[sjm]

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?

[hnarn]

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.

[theamk]

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.

[evanelias]

> If you liked to use redis hosted by someone else [...] it is no longer possible

That's not true though. Cloud vendors can choose to pay Redis Ltd to continue to offer "official" Redis as a managed product. Azure is doing this. AWS and GCP just chose not to.

[theamk]

Can't imagine Redis Ltd will be allowing cloud vendors to undercut their offering long-term.

Even if Azure Redis is cheap now, just wait until the next low-performing quarter at Redis Ltd, and they'll raise Azure's fees to make their offering more attractive.

They are the monopolist now, no one can force them to have fair prices.

[evanelias]

I completely disagree with that prediction. When comparing the operating costs of a first-party vs third-party managed Redis service, cloud vendors have substantially lower operating costs for their underlying infrastructure (servers / data centers) than Redis Ltd. This means the cloud vendors can still offer a competitively-priced product, despite having to pay Redis Ltd for licensing fees.

Cloud vendors can also offer better inter-op between their managed Redis product and their other managed services, availability of managed Redis in every single region the cloud vendor offers, lower latency, etc. The managed offering directly from Redis Ltd can't compete on those qualities.

Additionally, Redis Ltd is motivated to not massively jack up fees on Azure, because in that situation Azure could switch to ValKey (or any other fork, or an in-house compatible re-write -- which they already have one of) and tell Redis Ltd to pound sand, like what AWS and GCP did.

Market forces are what makes Redis Ltd have fair prices, and this inherently means there's no monopoly.

[p_l]

For various reasons I ended up small-time hosting bunch of things for others.

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.

[forgotpwd16]

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39915700 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39915741

[remram]

It is not "their software" in the sense that they would have written it. So it's hard to feel bad when "others" are profiting from Redis too.