[brody_hamer]

It wasn’t clear to me until I read their blog, that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”, which will continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!)

So we as developers don’t have to scramble to replace redis in our SAAS apps and web based software.

This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.

Redis’ blog post: https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-li...

[dkuntz2]

Well, except for the fact that "redis" the organization didn't create redis and isn't even the main developer of redis. The origin of Redis the company is literally as a hosting provider for the open source redis that they didn't create.

[simonebrunozzi]

I believe that Redis has an agreement of sorts with Salvatore Sanfilippo / Antirez, the creator of Redis.

[radicalbyte]

Amazon / Google / Microsoft made a massive mistake by not hiring Antirez, it's chump change for them to throw him $1-2M a year at him so he can work on Redis for them full time.

[evanharwin]

This makes me think - is it actually bad for Amazon/Google/Microsoft, that they now have to pay a licensing fee to Redis?

I feel like there’s an argument that these kind of licensing terms are almost beneficial to ‘big cloud’ because the cost/effort of all of these arrangements might dissuade smaller companies from trying to compete in the hosting and managed-services business.

[drewda]

Microsoft announced on the same day as the Redis license change that Azure's managed Redis offering will continue to run against the latest releases: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-...

Meaning that Microsoft is "paying to play" with Redis Ltd... while I have not seen any announcements from AWS or GCP.

[cjbgkagh]

I do wonder if Microsoft kicked this all off by telling Redis Ltd that they were willing to pay beforehand.

[pas]

they don't have to pay. they offer a Redis-compatible service. whatever it is, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares. (sure, in practice they just forked it. but it was not AGPL-like when the fork happened, so ... c'est la vie)

[manfre]

They have engineering resources to maintain a fork, which they've made. https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey

[BartjeD]

Microsoft has its own redis alternative: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

[wvh]

This. Why not support the projects a company uses in ways that go beyond the traditional ways of hiring employees in the form of physical bodies that defy traffic jams to spend large parts of their day in a physical building? There are some larger companies that employ open-source or third-party developers of course, but it seems to me that if your product is built around a technology or framework, it would make sense to invest directly in that project – share a developer resource as it were – instead of hiring an extra person in-company and make sure your use case and reliance is covered in the future.

Both the internet and open-source enable alternative employment and funding models that up until now might have not have been sufficiently explored.

[bloppe]

This is actually pretty common. My company did exactly that with an Apache project founder. I know of several others. They still work on their own project, but have to shift priorities.

Sounds like that's basically what happened here, too, except not with Google. I'm not sure why.

[mariusor]

Has anyone asked Filippo if he still wants to work on Redis "for them" though? The fact that he stepped down suggests he doesn't.

[radicalbyte]

He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.

Again, it's chump change, these companies drop that kinda money all the time in aquihires..

[emmp]

He worked there for 5 years. It probably didn't feel "random" for him.

[chipdart]

> He sold the trademark to some random company. Amazon / Google / Microsoft could have thrown him $30M for that and put Redis in an OSS Foundation.

It sounds like a very bad deal for the likes of Amazon et al. The likes of Amazon offer Redis alongside memcache just because cloud adopters might want to use a memory cache service,but there is no value in buying trademarks for it.

I mean, just take a quick look how Amazon offers managed RDBMS, and how the specific DB is just an afterthought behind a compatible interface.

People seem to think that just because some company has cash that they should mindlessly spend it on things that add absolutely no value.

[jbverschoor]

Same with many open source creators.

Plus some great projects don’t even get (monetary) contributions from large corporations. I think because it could weaken their legal position.

[alex_duf]

I mean I love redis, but Amazon Google and Microsoft all probably have readily available in memory key/value stores at hand. Throw a little money and they can make it redis compatible, so we wouldn't have to re-write any code.

Redis is great as an off-the shelf component, but it's not exactly rocket science to re-implement for a big corporation. So redis doesn't really have any leverage in my opinion.

[radicalbyte]

It's all about branding and name recognition: they all profit from Redis via their cloud offerings. They have a strong incentive to support it and to have it as a viable open source project. Similar to other key opensource infrastructure.

Then their cloud-specific solutions are the up-sell (and lock-in).

[chipdart]

> It's all about branding and name recognition

I don't think so. The only thing they need to let their customers know is that they offer a memory cache service that is compatible with this or that interface. Whether it's Redis, memcache, Garnet, or whatever it might be, it matters nothing at all. All they need to do is ensure clients can consume their service, and that is it.

This whole thing sounds like a desperate cash grab that fails to argue any point on why it's in anyone's best interests to spend small fortunes on nothing at all.

[RajT88]

Not just that - there's a significant ecosystem around Redis. A huge number of client libraries and tools.

Which is why Microsoft's new drop-in replacement works with all those things. It could gain traction - who knows.

[jacurtis]

AWS has been pushing MemoryDB, which is redis compatible storage, works with the redis clis and supports Redis features.

I suspect in the long run, Amazon will eventually "pay" the licensing fee for customers that demand "Redis". But they will push everyone else towards their in-house fork of Redis that they brand MemoryDB or whatever. You will pay more for the Redis licensed version and AWS will steer you away from it, but it will be there if you are adamant.

This is already happening with Aurora, which has Postgres and Mysql compatible versions. If your company is big enough for special pricing, then you know they want you on Aurora. The pricing discounts for Aurora are insane (50%+) compared to what you might get on a traditional Postgres of equivalent size (20%). They will probably do this with MemoryDB and Redis eventually. Redis is available if you really need it. But this other thing that they maintain is discountable to half the cost of the other one and it becomes a pretty obvious choice.

[datavirtue]

Already done. We are talking about a key/value store here. I don't get what all the histrionics is about.

[simonebrunozzi]

VMware (Pivotal, if I remember correctly, which was part of VMware) hired him for a while, about a decade ago. They did a huge mistake as well, because they didn't take advantage of him at all.

[mondomondo]

Good products == low valuations it would have stunned the investors if they focused of quality instead of marketing.

[sneak]

*one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn’t mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis.

It’s a community effort and this is just as rude to the community that built it as they are claiming SaaS vendors are being to them by not “giving back”.

This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing free software is about as logically sound as expecting compensation from someone when you give them a gift.

[AnthonyMouse]

> This idea that you are owed reciprocity for publishing free software is about as logically sound as expecting compensation from someone when you give them a gift.

Ironically this happened because the community was using the BSD license instead of the GPL, when the former allows someone to fork the code under a different license.

If the big cloud providers wanted to stick it to them, they would create their own fork of the code under the GPL and make substantial contributions to it so that one becomes the main one.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yep. Precisely. Licenses are working as expected. People that spin this as “stealing” are simply showing their own lack of understanding.

[plufz]

I think everybody here understand that you legally can fork bsd code under a new license. I think you and them differ in what you think is morally correct to do for an open source maintainer in the specific context of the redis project.

(I don’t know enough to be in either camp.)

[evanelias]

> *one of the creators. Being the first committer doesn’t mean he wrote all of the thing that is today called Redis.

This is a false equivalency. No one is defining "creator" as "wrote all of the thing". When describing a project/product as a whole, there's a clear, massive difference between "creator" and "contributor".

Let's say you get a small patch merged into the Linux kernel, would you then call yourself "one of the creators of Linux"? The vast majority of people would not find this remotely acceptable!

How about proprietary software and employment arrangements. Let's say a Microsoft intern gets a few lines of code merged into SQL Server. Would you call them "one of the creators of SQL Server"?

Extending this logic to other words, would you say a company with N employees actually has N founders? No, because these words mean different things.

[x3n0ph3n3]

Not only that, AWS has been offering redis-as-a-service longer than the "Redis" organization has been.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

But if the shoe were on the other foot, AWS wouldn’t hesitate to rip the carpet from under anyone.

[chii]

It doesnt matter if they would've or not. Presumed innocent until proven guilty (via action). Using this as an argument doesn't work to justify redis inc's actions.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

I think your use of innocence is referring to your perceived ethical and moral compass, so while you have a theoretical point about guilty and innocent, your argument isn’t based on legality of actions which ultimately is all that matters.

But if you think AWS would have any shred of ethics when it comes to a topic like this, you’re much more optimistic than I am.

[objektif]

This is what I am confused about so what right do they have to enforce AWS from selling Redis when they do not own it?

[tapoxi]

Trademark, and it's licensed under BSD.

Basically Redis Inc is the one making the fork, which retains the Redis name since they purchased it from antirez.

[nebulous1]

From what I understand they acquired the rights to redis from antirez sometime after employing him. I assume he received money for this.

[mythz]

The licensing change only applies to their future versions which they own all contributions of which AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.

[happymellon]

> AWS won't be allowed to leech off anymore.

Doesn't AWS employ Madelyn Olson? I mean, AWS have paid for Redis development.

Not exactly a leech.

[mythz]

Yep still the biggest leachers. Token hires and flowery PR campaigns doesn't entitle them to most of the profits of other vendors products or absolve them of their predatory behavior.

But they wont be able to leech Redis's future contributions. Knowing AWS they'll most likely create a fork to continue raking in most of the profits in the short-term.

[happymellon]

Err, after this license change Redis Inc will be the biggest leechers considering they didn't contribute the majority of the code.

> Yep still the biggest leachers

Redis was literally licensed for people to do whatever they want. That's not leeching.

[nindalf]

AWS, along with Google and others have created a fork already. It’s very rude of you to call someone a token hire when they’re high up in the contributors list (#7 all time). Denigrating their work for no reason other than to “win” an internet argument.

We’ll see what happens though. If redis Inc (that never created redis) wins over AWS, GCP and others (who also never created redis). Both contributed to its maintenance, as GitHub clearly shows. We’ll see which fork wins out.

[lukaszwojtow]

Yes, they paid. And they can use the code they paid for. But it doesn't give them right to leech of any future code written by someone else IN THE FUTURE.

[chii]

Calling it leech isn't right, because what makes aws any different from another user? Just because they're selling the hosting, doesnt make it any different to a regular user.

Code contributions from amazon would've been leeched by other parties using redis as well - something which amazon is accepting (and probably encouraging).

[happymellon]

And considering Redis Inc hasn't contributed the majority of the code, they won't be able to leech off other people's code because why on earth would anyone contribute to this trainwreck!

It's lose/lose!

[vasco]

AWS leeches as much as Garantia Data no?

[mythz]

AWS are the largest leeches of OSS, syphoning off most the profits and contribute relatively nothing back towards the OSS projects they rent seek from.

The "Free for all except mega cloud corps" license changes are to disrupt this status quo which currently sees the mega cloud corps with impenetrable moats from capturing most of the value of OSS products others spend their resources into building, AWS are then able to use their war chest profits to out resource, and out compete them, using their own code-bases against them.

It's unfortunate organizations need to resort to relicensing stop this predatory behavior, but its clear in AWSs 20+ year history they're not going to change their behavior on their own.

[ricardobeat]

Except Redis was never meant to be “owned” by this company. They are both predatory.

[objektif]

I think you are right about AWS leeching OSS.

[mirekrusin]

If you own copyrights you’re not the leech.

[Thorrez]

Who owns the copyrights? According to the article, since 7.0.0, 24.8% of commits are from Tencent, 19.5% from Redis, 6.7% from Alibaba, 5.2% from Huawei, 5.2% from Amazon.

[vasco]

If you own the copyrights you had money to spend at some point. Other than that unless you are one of the contributors you are leeching, just different flavors of leeching.

[coredog64]

> without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.

AWS employee Madelyn Olson was a committer on Redis since 2019. Since 2020, she was on the core team of maintainers.

[andrelaszlo]

Here's what she wrote about the above article:

> If you're looking for a primer on what is going on with Redis and why its license change matters, this is the article to read. As someone close to the situation, this is the best summary I've seen.

[a2800276]

Where?

[andrelaszlo]

LinkedIn

[ensignavenger]

AWS was directly funding Redis development, from the article, they are one of the top contributors, they even employed one of the core redis maintainers full time to work on Redis.

[esquire_900]

Which is peanuts compared to the 350 million that the VCs invested. You're totally right, but I think the internal financial pressure is higher.

[gklitz]

Ah, so it’s not about open source and moral responsibilities. It’s about the responsibility we all owe to VCs to ensure they make money. Gotcha.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

Isn’t that the deal we sign up for when we take VC money?

I like free money as much as the next guy, but VC isn’t it.

[Macha]

Who's we though? The former Garantia data did, but redis users didn't.

(And also I'd argue most of redis' value to users was already in place before the VC backed company got involved)

[ufocia]

All the Redis users have is a license to use and an expectation. An expectation is a belief that Santa will bring presents, that's all.

Where the value is or was is pure sophistry. You don't have a crystal ball, just like everyone else.

All this discussion is envious bellyaching from those that are probably leeches themselves. They just want the free gravy train running for themselves.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

You’re right of course.

From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects, if you’re using these things at scale it’s much more economical to buy some servers and hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis. But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.

[crasshit]

> without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.

Redis organization doesn't pay any sort of compensation to developers who contribute to redis source code. I do not see any difference here.

[ajmurmann]

Doesn't Redis Labs employ paid contributors? Does Amazon donate their contributions back to the community?

[x3n0ph3n3]

According to the linked article, Amazon has contributed 5% of the contributions to Redis, while Redis, the company, has contributed 20%.

[cloudboogie]

Right, now count in contributions from other cloud providers: tensent, huawei, alibaba and you'll find out that they contributed much more, than actual redis-employed developers

[jpc0]

I'm not for or against in this case. I'm anti what Redis the company is doing but I don't give a crap otherwise.

Are we really counting contribution based on LoC? Haven't we over the decades decided that isn't valid? Guess every person that makes this claim should once again have their performance based on LoC...

Some simple examples, I'm not saying this is the case though. What if most of Amazon's contributions are high impact contributions where most of Redis orgs are simply maintenance or feature pushes. What if the same is true for a 1% contributor?

By your own statement doesn't Tencent then have a larger claim to redis that Amazon or Redis does?

[sverhagen]

> Are we really counting contribution based on LoC?

I think they didn't include the LoC in the article as anything other than a broad estimate of contributions, perhaps for lack of any better measurements.

[fransje26]

> Does Amazon donate their contributions back to the community?

If they contributed to 5% of the code, and the code is open-source, then yes?

[ufocia]

> This is more about preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers.

But the developers licensed the software at no charge. What kind of compensation are they entitled to then?

Sounds like a case of sellers remorse/take-backsies one of the problems that open source was aiming to solve.

[bramblerose]

They are not entitled to compensation over their previous work, but you/me/AWS are also not entitled to their _future_ work.

[mahkeiro]

But when you see that currently Redis is mainly developed by Chinese companies or AWS all of this is rather ironic.

[ufocia]

Not sure what you meant. Is it wrong for Chinese companies or AWS to develop Redis or is it great, or something in-between?

I wonder how many bellyachers here contributed to Redis vs. just leeched. (Not a rhetorical question.) How many are just in the peanut gallery (just like I).

[jamespo]

5% of contributions is not “mainly” from AWS

[8note]

Does this mean they aren't accepting external contributions any more?

If I put in a commit, what is redis going to pay me for executing my code?

[ufocia]

Absolutely!

[VWWHFSfQ]

I continue to have mixed feelings about this kind of thing.

A (very) long time ago the Apache developers could have gone down this route.

> You can only run Apache under very specific circumstances!

Or memcached:

> You are only allowed to run a memcached server if you're only caching your own website!

We see how nonsensical this is

[wmf]

More like you can run Apache except in specific circumstances. People will put up with a lot if there's no alternative.

[8note]

*we reserve the right to ban your circumstance if we think we can make money from it

[ufocia]

The alternative is to write it yourself or commission it, so let's be honest, it is about the cost. When you don't know what something is about, it's about money

[mort96]

Whether it's gratis or not isn't the issue. Some people used Redis not only because it's free of cost, but also because it's open source. It's not anymore.

[fastball]

It is open source up until Redis 7.4. Why does it matter to you (someone that cares about it being open source) if future versions created by this specific company are not? You (or someone else) can fork it and continue the work in an open manner. AFAIAC that is the literal purpose of open source.

[mort96]

I don't understand what your point is. I'm saying that it doesn't matter that the community edition is still free of charge, because it's the fact that it's not open source anymore that's the issue. What part of that are you responding to?

[jamespo]

I suppose they're getting at why was it important that Redis was open source to you? Under the assumption someone else would be responsible for free updates?

[tbrownaw]

This accusation is not consistent with what you're replying to.

[ufocia]

The copies that were created under BSD still are. Go fork and multiply. You can even make your contributions GPL or commercially licensed.

[lenerdenator]

The problem with this is, it's virtually impossible to compete against the FOSS trunk that your now-closed-source software branched off of, or FOSS clones of it. Low-end proprietary UNIXes got wiped out by GNU/Linux and the BSDs, for example.

Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already exists. They'll do so because it is to their advantage to not charge for the license fees Redis now wants.

[fransje26]

How to saw off the branch you are sitting on..

> Amazon, Google, MS, and all the rest easily have the talent and resources to create a Redis replacement with code that already exists.

And they most possibly will. Goodbye, and thank you for the fish!

[maerF0x0]

Would be nice if Redis wasnt eating Lua's lunch and would make a big (public) donation to https://www.lua.org/donations.html#donation (Maybe they do, but it wasn't something i could find evidence of)

[kyriakos]

Isn't this the same with Elastic? Or that was a different situation?

[fastball]

Yes, very similar. ElasticSearch changed licensing, so AWS forked it and created OpenSearch.

[stephenr]

> that redis will remain free to use in their “community edition”,

I mean, they've already changed licensing for parts of the project twice in 6 years. I have zero faith that they won't pull a Vader and change the terms of the agreement again.

> continue to be supported and maintained (and improved!)

I'd guess that > 99% of any "improvements" Redis the company make, will affect < 1% of users.

As has been pointed out numerous times, it's essentially "done" in terms of functionality - but as a VC funded company they have to constantly do "something", so they'll keep adding niche upon niche features, giving the resume padders at other VC companies something sparkly and new to spend their budgets on.

Meanwhile 99% of people just need a fast key/value store, and maybe half of those need it to be distributed/replicated, and maybe a third need it to run some kind of scripting (Lua) to do "in-db" operations atomically.

With the addition of native TLS several years ago redis is, for 99% of users "functionally complete".

Sure, new TLS versions will come along and need support, kernel or library features they use will adapt or have improvements, etc, but I think you're vastly over estimating the amount of "improvements" to expect that will impact the vast, vast majority of users.

> preventing AWS from eating their lunch by providing redis-as-a-service, without paying any sort of compensation to the redis developers

Look I hate AWS more than most people would find reasonable, and even I'll admit they're not the "bad guys" in this scenario.

The project was released as BSD licensed, so AWS could if they wanted, fork it, and offer a service based on that, and make any fixes/improvements just in their service offering.

They didn't. They had paid staff contributing back to the redis project, for a number of years. This was literally the goldilocks project of the OSS world:

Numerous massive tech companies who all have the financial ability to simply run their own fork, and the legal right to do so (due to BSD-3), willingly contributing to the maintenance of the project.

As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis (and HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the tech community in general: if an OSS project you rely on transfers control from it's founder(s) to a company, you probably need to consider continuing with a fork from the last open version, because apparently "(try to) monetise popular open source" is the newest way to win the douchebag villain award given to MBAs at VC funded companies.

[KptMarchewa]

>As I've said before, the story of what's happened to Redis (and HashiCorp stuff) is likely to become a warning to the tech community in general: if an OSS project you rely on transfers control from it's founder(s) to a company, you probably need to consider continuing with a fork from the last open version, because apparently "(try to) monetise popular open source" is the newest way to win the douchebag villain award given to MBAs at VC funded companies.

Or, even simpler, if the project is not contributed to some open source foundation, and does not have copyleft license - it's a trap.

[ufocia]

Contributing to a foundation may be a trap too. If you assign your copyrights to a foundation, in many jurisdictions you no longer have control of the code you wrote. That means they could license the code in a way that you wouldn't do.

[crote]

Yes, but that's where the "foundation" part comes in. If it's one whose charter explicitly states that it exists to support open-source software development, it is legally unable to do otherwise.

[fmajid]

KeyDB, the multithreaded fork of Redis, is already way faster as a KV store.

[1letterunixname]

Agreed. This a good engineering effort over at Snap. It does clustering too.

https://docs.keydb.dev/docs/cluster-tutorial/

I wished they'd release some of their "Pro" stuff and/or internal-only features.

[winterplace]

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yeah. As usual whenever something like this happens, there’s an endless supply of blatantly misleading FUD by open source license purists. Let’s not pretend that Redis has become unusable by….all but a few organisations selling hosted Redis solutions. The people who are “rushing” to replace Redis are probably doing so in a way that isn’t on their boss’s radar, and it’ll stay that way because their bosses would probably tell them to go do more important things.

[8note]

I think it has become unusable to everyone though?

If redis thinks you're making too much money using redis, they'll relicense it so you have to pay them to do whatever you are doing

[ufocia]

They're not purists. They are zealots.