Do both, Run the thing on GitHub like it always has been and back it up to the other platform. If MS makes GitHub into the next source forge... then you're already half way out.
3. The name: Not a hill any one should die on. Pick three, ask amazon legal to clear them or FSF legal to clear them and vote. Redict and valkey are both fucking stupid names... Yea you might have to live with storage mcstoreface but that would be better than either of the current options.
As for FOSS drama... Lacking any clear leadership, peoples ability to self organize is limited. These sorts of things happen all the time (systemd, x vs waylaid, how many unix forks?) The winning side is almost always the one with clear leadership.
[+] [-] jedmeyers|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kyriakos|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] NewJazz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asia92|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|1 year ago|reply
I can.
Free software is, at its core, wage theft. It is truly unfortunate that so many people don't understand "big picture" economics, not the $2 for a loaf of bread economics, but the creation of value, it's consumption, and allocating resources to maximize creating the "right kind" of value. Most programmers "get" that writing code has value, hell tech companies will pay $5,000/week in total compensation just to do that, of course "coding for money" isn't the same as "coding on something you love", or are invested in, or does something you want. But here is the detail that so many miss, it is still $5,000/week "worth" of value. Whether or not someone is paying you to do it, there is still value there. And when you think about it is it all that surprising that putting that value into a thing doesn't make it something others might value too? Others who don't have the chops or the time to make it themselves? THAT is economics. And there are so many people who can see that value just sitting there and say, "Hmm, I bet I know someone who would value that, and I could get them to pay me some of that value in cash money in exchange for hooking them up." And it's game on buddy. And what is that game? Stealing the 'value' that would have been returned as a wages to a coder if they had been hired and keeping it for themselves.
You might as well decorate your front lawn with $100 bills and put up a sign that says, "These bills are decoration I forbid you from using them to go buy things for yourself." Sure some folks would respect that sign but a whole lot more would say, "Uh, good luck with that, and thanks for the cash."
If you write code for "free", no matter what license you try to put it under that "prevents" people from profiting off of it, they are gonna profit. You can either make it possible for them to profit and cut you in on some of that, or you can decide for yourself that you're okay with all of that value you created funding someone else's lifestyle.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sjm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hnarn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] p_l|1 year ago|reply
They don't want to use big (especially US) cloud hosters.
Funnily enough, it also means most of those "buy hosted only from us" setups with hashicorp or redit are also dead in the water.
So it's build from scratch or fork or go for project that has clearer leadership on what it's for and isn't going to rug pull.
[+] [-] redskyluan|1 year ago|reply
OSS companies are fighting against cloud vendors to survice.
https://zilliz.com/blog/Redis-tightens-its-license-How-can-a...
[+] [-] eatonphil|1 year ago|reply
Cockroach, Materialize, and MariaDB were all also relicensed without massive backlash, I think. But I think that's because they had fewer users at the time.
But Mongo's was the one relicense event that didn't produce so much shock that a new fork came out of it. And Mongo's stock is doing great, if that's a good proxy for their overall success.
I wonder what the difference is.
[+] [-] zoogeny|1 year ago|reply
I am pleased that Valkey has made the decision to remain independent from the competing Redict fork project. The dogmatism on display in that thread is frustrating. It is one thing to stand by your own principles and opinions, it is entirely another thing to aggressively push your opinions onto others. With the two projects remaining independent, we will get to see which kind of community stewardship results in project success and longevity. The alternative, I fear, might have been technically minded people being railroaded by ideologically driven zealots.
Dogmatism and zealotry are words we probably mostly associate with religion, but I think they apply exactly to the kind of people I would proactively exclude from any public community I was trying to build.
1. https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/issues/18#issuecomment-2...
[+] [-] laurent123456|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hn72774|1 year ago|reply
You are pushing away potential customers with this behavior.
[+] [-] rafaelturk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mirekrusin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] binary132|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tayo42|1 year ago|reply
Are these redis forks just vocal terminally online internet people fighting, like most people don't resell redis and don't care, don't comment or get involved?
[+] [-] eigenvalue|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] malkosta|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] refulgentis|1 year ago|reply
I'm, generally, a mobile dev so I'm not familiar with redis. My handwave-y understanding is its a in-memory key/value DB.
I don't understand how that brings anything to the table for genAI. Couldn't the pitch read the same if you were mongoDB, postgres, whoever?
Also, my goodness, my eternal enemy, the idea a vector DB is something different than keeping a store of file -> pair<string, list<double>>.
The odds you need a vector DB unless you're doing insanely high scale stuff with AI are very low. If you're doing consumer stuff, please use ONNX and keep the pair, and thus the file, local and private.
[+] [-] erikbye|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] miki123211|1 year ago|reply
The queries it's good at are not "what vectors map to this filename", but "what pieces of text are closest to this vector, and what metadata do we have about them?" This is a non-trivial problem to solve if you don't want your queries to be O(n) where n is the dataset size.
This is useful because AI models can transform any kind of content (usually text or images) into vectors, in a way that content similar in meaning is transformed to vectors that are close to each other. This can be used e.g. find all documents related to your search query, even if your search keywords are never directly mentioned, to find articles similar to the one you're currently reading, to search images by their descriptions, or even to see how closely a user submission matches "undesirable" content, like spam or porn.
I agree that specialized vector databases are a little silly though, considering that Postgres and others have vector extensions now.
[+] [-] esafak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MrOxiMoron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Rapzid|1 year ago|reply
However I think the RESP is going to become even more of a standard protocol that many viable implementations support moving forward. Microsoft is working on Garnet, and I can imagine other major cloud providers having their own implementations or forks at least.
[+] [-] mfru|1 year ago|reply
AGPL ensures no one will serve your software via network without also showing their code (which they can avoid by buying commercial licenses and thus funding the project) and no CLAs ensures that the project can not be relicensed without every contributor agreeing. (after all, if really every person can agree it is a good idea there might be some merit to it).
[+] [-] kubanczyk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] snotrockets|1 year ago|reply