[jsmeaton]

I’m usually pretty ambivalent when a company decides to move to a license like BUSL. Sure it’s not “free” - but practically it only affects the likes of AWS from freeloading while making extraordinary profits. Especially true when a given company started the project. I understand why some hold strong feelings on the principles of OSS. My perspective is we’ll have fewer nice things if we allow the likes of AWS to cannibalise successful services.

But I feel no such sympathy for Redis nee Labs. It was never their project. They took over stewardship and then effectively stole the project for themselves. They’re not even the dominant contributor to the core product.

[YeBanKo]

Seems similar to what Elastic did few years ago [1]. I kinda understand their motivation. It's not theirs originally, but they had antirez working on it for 5 years as their employee. They are making some contributions [2], I wish GH had a way to see such an insight by company affiliation. On the other hand, AWS and likes can easily fork pre-license-change version and spin it into its own product. However, I am fairly certain that AWS Elasticache is already such a thing – their own fork that diverged enough from the upstream and they are not eager to share.

So I view it as every major cloud provider with redis offering has its own fork. Except that Redis Labs also owns the original name. But it can go on as a stand alone project, like MariDB was spawn off after MySQL acquisition by Oracle.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657

[2] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors?from=2019...

[AntonyGarand]

AWS did not launch their own spinoff alone, but instead joined the Valkey project by the Linux Foundation[0], alongside many other major contributors:

> Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it.

Seems like a good alternative to a single company's spinoff: Many major providers working on this same project should result in everyone benefiting from it.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...

[YeBanKo]

I don't have any inside knowledge, but I can't believe that they don't have an internal fork of Redis for Elasticache.

[anonthrow]

I agree with your points min general but want to share my experience and maybe some counterpoint.

Being a customer of the redis labs' hosted solution, we noticed several issues:

- RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's

- RLs solution is not even close to elasticache in its ability to scale

- when issues occur the organization internally moves incredibly slowly so simple issues can turn into prolonged outages

Moving to this licensing model will make it possible for them to better invest in these things. That said, given the quality of their offering and lack of investment in the actual redis platform, why would anyone continue to use redis after the license change? The cloud providers can fork off their own version and never look back!

I think they're shooting themselves in the foot here.

[pm90]

> RLs solution is way more cost effective than AWS's

Its not cost effective if the service causes extended outages as you mentioned later.

[tsimionescu]

Wasn't AWS a major contributor to Redis? How are they "freeloading"?

[420698008]

I'm pretty sure ElastiCache has been around longer than Redis Labs too, so it's not like AWS undercut them, plus RL got a ton of free market research from it

[jsmeaton]

In this case that’s true and why I said I don’t think it applies here. Typically it does though.

Open source services are in a weird spot. They spend tonnes of money developing it and big providers are able to cannibalise as soon as something becomes popular at very little cost to themselves.

I think we do need something between fully free and fully closed where cloud providers pay some kind of licensing. It’s a problem worth solving.