[paxys]

Redis the project was essentially taken over by a company that had nothing to do with its development.

Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) started Redis and developed it by himself from 2009 to 2015, gaining massive popularity and building a large community in the process. It was FOSS the entire time.

A separate VC-backed company called Garantia Data used to make money by offering a hosted version of Redis. That company changed its name to Redis Labs in 2014 (and eventually just Redis), likely themselves violating antirez's Redis trademark at the time.

They then hired antirez in 2015 and started officially sponsoring the project.

From there began a slow transformation of Redis from a community run FOSS project to a proprietary locked down service. The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him and then finally kicked him out in 2020.

[orochimaaru]

They paid antirez and I'm sure compensated him for his efforts on redis. I haven't heard antirez being "kicked out". There may have been a separation of ways when redis inc. decided to not be truly open source, but I haven't heard of them being abusive or unethical with antirez.

So yes, antirez started it. He owned the trademark and gave it off to redis inc. and was compensated for it. I am not seeing why this has to be controversial.

I don't like what redis is doing. But they're within legal rights.

[nine_k]

Yes, nobody says that there's something illegal here. Were it so, Redis is high enough profile project for someone to take a legal action.

But this is a takeover that is slowly draining the value from the community and directing it to private pockets. E.g. Redis is now source-available.

There are still compatible alternatives: https://valkey.io/ (C, a direct Redis fork) or https://keydb.dev/ (C++, an evolved Redis fork), both BSD-licensed.

I wish RethinkDB was more alive :-\

[orochimaaru]

My point is the lesson here should be to wary of tools that don't have a foundation backing them. I have nothing but the highest respect for antirez. But redis never had a foundation. That makes it susceptible to be source-available. The same with Elastic search.

I think the best option against this action by Redis Inc is to move to valkey and use it to incorporate features that Redis Inc considers "enterprise licensed features". If there are big players in valkey, there should be a move to setup a foundation for it - so that it doesn't get taken in to be source available again.

[chipdart]

> But redis never had a foundation.

In theory Redis could have had a foundation. It didn't. Instead the project owner opted to sell it to a corporation. This doesn't happen by accident.

What indeed has a foundation is Valkey[1]. It's backed by the likes of AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.

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

[chipdart]

> But this is a takeover that is slowly draining the value from the community and directing it to private pockets. E.g. Redis is now source-available.

I think you're fooling yourself into believing that Redis was ever a community-owned project.

The truth of the matter is that the guy who developed Redis ended up selling Redis to a corporation. Since then he bailed out, and the corporation that owns Redis is now going through great lengths to monetize it.

The faster you forget about Redis and switch to alternatives, the better you'd be.

[paxys]

No one is saying what they did was illegal, but you'd have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make a case for it being ethical and in the spirit of open source.

[seneca]

> The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him

How did that happen? He must have given/sold it to them, right? I remember him making an announcement that he was done with Redis and stepping away from involvement.

[reconditerose]

The only public record I've seen him talking about it was in https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/issues/544, where he mentioned having sold the copyright.

[paxys]

Impossible to know as an outsider. They could have tricked him with false promises ("we'll take good care of the project and always put the community first, trust us"). Or he could have decided that the check was big enough and not really cared beyond that.

[bigcat12345678]

https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13670

Created a PR to add this into the context.

Feel free to comment on it.

Also, calling other bystanders to add other missing pieces to the history.

[RestartKernel]

That seems inappropriate to me for a README — at least in its current, somewhat inflammatory, form. Is the commit itself an act of protest or is this a genuine attempt at getting it pulled?

[jjtheblunt]

excellent summary (not kidding); thank you for it because i hadn't understood it until what you wrote

[OPoncz]

It's not right to say that Redis "had nothing to do with its development." They were a major contributors and were managing the project for many years. The problem like many other open source project is that the innovation is shared with competitors who happen to be huge corporates. What would you do if for every line of code you add your competitors get X10 customers than you?