[mschuster91]

> For decades we lived in a world where someone could sell you an Apache server and a MySQL instance without having to pay money to Apache or MySQL. We can change that social contract, but like all tariffs, this one will be paid by the end users, not by the companies providing the service.

Yeah, but the Internet community at large took care about funding. MySQL always had the commercial support leg to stand on, and Apache httpd... looking at the contributor list [1], it's a healthy mix of universities, large companies (IBM, HP), ISPs (Vodafone, Cable & Wireless), hosters (Rackspace), small consultancies and individual private contributors.

In contrast, the megacorporations are largely absent from FOSS contributions (the exceptions being Netflix and partially, where it suits them, Google, Microsoft and Apple).

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/contributors/

[bojanz]

Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai, NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical, Chainguard, Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud, Oracle, Percona, Snap Inc and Verizon[0].

There is enough interest in sponsoring the development of infrastructure software. But if you want to build a "commercial arm", get VC funding[1][2] and earn millions, then it will never be enough. And I can't say it's unreasonable to want to do that, it just ultimately ends up being against the long-term interests of the project as a whole.

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/valkey-welcomes-new-pa...

[1] https://redis.io/press/redis-labs-raises-100-million-series-...

[2] https://redis.io/press/redis-labs-110-million-series-g-led-b...

[matsemann]

How much did AWS and those contribute until they got locked out of using Redis? That's what's interesting. That they now have to sponsor an alternative isn't exactly surprising.

[Towaway69]

How do they manage the payout to the individual contributors?

If I fix a typo, do I get a payout at the end of year for my work?

IMO that’s what it comes down to, that contributors that work for these companies have they contributions reimbursed through their salary. Other contributors might not earn that salary.

[mattmanser]

One of my clients is using OpenSearch instead of Elastic.

Big mistake. It's already behind elastic search, and worse too. It has bugs, weird behaviour and updates are already slowing.

On top of that, elastic have cunningly changed parts of their offerings to mean OpenSearch users can't use the elastic examples. For example they completely changed their .Net Core library so all new documentation in elastic is totally useless for OpenSearch.

They've added a way in the dashboard to run SQL for quick queries, etc. The OpenSearch version of that is buggy as hell, and for all intents and purposes useless because if you get the SQL wrong it just shows a blank screen instead of the error.

I'd be very aware of those problems, which appeared pretty rapidly, when going to these big corporation supported branches.

You are asking for trouble and are totally dependant on the company keeping that branch going who have little incentive to maintain or improve it now you're locked into their PaaS.

[easton]

Sort of. "Locked in" is a strong word, considering Redis will run on AWS just fine, either by buying their product or spinning up a couple EC2s and `docker run redis` (which is allowed under the license since you aren't reselling it). Yes, harder than clicking a button in the AWS console, but it's not like you're stuck completely.

I understand it more for OpenSearch, because scaling that is annoying, but Redis has built in cluster mode stuff that works fine without having Amazon's magic control plane.

(we're also using OpenSearch hosted by AWS but not for anything complicated, so haven't encountered what you have. seems like Elastic 7.10, frozen in time, which is fine for us. they forked the old version of the .NET library for people to continue using, but I guess you need to use the archived docs.)

[mschuster91]

> Valkey, the Redis fork, is currently sponsored by Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai, NetApp, Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Canonical, Chainguard, Ericsson, Heroku, Huawei, Google Cloud, Oracle, Percona, Snap Inc and Verizon[0].

Took 'em long enough to realize. I 'member the Heartbleed catastrophe and what pittances OpenSSL got [1]. And as always, there's an XKCD fitting just too damn well [2].

> And I can't say it's unreasonable to want to do that, it just ultimately ends up being against the long-term interests of the project as a whole.

That's the thing... conflicting interests, incentives and most especially expectations. Let's say I'm unhappy with the current state of managing a fleet of hardware servers and VMs, especially after the VMware disaster.

I could bite the bullet and pay VMware. I could go and get OpenStack running. It would be an utter pain to set up and run (because it is funded primarily by universities who don't have the constraint of "administration time effort" because that's what you have aspiring student volunteers for, but instead do have the constraint that it's hard to get hardware so OpenStack has to be flexible enough to support a ton of crap that any enterprise would have sent off to e-waste a decade ago). I could go and get Proxmox up and running, but it's AGPL so corporate legal may chew up my ass. Or I could whip up my own orchestrator, fit to work for my needs, and say I open-source it... and it might even be decent enough others may want to use it as well.

But then, many of these "others" won't be willing to pay for support, but they'll flood the Github issue tracker with all kinds of stuff that I now have to care about (because who wants to present a Github repository with dozens if not hundreds of open issues?), tons of feature wishes and demands (because obviously while I may run Cisco network gear for SDN, someone else may be a Juniper or whatever shop, and wants integration for that), and in the worst case someone gets 0wned because of some vulnerability that I might not even have realized - and I get the shitstorm for it, my name gets dragged through the mud like it was for OpenSSL or log4j.

So, basically I'm left with the choice between either accepting being labeled "lazy" (for not caring about "my project" enough) or to raise enough money to get the product competitive with what the other players are offering, and the only way for that is to go the VC route. And unfortunately, unlike old-school "startup capital", modern VCs want (or rather, because they're following spray-and-pray in their hunt for the 1-out-of-100 unicorn chance, have to aim for) the expectation of insane hyper-growth.

And then, one day, Amazon might go and say "hey, this FOSS thing is pretty cool, we'll add some glue code to integrate with IAM, backups and high availability, a fancy web UI and sell it on towards our customers". And suddenly, people would flock towards Amazon, who'd not be required to contribute back (because I chose either the MIT or GPL license to make adoption by others easier)... but I as well as the investors who enabled the product to grow to the stage where it was usable and popular enough for Amazon to commoditize would not see a single cent of it.

And everyone but Amazon loses out. I may be lucky enough to have gotten a few years worth of salary from VC funding (the reality is, most startup founders prioritize ramen lifestyle), the VC and their investors in turn lose out because why contract with me when they already got a frame contract with AWS, and the developers who worked with me also lose out for the same reason.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7575210

[2] https://xkcd.com/2347/