From where I left

by tilt • 2 years ago

1190 449 2 years ago

Welcome back Salvatore!

rcarmo2• 2 years ago

Well, I see this as great news. I've been tinkering with vector search myself and really don't like the APIs, query structures, even the embedding steps required. Anything that makes it simpler (and faster) is most welcome.

I do hope Salvatore keeps doing emulators for MCUs, though :)

antirez31• 2 years ago

Thank you Rui, my target is: API that can be learned and used under 120 seconds. I don't think more of this is needed, for the basic usage. Then there could be other stuff, but it must be incremental. Easy things must be easy.

rcarmo2• 2 years ago

Well, the VSIM example I got inside of 10 seconds, so at least for now you're on track :)

jeffchuber• 2 years ago

chroma's api i think takes something like 20 seconds

maremmano• 2 years ago

Bentornato ;)

Nabeel_• 2 years ago

Welcome back, Salvatore!

PieUser• 2 years ago

Will be interesting to see how the Valkey community reacts to this

bhouston8• 2 years ago

I don't think it changes the negative business actions that the company Redis has been doing. But it likely means that Redis may actually evolve now, rather than being a static target.

reconditerose4• 2 years ago

Valkey maintainer here. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I worked with antirez a bit before he left the project in 2020, and I still look fondly back on that time since he was a wonderful person and he helped me learn a lot. I wish he had considered coming to work with Valkey instead of Redis, but maybe we'll find some some way to work together that benefits both communities.

PeterZaitsev8• 2 years ago

I think antirez has made very rational economic decision. For Open Source Redis/Valkey community though it would be better if he had joined Valkey of course.

Note though it is not certain he even could - the Non Compete when you have significant compensation in cash or equity can be much stronger and run a lot longer than employment related

antirez31• 2 years ago

Appreciate your kind words, and I'm very happy it was a good experience to work together, it was cool for me too. I hope there will be ways to exchange infos and hack :)

bhouston8• 2 years ago

I suspect he is going to make a lot of money coming back to save Redis from the negative press they have been having recently as well as the threat of Valkey. I sort of have to view it in light of all the other events that have been happening to Redis.

antirez31• 2 years ago

I covered this in the blog post: no big money involved, I asked to rejoin and without a big paycheck on purpose because to be free to act you should not get too much money, otherwise it's all fake.

bhouston8• 2 years ago

But if you wanted to have influence without a big pay check, why not join Valkey? Redis, the company, in your absence has gotten a reputation as a predatory company that has attacked open source projects in other to further those goals.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/redis...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858144

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607

yard20102• 2 years ago

I love this sentiment, I guess you have to have some sort of basic economical confidence to be able to afford this.

metalnirvana873• 2 years ago

And Valkey with backing from AWS, GCP, and Oracle don't make any money at all ... wait aren't those trillion dollar monopolies?

The pot calling the kettle black

bhouston8• 2 years ago

Valkey also has the backing of The Linux Foundation. So maybe it just has a lot of backing in general.

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

BTW are you an employee of Redis? You seem to have created this account just to reply to me.

worldmerge• 2 years ago

Good luck!

I like Redis, it was my first queue system and it worked great. I used it for this project https://edwarddeaver.me/portfolio/control-my-lights to pass messages from multiple inputs into a central funnel.

Looking forward to reading more of your posts.

dxuh• 2 years ago

hint: (Claude AI is in its own league)

Is there a good way to use the Anthropic models as a private person? It's my understanding you can only pay for them as a business.

Veen2• 2 years ago

You can use the API and Claude as a private individual. I've been doing so for a couple of years.

Edit: Go here and create an account: console.anthropic.com

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

You can use the API and Claude as a private individual. I've been doing so for a couple of years.

You're using Claude since a "couple of years". You really must be an early adopter ; )

antirez31• 2 years ago

Nope it's like ChatGPT. 20 bucks / month.

byefruit• 2 years ago

As sibling comments have said, you can pay per month to use the web interface, pay for use of the API via self-signup or you can even use them via openrouter.

simonw9• 2 years ago

Claude is available for free (with usage limits) if you register for an account. Then you can pay for a $20/month Claude Pro account as an individual.

You can also create a paid API account as an individual and use it via their API, which is almost certainly cheaper than the $20/month Pro account for personal use.

I use the Pro account because I really like the Claude Artifacts and Claude Projects features.

ksec2• 2 years ago

Welcome Back. Antirez! ( Surprised This blog post is submitted just 2 min after it was posted )

I am wondering if Valkey has moved so far off from Redis the codebase couldn't be merged again? I am reading the top contributor to ValKey are now from Tencent Cloud, Google, Amazon and Ericsson.

Could someone help with me with SSPL, is it essentially AGPL v3 except instead of releasing the source code only you have to release the whole system that is able to run the services you are currently operating on top of ?

Just wondering these things from the sideline. As I am still on the memcached camp.

antirez31• 2 years ago

Hi ksec! Thanks. ValKey and Redis are not so different codebases so far, but I have the feeling they will diverge more and more. I hope that at least at protocol level they will stay compatible, to be able to use the same clients. I doubt the projects can be rejoined, because the backers have different goals. Amazon / Google / Alibaba / ... wants to keep using it without any revenue sharing, and Redis instead does not want Redis to be sold SAAS style since the cloud three-poly makes it very hard to penetrate the market without any agreement. I'm not a business person but this is how I see the current matter.

bonzini• 2 years ago

You have to release the whole system under the SSPL. So there could be a reading where you can't use Linux, you can't use systemd, you can't use glibc, etc.

ksec2• 2 years ago

So there could be a reading where you can't use Linux, you can't use systemd, you can't use glibc, etc.

Thank You. That makes a lot more sense why certain people dont like SSPL.

anonzzzies2• 2 years ago

I am a big fan your work, including your lua c64 coding thing which actually was a great educational tool for my small cousins and for some friends. Also works well on the go. Just wanted to say that.

antirez31• 2 years ago

I appreciated a lot reading your comment. I feel silly sometimes when I use months of time to write something like LOAD81, I question my sanity, but then I see that other people had some good time with it and I'm so happy: and also I'm sure that I used my time in the best way.

anonzzzies2• 2 years ago

It is a work of art for me as a c64 80s guy so I put it on too many people to learn coding. It is great!!! Thank you.

tluyben2• 2 years ago

I for one partially wrote a few mobile games with LOAD81 ; I was travelling and only had my Pandora with me; I wrote all the logic tested them all out with load81. Of course I had to actually get them on a mobile platform device and create a better UI, however all the logic and most of the UX was all done in lua on load81.

gavinhoward• 2 years ago

@antirez, if you manage to see this, can you tell me what you think of [1] as a funding model?

[1] https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... , though just read until you get to https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... .

didip• 2 years ago

Antirez, I am just wondering about something...

Given that you probably already have retirement-sized exit from Redis. Isn't it more liberating to start something completely new? Or maybe forked Redis as the foundation of something new? Is there a need to re-join the old company?

antirez31• 2 years ago

That's a good question. The problem is that: I would end doing something in the vector search space probably, or other stuff that are tangent to AI. I can do the same but in public, as examples of hacking with this stuff, to share with the community. In the process I can add a solid vector indexing capability to Redis. It looks like a nice way to continue hacking.

brabel• 2 years ago

From the blog post, looks like he contemplated that (I'm sure that while playing around with code, he would've thought of that) but ended up going in another direction. You can disagree, but you've got to respect his decision to try and do what is best for him, and what he believes is best for Redis.

world2vec• 2 years ago

Is Claude really that much better than ChatGPT? I Use ChatGPT Plus on a daily basis and have no complaints but is it worth cancelling it and get one for Claude?

antirez31• 2 years ago

If you find ChatGPT useful, pay just one month of Claude AI and use both. I bet you'll discover that Claude AI can help you a great deal more. If that will be the case, you gained a much better AI assistant. Otherwise it's just 20 bucks... For me the difference is huge.

pknerd• 2 years ago

I have used Claude(Free) for coding and architecture-related questions and found it pretty solid but I found chatGPT a generalist LLM that is good at many things. Is Claude the same? Or you found Claude better for coding related tasks?

Keyframe• 2 years ago

or maybe through perplexity he can try both (and more)

porridgeraisin• 2 years ago

I think both are really capable. However anecdotally, I notice myself doing way less of the "annoyed, cancel response, extend prompt instructions, regenerate" cycles with Claude as compared to chatgpt.

Also, I am not sure if it has my writing style preferences saved somewhere, but Claude uses the terse style I prefer to read explanations in, without me needing to mention it. ChatGPT can do it too but it needs to be prompted lest it do the whole "repeat question, bullet points, summary" ceremony. ChatGPT gets really annoying when you have do the "slightly more detailed, slightly more terse, there we go" ceremony as well. For similar reasons, I prefer it for code.

One place where ChatGPT absolutely takes the cake though is mathematical proofs heavy with symbols. Nothing else comes close in my experience. It's also better at latex typesetting (seems to be more fluent with common packages like amsmath).

devjab• 2 years ago

We use both, in my anecdotal experience it depends on what you use them for. The engineering teams which build solar plants use them as “an extra set of eyes” for increased quality control, and they chose ChatGPT. It discovered something to do with cable sizes and efficiency which ended up saving/making a lot of money. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise than that, but I know they had a much better result rate with ChatGPT. For my team which is software development, we favour Claude. It’s obviously rather anecdotal but it has been much better at Go than ChatGPT. For other languages like Python I don’t think there is any real difference. If you feed them both the same prompt they’ll often give you an extremely similar output, and neither will consistently be better than the other.

So I think it’s mainly to work with the one which works for you. I’ve seen some of our more junior developers first use Claude and then ChatGPT to refine their output, or the reverse.

electroly• 2 years ago

I was in the same boat. I gave Claude a try, just to see what I was missing, and I ended up never returning to ChatGPT except to generate pictures (which Claude can't do). Give it a try for a month. It's worth a shot. They have improvements beyond just generally being smarter. For instance, Claude can _edit_ a prior code block rather than just emitting a new one. It can build React components and show them to you, rather than just giving you the code.

thomasfromcdnjs• 2 years ago

For writing code, I've found Claude far better at conventional/framework based code. I've found ChatGPT better at reasoning about more complex/nuanced code.

As other commenters have said, that is just my personal opinion, I have zero evidence to back that up lol

vessenes• 2 years ago

Love this, welcome back Salvatore -- hopefully it's fulfilling and fun. You authoring some new vector primitives seem to indicate to me you might be back in your sweet spot.

Getting a 100x engineer back to making new things is great for the world.

Some thoughts on vectors and embeddings and etc; there was a spate of companies that launched RAG-related "new" databases a couple of years ago, and obviously we have plugins to major databases now. I appreciate the idea that some low level tools, properly tuned, will be maximally useful. There was a lottt of overhead playing with those vector dbs, and often in testing I would just want to throw up like 10,000 embeddings and do some things with them; I didn't want to have to choose a pytorch variant in a docker image to do so.

Anyway. It makes me wonder what else would be useful to have on the AI support side. I'll look forward to playing around with the module.

Attummm• 2 years ago

That is great news.

Redis remains my favorite database. I've had the opportunity to work extensively with it, not only professionally but also through open-source projects like redis-dict[0], a Python dictionary with Redis as the backend.

How can we follow your progress on the vector set feature?

[0] https://github.com/Attumm/redis-dict

bsnnkv3• 2 years ago

I really appreciated the section about OSI licenses as someone who this year stopped using them entirely for new work.

(Snippets from the article below)

I wrote open source software for almost my whole life. Yet, as I’m an atheist and still I’m happy when I see other people believing in God, if this helps them to survive life’s hardships, I also don’t believe that open source is the only way to write software.
Moreover, I don’t believe that openness and licensing are only what the OSI tells us they are. I see licensing as a spectrum of things you can and can’t do.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 2 years ago

See, I read that and immediately was reminded that I don't exactly love the OSI being the one true definer of Open Source... but somehow the only people who ever argue that immediately try to use it as an excuse to pretend their stuff is open for marketing reasons while avoiding actually giving users the same rights. Besides, it's not that "openness and licensing are only what the OSI tells us they are"; it's that the OSI and FSF and DFSG all agree.

benatkin7• 2 years ago

I appreciate redis, but believe me when I say, I never considered using redis under anything but its original license, and I am just as grateful for valkey as I am for redis. It is very easy to move and I will keep moving anytime there is a license switch-up like this. I prefer a fork rather than an alternative, but if a good fork hadn't emerged, I would have moved to something different with its own technical advantages and drawbacks.

nine_k• 2 years ago

What parts of the new licence are particularly critical for this decision? Just curious.

ofiryanai• 2 years ago

Very exciting! I sympathise with the Redis "lego" way. But don't you think that hybrid search ha meaningful use cases? E.g searches that combines BM25 or piplned search in more sophisticated way than simple filter + knn / hnsw then filter? Or maybe its more for a search engine than a cache

antirez31• 2 years ago

I think that hybrid is useful in many contexts, but that providing hybrid as a bundle with other filtering techniques, API-side, is not necessarily the best way. Just a trivial example, you want to filter by documents year for similarity. With Redis vector indexes you didn't even care about hybrid, you create different keys for different years. This is the usual Redis tradeoff, it's very similar to the past but applied to a novel field.

However I don't deny that in the future maybe, if elements of vector sets happen to be JSON documents (maybe just with the attributes you want to filter with, and a document ID), it may be useful to have VSIM options to filter by such scalars.

jcgrillo7• 2 years ago

more extensively thanks to Redis Labs later: a freaking Robin Hood of open source software, where I was well compensated by a company and no, not to do the interests of the company itself, but only to make the best interests of the Redis community.

Governments should do this and tax companies to pay for it.

Re: vector embeddings, two projects I've had recent exposure to--Memgraph and FalkorDB (previously RedisGraph)--are implementing similar functionality. I think the lego approach is really awesome, I wish this concept was more broadly adopted. All that is to say, this seems exciting!

munificent8• 2 years ago

However, during the “writing years” (I’m still writing, by the way), I often returned to coding, as a way to take breaks from intense writing sessions (writing is the only mental activity I found to be a great deal more taxing than coding)

This has been my experience too. With both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters", writing the code was a joy while writing the prose was hard work. Gratifying, but mentally draining in a way that programming isn't.

iamflimflam1• 2 years ago

That's really interesting - was chatting to a few friends who are very into using tools like cursor to generate code. They've been complaining of feeling extremely drained after a day of prompt writing.

antirez31• 2 years ago

Totally agree. It's very hard, especially since when writing fiction, and the kind of fiction I wanted to write, there are a lot of things you doubt about yourself: is my style as good as I wish? Are my stories and my characters strong enough, with the right motivations? And I bet many of this ingredients are still there even when writing technical books if the goal is to do a very good job. Teaching in written form, with a book, is like a long story that must fit, chapter after chapter, sentence after sentence.

block_dagger2• 2 years ago

Please keep writing, I want to read your fiction. I cal tell you have style from your blog entries. Lean into the style and readers will love you for it.

jaronilan• 2 years ago

I find, even in the short stories I write, that managing the story arc is so much harder than managing code execution…

braco_alva• 2 years ago

"Game Programming Patterns" has been of huge help throughout my career and it's always my go to recommendation for new game programmers and reading your comment makes me feel even more grateful that you made the effort of writing it, thanks for writing such a great book!

munificent8• 2 years ago

You're welcome!

nyarlathotep_• 2 years ago

Dropping by in the comments to say many thanks for both of these books.

I have hardcopies of both and "Crafting" remains my all-time favorite programming book.

It's delightful, educational, and beautiful.

munificent8• 2 years ago

You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed them. :)

foresterre• 2 years ago

Where did you get the hardcopy? (I already have the paperback for "Crafting Interpreters", but I prefer to buy hardcopies if available)

As far as I was aware, there are only paperbacks.

block_dagger2• 2 years ago

I have had the same experience. With coding I can be in that coveted state of flow for 10 hours straight. With creative writing, I feel exhausted after 3 or 4 hours. I didn’t expect this and don’t fully understand why.

hyperadvanced• 2 years ago

There are a couple of reasons as far as I can tell. Programming can be adequately gamified or fulfill basic dopaminergic feedback loops in a way that “true” creative expression (outside of an effort-action-reward feedback loop) cannot. With fiction, the value is strictly non-instrumental or context-specific. While the parsimony of the (formal) language you deploy can be (reflexively) satisfying to look back on, the real joy of art for its own sake is the response from the reader, which is necessarily slower than that of a computer, as it requires a more complicated system of evaluation than pure utility.

codazoda3• 2 years ago

Would Game Programming Patterns help someone who wants to build a slot machine? I’ve built a wall mounted machine for my home but I never got the software side done. I think a book could help but most of them cover very different mechanics these days.

munificent8• 2 years ago

Honestly, probably not. It's about software architecture for games, and not about game mechanics specifically.

codazoda3• 2 years ago

Why the down-votes? Are people specifically opposed to gambling or is it something else I said? I'm just wanting to write a hobby slot machine because they fascinate me but the mechanics of a slot machine UI are quite different than a 2D scroller or a 3D game engine.

I do appreciate the author answering. Thank you.

MisterTea• 2 years ago

It's because the audiences for each are different. The audience of programs are CPU cores that have a well defined set of behaviors. An i7 isn't going to one day decide it doesn't like the SHL instruction or offended by having to perform too many MOVs.

The human by comparison is more taxing to write for as your brain is the compiler and checker for the instructions of your language. You write, proof read, correct, proof read again, correct more, delete, re-write, etc. I get why AI tools for writing are in high demand. Hell, sometimes I spend what feels like forever writing some of the comments here on HN as I have to compress a lot of thought into a few, clearly written sentences.

munificent8• 2 years ago

It's that but even more so: you aren't writing for a single human, but for the superposition of all possible readers of the book.

It's sort of like trying to write a program that is simultaneously valid Perl, C, Ruby, etc.

adelmotsjr• 2 years ago

Does it have something to do with the ambiguity of our language (english, spanish, _et cetera_) in contrast with formal languages? Like, it would require more mental effort to describe something in the English language, compared to describe an algorithm using language constructs: you know the constructs, and you know your restrictions in the programming language; in the English language, you don't know in advance what can you say and what you cannot, and you have to imagine what is your message going to get across in reader's minds. Well, who knows?

Anyway, absolutely love your books, have the Crafting Interpreters print copy (which has been inadvertently unboxed by my friend; did want it to be still in the plastic) despite using only the website version, and looking forward to buy the Game Programming Patterns. I hope you continue to be successful in your endeavours (especially if they result in legendary books like these :D). Also, could we be looking forward to a version of yours of a CPU architecture book, a la Nand2Tetris ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)?

WorldMaker• 2 years ago

Our language centers evolved to build our "natural" languages and our "natural" languages evolved to take the best (most?) use of our language centers. Whether or not it is ambiguity or simplified context or some other "complexity mechanism", if you agree with the Chomsky hierarchy that our "formal" languages are pure subsets of our "natural" languages, then that alone would imply we use only a smaller subset of our language centers when working in "formal" languages.

Though yeah, that does feel awfully reductive as an argument, and leans on a lot of assumptions in Chomsky's theories. I know that there are axes where "formal" languages feel more orthogonal to "natural" languages than "pure subsets". Some parts of "formal" languages to me feel a lot more visual like poetry than linguistic in the same way as prose.

girvo2• 2 years ago

Game Programming Patterns

Huh, I own this in a print copy. Thank you so much for writing it :)

BiteCode_dev• 2 years ago

This type of genuine openness mixed with the excitement of passion is so joyful to read, especially from a high achiever with strong technical capabilities and a history of business success.

Salvatore is definitely high on my list of role models.

simonw9• 2 years ago

For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons:

1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust.

2. From a purely selfish point of view, my favourite thing about open source licenses is that they let me know exactly what I'm allowed to do and build on that software without having to consult a license. Licenses like the new Redis one leave me potentially needing to get my own legal advice depending on what I'm building on the software. I don't want to spend my time, energy or money on that stuff!

I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally. It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms. That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis, there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects. I'm sad about that.

(And yes, I do understand and dislike the trend of businesses building on open source without contributing back. There are no clearly correct answers here.)

jcgrillo7• 2 years ago

The question of what constitutes a "service" seems very murky, and although it's obviously not the intention of all these source-available, BSL style things, in a dark timeline it seems like there's a lot of room for litigious actors to behave very badly. The uncertainty is what makes it scary, I'd also like a lot more clarity.

antirez31• 2 years ago

The good thing about this is that since the companies are copyright holder of the code, if this creates issues, the licenses can be rewritten and modified in order to be as sharp as possible in the use cases they want to avoid (which is... two/three users in the world :D).

fweimer2• 2 years ago

No one is expected to use any of the code licensed in this way commercially. You enter a contract with the vendor, tell them what you need, and negotiate a price. At that point, it doesn't really matter what the copyright license says.

antirez31• 2 years ago

"Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc"

I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is that such value never gets lost. People are able to fork, and after a fork for the original project to still lead will be require to put something more on the table. Inside Redis it was tried very hard to don't change license. For years it was some kind of "dogma", something one could not even speak about. Then after all the kind of attempts, and following the experiences of MongoDB and others, finally this choice was made. (Disclaimer: I saw the switch as an outsider, so my information is not complete about the final decisions -- I for sure know how this was always considered to avoid if other setups were possible).

However now I see that there is the case for giving the community something in exchange to the license change: a lot of good things in the core, a very good attitude towards the community, and so forth.

benatkin7• 2 years ago

In a sense valkey is the main line and redis is now the fork. Valkey is about the same except losing the trademark. It’s similar to Hudson and Jenkins. It’s not so clear cut with OpenSearch.

simonw9• 2 years ago

I'm embarrassed to admit that I hadn't fully taken into account that those contributions do at least remain under the BSD license and hence stay open under those original terms. Thanks for reminding me of that.

crote• 2 years ago

With open-source software, a license is as much a social contract as it is a legal one. People contribute because they want to be part of a community building something which is beneficial to everyone. Everyone contributes where they can, and in turn takes what they need.

Redis Ltd. broke the social contract. They decided that the short-term profitability of the company was more important than the project as a whole, the community which had grown around Redis and the future of the software. Probably a wise decision from a business perspective, but that doesn't make it any less of a rug pull from a community perspective.

You're right that no pre-relicense code was lost. People could and did fork. But something far more valuable was lost: the community's trust. First they relicensed the code solely for their own benefit, now they tried to take over third-party libraries and started behaving in a hostile way towards the community forks. Why would anyone volunteer their time and effort when it is mainly going to benefit a company which is so openly antagonistic against its volunteers? After all, what's the next shady move going to be?

ensignavenger• 2 years ago

That is true, and that is how Valkey and other forks are moving forward. But the value wasn't just in the code- many folks contributed value by writing blog posts, making videos, and writing books or otherwise promoting "Redis". The Redis trademark owners had every legal right to change what "Redis" means by changing the license, but it creates a massive headache and a practically impossible task for everyone that gave so much to promoting the project to change all of these references.

Folks like to cite MongoDB as some great example, but Redis had significant community contributions in recent years. And AWS never used any Mongo code.

weinzierl4• 2 years ago

"I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is that such value never gets lost."

That is one side of the coin: value never gets lost!

The other side is that the BSD license is very clear what it allows. It's a good thing that there are licenses that allow what Redis did. It is also a good thing that there are other licenses which can help prevent what Redis did.

It is our choice as developers and we should never blame others for exercising the rights we granted them.

smolder• 2 years ago

Put another way, many people have contributed to Bezos' bottom line for free. The restriction is annoying but there should probably be a better way to get a piece of that huge value for everyone who generates it, mostly thanklessly. Some kind of OSS tax proportional to profitability would make some sense, as annoying as that might be to implement or deal with.

jillyboel8• 2 years ago

However now I see that there is the case for giving the community something in exchange to the license change: a lot of good things in the core, a very good attitude towards the community, and so forth.

You can do this without fucking over past contributors. Just... Don't change the license. Then still do all that other stuff. They're not contradictory.

bsnnkv3• 2 years ago

I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally

I've re-read this a few times and I'm still not sure what "harmful to open source" means in this sentence, could you expand on this a bit when you have time? (readings I considered: this will dissuade people from using OSI licenses, this will dissuade people from trying to monetize open source components, this will dissuade people from using open source components in their products all together, this will dissuade people from contributing to open source)

Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free

This one is not directly addressed at OP but I would be interested to see what the contribution numbers are like for Redis and other projects post-license change.

In my own limited experience (project with >10k, <100k end users), I received no meaningful code contributions when the project was MIT licensed, but contributions of significant features and large bug fixes skyrocketed after switching away from it (not saying that the license change is the reason for that, just that it didn't dissuade some people who are willing to contribute significant effort from contributing to the project).

Editing this post to say thanks for the response and clarity, I don't have anything else to add!

simonw9• 2 years ago

I see the open source movement as being about developers sharing their work in order to raise all ships and dramatically accelerate the rate at which participants in that community can build cool software.

A lot of that benefit comes from not having to worry about licenses: pick platform components with known open source licenses, build cool things with them.

I think the rise in not-quite-open-source licenses (especially projects switching to those licenses) undermines the things that I value about open source, and further encourages more projects to make those decisions in the future.

inopinatus3• 2 years ago

In this matter, that pretty phrase “social contract” is at root a demand for ego massage from a) contributors that don’t actually believe in the freewheeling spirit of the BSD/MIT licenses but used it anyway, and b) noncontributors whose sense of entitlement is projecting as loss aversion.

The revised license is nevertheless a problem for component selection. Usage caveats are a landmine and thereby a coherent motivation for the Valkey fork.

thayne3• 2 years ago

this will dissuade people from using OSI licenses

Yes, because other projects will follow the pattern of successful ones.

this will dissuade people from using open source components in their products all together,

Yes, because now there is a very real risk that after you have invested in using an open source license, the owner might change the license on you, which makes potential users more wary of open source projects.

this will dissuade people from contributing to open source

Yes, for similar reasons to the above.

gpderetta3• 2 years ago

switched away to what? To a source-available license? copy-left?

softwaredoug2• 2 years ago

Successful open source projects historically involve a bunch of companies lowering their costs by commoditizing expensive commercial functionality. Server operating systems, version control, programming environments used to be very expensive.

Linux, git, Python, Postgres, etc weren’t about getting rich, but about making something cheap and easy.

The paradox of these single company backed OSS projects is somehow making a big chunk of it free/open but collecting money off of other services. To me, I’m not sure that’s worked yet. Many will even say that these companies aren’t really doing open source in the traditional sense, but acting as commercial vendors that let you look at the code.

_acco• 2 years ago

AFAIK, the reason for these changes is basically "prevent AWS from eating our business". Is that right?

If so, are these trends harmful to open source? Are we not choosing between:

1. A world where all revenue in OSS infrastructure ultimately flows to a few big platform companies.

2. A world where these carve-outs are commonplace.

Meta's carve-out with Llama is so interesting because it practically calls the big companies out by name. Should there be a similar standard license for open source infrastructure?

gpderetta3• 2 years ago

Affero GPL-style copyleft licenses are an option, although they are treated as radioactive by most companies. A clause that triggers the extensions over GPL only for companies beyond a certain size might make them more platable.

girvo2• 2 years ago

Should there be a similar standard license for open source infrastructure?

Yes, I think there should be. The tech world is basically a monopoly at this point, and that's dangerous for a thousand reasons. The least those monopoly owners can do is financially contribute if they want to use these tools.

It's sad to me that the tech world is rallying around Valkey, which is Big Tech's fork: AWS et al are the ones behind it. We continue to give more and more power to the biggest players.

Sloowms• 2 years ago

I think it comes down to the initial choice to make something open source. At that point you're well aware that big companies might use your code and profit more than you ever will. If you don't want that, don't open source and they will never use your code.

It's having your cake and eating it when you get popular by being open source and then add restrictions when you have success.

I think there should be a change to licenses where the trademark is tied to the license. You can go proprietary but you can't take back the name.

Suppafly• 2 years ago

there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects. I'm sad about that.

It also severely sets the industry back every time one of these rug pulls happens and we have to scramble to find a replacement. Sure it might drive some minor innovation, but it also wastes a ton of resources by splitting communities and leading to tons of rewrote just to get back to a place of stability.

hgs3• 2 years ago

Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free

It's worth noting that the bulk of the code was written by antirez with only ~12 others exceeding 100+ commits [1]. And if you continue scrolling the number of commits-per-user drops off fast. It's striking given how famous the project is.

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors

softwaredoug2• 2 years ago

It goes far beyond the actual codebase to the long tail of supporting projects, conference talks, blog posts, etc

reconditerose4• 2 years ago

As one of those 12 other people, number of commits is not a good metric in this context. When you have a single maintainer, like antirez was for a long time, he could commit 10+ commits for a single small feature but I needed to get someone else to approve my commit before merging.

mise_en_place• 2 years ago

The license change is a necessary evil, otherwise BigCo will continue EEE and extract value from the project without giving anything back. It's time to hit them where it hurts. The world will be a better place if Google collapsed tomorrow. FOSS must adapt to SaaS and the modern rent-seeking behaviors of BigCos.

kqr• 2 years ago

It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms.

By "used to be" you mean for a brief period in the 2000s, right? Because this extremely generous open source landscape we have seen in the past 20 years were not the normal state of software for most of software's existence.

A generous open source landscape is something we -- you, I, the readers of HN -- have to actively maintain by shouldering the burden of maintaining the correctly licenced software. We cannot trust this important job to profit-making corporations.

osigurdson• 2 years ago

MIT + popularity = commercial license

space_oddity2• 2 years ago

Yep, when people contribute to a project, they invest more than just code; they invest trust in its principles

berkes• 2 years ago

It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms.

I'm not familiar with what's happening in this Redis licence change.

But if it was Open Source at version N, and you built your business (or stack, etc) on top of that, N will remain forever available to you as FLOSS, not?

Is the problem maybe that ppl expect future updates, maintenance to remain Open Source? Something that, AFAIK, no Open Source licence guarantees? So, misaligned expectations?

That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis, there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects.

It's not new. MySQL, Redhat and many others have done this for ages in the floss community.

alecco3• 2 years ago

Note his "build a business on it" angle. It's not an open source problem. Greedy techbros want free support forever from the community while contributing almost nothing back. Same for large corporations.

They see this as "rug pulling". I think developers need to do a lot more of that for things to change.

bojanz2• 2 years ago

What I dislike about the license change is that by trying to extract an extra dollar from Amazon&Google, the entire community gets hurt in the process.

Can I "dnf/apt install redis" on my Fedora or Debian install? I cannot, it's no longer packaged because it's no longer open source.

Can I go buy a shared hosting plan and get Redis? Or a small PaaS that sits on top of AWS? I cannot, because we have decided that every hoster is now as exploitative as Amazon, regardless of their margin.

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.

Disclaimer: I work for a PaaS.

mschuster912• 2 years ago

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/

poulpy123• 2 years ago

Can I "dnf/apt install redis" on my Fedora or Debian install? I cannot, it's no longer packaged because it's no longer open source.

to be fair that's more an issue with linux distrib than with redis

SergeAx• 2 years ago

you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you

Why not just stay on the last version with the license of your original choice?

prmoustache• 2 years ago

1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code [...] it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license.

The whole point of the MIT/BSD licenses versus licenses like the GPL is to not be limited by that.

It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust.

It feels like total ignorance from. If such license change bother you, you should only contribute to projects that are licensed under GPL or similar licenses and that don't force contributors to sign a CLA.

I don't like current Redis license, but nobody lost any code and any contributor can still contribute to any fork that started using the last open source version.

no_wizard• 2 years ago

Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust

I'm not seeing this being a factor in the broader community of users. Redis is still 'go-to' solution in its space. Haven't yet had anyone bring this up.

I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally. It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms. That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis, there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects. I'm sad about that.

I think the biggest thing is - that you acknowledge- that companies (particularly big businesses, like the cloud and service providers) build entire lines of business on this tech without contributing back, monetarily or otherwise, or even worse, try to shorehorn a project into prioritizing what they want over what may be better for the long term health of the community.

These license changes I've seen so far are all attempts to address that. How else are they able to do it with any long term success? They already aren't getting the funding they're looking for, clearly, while businesses build multi million and in some cases billion+ dollar businesses on top of the technology.

I'd argue that old permissive licenses aren't sustainable in the long run for any project like Redis

simonw9• 2 years ago

That vector sets design outlined towards the end of the article is delightful - it's exactly the kind of API design I appreciate from Redis over the years: simple, elegant and feels obviously correct to me.

antirez31• 2 years ago

Very happy to read this from you, Simon!

some1else2• 2 years ago

Where would a Redis vector store play a part though? Maybe you'd load up relevant embeddings for a particular user while they're interacting with their dataset, to make their responses quicker? You've already spent the effort on hydrating their data out of persistence though. I guess step one is likely being a more trusted alternative to the in-memory vector solutions like HNSW, Faiss, and a potentially faster engine than pg_vector. I've always seen Redis as an augmentation, but maybe in this role it can take the helm?

simonw9• 2 years ago

It's exactly that. Redis is an in-memory data structure server that you can outsource index-style operations to. Vector similarity is a type of index search. I think it's an exact fit for Redis.

nikolayasdf1234• 2 years ago

yeah! much better than FT.SEARCH monstrosity...

fishtoaster• 2 years ago

I'm really interested in this bit: "the fracture with the community is not about licensing, or at least it’s not mainly about licensing"

I wish he'd elaborated a bit more on what he thought it was about. My understanding is that it's 100% about the license. That's certainly why I'll reach for valkey instead of redis next time I need it. That's also what I've heard from everyone else in a similar position. What else would the community split be about?

antirez31• 2 years ago

For somebody, like you and many others, it was very important to retain an OSI license. But I feel that in general given that the new license is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what they can do with the code, and that the cloud situation was quite self evident, I believe that with better communication, and immediate developments/merges in the core, to counter balance the license switch, many people would understand the license matter.

We will not win back you as a user, and I respect that. But many, many users that see openness, good features and documentation, the github repository at the center of everything: I believe they will appreciate this, and can decide that Redis is good for them.

collingreen8• 2 years ago

Thanks for directly expanding on this.

worik2• 2 years ago

But I feel that in general given that the new license is IMHO good for almost every user

That is the nub of the sticking point.

The new is OK for people who only care about getting things done. But for people interested in building and being part of a community, giving as well as taking, not so much

This:

You may not make the functionality of the Software or a Modified version available to third parties as a service or distribute the Software or a Modified version in a manner that makes the functionality of the Software available to third parties.

QuinnyPig• 2 years ago

I hear you, but at the same time it was badly done. I’ve been referring to Redis as “a proprietary fork of Valkey,” and that message has clearly resonated.

Spivak• 2 years ago

is IMHO good for almost every user, from the POV of what they can do with the code

I think the thing that hurts a lot of folks is the one thing they wanted to do with Redis is use a managed version of it in AWS. And now they can't. We're trying to figure out our migration path right now and it's almost surely going to be Valkey.

Large vendors were never going to pay up and so it's all loss for everyone involved. I have to do work, every project that works with Redis has to do work to support Valkey now, the eventual divergence will force people to pick a side which will probably also be Valkey for everything other than the client libraries Redis Labs personally develops. It's a mess.

Open core proprietary add-one for new fancy AI features could have avoided the split and gotten you in the door with big cloud vendors willing to sell your add-on in the marketplace with revenue sharing. They did it with Bedrock and Anthropic is making bank off it.

saghm4• 2 years ago

It sounds like your opinion is that the communication around the relicensing was the issue rather the relicensing itself, but from the standpoint of the people who decided there was enough of an issue to switch away from Redis, is that the case? As an outsider to the Redis community both before and after the schism, I don't know that you're wrong, but I have to imagine that if I were someone concerned enough to consider forking (or switching to a fork), I wouldn't be happy with someone involved in the project making a blanket statement about whether my motivations were actually about the licensing or not. Ironically, this seems like it's exactly the type of communication that could exacerbate concerns around licensing.

leosarev2• 2 years ago

I'm a vendor of some packaged on-premise solution. We are using a Redis as a cache layer inside. Risk of being forced to GPL out our installer is unacceptable for us.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

Yeah, I have the same question, I wasn't sure if he had said what he does think the fracture was mainly about and I missed it.

JamesSwift• 2 years ago

Yeah, even if the split isnt entirely about licensing (and I do think it mainly is), the rest is a result of the licensing changes as well in terms of the implications and side-effects. Its the way people felt rug pulled and eroding the trust, which is now forever lost.

nikolayasdf1234• 2 years ago

you can see there is shift from roots in redis. original over-the-write protocol was human-redable by design. now more and more over last couple years API and instrumentation, docs, gets non-human readable at all (mix of ASCII and hex binary encoding, say in FT.SEARCH, speaking of FT.SEARCH it is barely readable even when in non-binary form...)

nikolayasdf1234• 2 years ago

also, lack of japanese and korean support... and non-willingness to integrate this when developers native speakers even want to and volunteer to improve it.

something is off in redis execution

hope with this guy comes back it improves!

alecco3• 2 years ago

Techbros and large corporations still have the original source code they built their business on. What they want is free community updates and support forever while they give almost nothing back. So it's not a licensing problem. It's not a free software problem. It's a "free as in beer" support problem.

AGPL only slightly prevents this by forcing them to share their changes to the source. And usually this is not very useful to the community, anyway. And very little effort. And the same people scream it's an evil license. They want free (as in beer) stuff forever and it's not just the source code. It's very ungrateful of them.

nijave3• 2 years ago

That's not been my experience. My limited experience at a large corporation was "throw money at vendors for enterprise support"

The bigger issue was startups and small/medium sized companies with limited technical support and limited money to buy enterprise support or in-house experts. These are the same companies heavily leaning on managed services from vendors like AWS.

sneak• 2 years ago

The license language is almost the same as the AGPL, with changes regarding the SAAS stuff. So, not OSI approved? Yes, but I have issues calling the SSPL a closed license.

The AGPL is a nonfree license, despite being erroneously classified as a free one. It is a nonsensical EULA masquerading as a copyright license, and I’m not the only person to point this out.

Comparing your nonfree license to the AGPL might seem like an argument in favor of the open-ness of your license, but in reality it is a condemnation.

It is insane to think that you should be able to dictate what happens to software that other people run on their own computers that you have given away as free software.

The AGPL and SSPL both demand this, for different reasons. Both are nonfree and both are wrong.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

I've never had a use for Redis, but I was very happy to read this, and sincerely wish him the very best of luck. He seems to have his priorities straight.

I am 62, and write more software, now, than I ever did. This time, though, it's for free. I make it a point to treat my projects as "top-shelf" professional-grade shipping software, as opposed to the "hobby-grade" that I see from many folks I know that write non-commercial software.

That's just me, and the way I do things. WFM. YMMV.

Anyway, hats off to him, and the best of luck!

justin662• 2 years ago

I make it a point to treat my projects as "top-shelf" professional-grade shipping software, as opposed to the "hobby-grade" that I see from many folks I know that write non-commercial software.

What are the practical differences in the end result?

My mind leapt to documentation, but I bet you meant more than that.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

That's part of it, but then, there's architectural integrity, code quality, testing, testing, and more testing, then there's testing, and some more testing, then, there's taking care of all the "boring" release stuff, like testing. Then, of course, you can't have a release without testing.

Getting an idea of what I mean? Finding a pattern in there?

I generally don't have a ticket system, beyond the GitHub Issues, and I have yet to go over one digit.

That's not because I write perfect code. In fact, I'm constantly finding problems. It's just that I never stop looking, and fix issues -comprehensively- when I find them. Usually, the finding and fixing is so fast, that it isn't even worth it to log the issue. The changelog has what I need, as does the checkin history.

Just because I release something, doesn't mean that I stop testing, documenting, or maintaining it.

In January, we released an app (which I won't link, here). It is currently up to version 1.7.0 (I've been busy), and I'm working on a 1.8.0 version. This will be a basically "behind the scenes" release that won't result in any real user interface changes, but will set the stage for adding a fairly considerable upgrade, down the road (maybe a 2.0 version, but we'll see).

I write code that can have a fairly significant impact on the lives of the folks that use it. It's a Responsibility. I take that fairly seriously.

levkk• 2 years ago

Hesitating to put this because it's not related to the topic at hand, but I find monospace font for blogs hard on my eyes. I think I'm getting old, but Arial (and other sans-serifs) are easier to read.

alex-moon• 2 years ago

Honestly working as a back-end Web dev is kind of a dream job just because you have these stack apps that are super fast, super stable and do exactly what they say they do. Nginx and PostgreSQL are typical examples, and I consider Redis one as well.

codazoda3• 2 years ago

However, during the “writing years” (I’m still writing, by the way), I often returned to coding, as a way to take breaks from intense writing sessions (writing is the only mental activity I found to be a great deal more taxing than coding)

I wrote and published my first book in a weekend frenzy and it’s one of my favorite accomplishments.

I’ve published half a dozen small books since then, the most popular of which is about how to write and publish your own book.

Over the past couple months I’ve been preparing a system to help others publish their own book. If you have any interest in writing and publishing, please reach out. I’d love to help.

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

Welcome back to the project!

I love to see original creators continue to work on their projects until the very end, e.g. Linus and D. Richard Hipp of sqlite. I think this produces the best quality software over the long term.

PeterZaitsev8• 2 years ago

Hehehe,

Reading between the lines. Redis is Hurting, Valkey is making a real difference at pulling the customers away. Elastic and OpenSearch were in similar situation, so Elastic went on to change license back to (more restrictive) Open Source License.

Redis went different route by bringing Redis founder back. I wonder if they go back on their license change next or do they think Redis founder endorsing license change, despite his previous promises of Redis being Open Source forever is enough ? Time will tell.

antirez31• 2 years ago

Except this is not true: I mean, I asked to rejoin, not because I evaluated the situation of the company, but since I wanted to do more hacking / community stuff. So you see what happens trying to read too much between the lines? That you invent what satisfies your needs as a reader, but drives you away from what actually happened. P.S. at Redis they didn't expected this at all and were really surprised.

And about switching to a more open license, who knows? Maybe we will be doing that as well if it offers enough protection - I'm not in charge for such decision but... I can suggest things -, so thank you for the idea (kidding apart, I was already talking about this possibility inside the company).

PeterZaitsev8• 2 years ago

Perhaps. I've seen people seen/write all kind of stuff when serious money are involved, and I also was offered to just just that on number of occasions.

I appreciate your honesty in disclosing what you still have Redis Labs stock, and assuming it is anything reasonable their value at future IPO would be much larger than any cash compensation which you might be getting as the part of the deal.

Reality is you did not fulfil (chose to or could not, I do not know) your public promise to keep Redis Open Source https://antirez.com/news/120

I hope your return will positively impact Redis as Open Source Project. Yet I'm disappointed to read your position on the Redis License - seeing cloud non compete license "basically as good as open source", as I far as I'm concern for many users which want to have software ran for them, and consume it as DBaaS it is no different to proprietary license, as it prevents competition.

stochastician• 2 years ago

At some point my daughter, who is now 12, and is a crucial person in my life, enlightening my days with her intelligence, creativity and love, wanted to visit NYC for her birthday.

I know this wasn't the point of the post, but it was the most beautiful thing I've read all week, and really sums up how I feel about my own children. A small aside in a much longer post but incredibly humanizing and wonderful.

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

I'm not a christmas person. Lights are pretty and I may throw up a piece of tinsel and a reef to make it seasonal but overall not a fan of the holiday.

I went down to the cafeteria today at work and they had school children carol singers. Seven/Eight years old singing Christmas tunes. I have to say it touched me, they were really putting their hearts in to it. The warm innocent spirit of something they believed in.

I then grabbed my styrofoam tasting lunch and then fell back in to my cynical self for the rest of the day. But it's pleasant to keep memory of.

mattbillenstein• 2 years ago

Well written and thoughtful piece - I don't have problems with the license - they control the project, they can do what they want, I can use it or not as I want.

The thing that's interesting to me is the idea that these things have to continue to "evolve." Like we need to keep adding features to keep people engaged to have an active community, yada yada.

In my mind, and maybe I'm wrong, some of these projects are just sorta finished - they've evolved to a completed state more or less and just need maintenance. Memcached has sorta went this route afaict - it's still tremendously useful for some things and it's not constantly trying to add data types to compete with other things.

BeefySwain• 2 years ago

All the conversations about SSPL seem to go the same way:

- Someone complains about the extra restrictions imposed on AWS (lets be real, it's basically just about AWS)

- People point out that SSPL is basically AGPL+, and that for the vast vast majority of people it doesn't make any difference

- People counter that the SSPL is written ambiguously/untested in court, and so while it might seem like it's AGPL+ and doesn't matter for most users, you can't rely on that

- People complain about rug pulling (valid, IMO)

My question is this: Can there be a AGPL+ that is OSI approved? Could there be a "AAGPL" that GNU releases that covers this (very common, and IMO valid) "need" for open source companies to not be cannibalized by cloud providers?

Is this conceptually unacceptable, or is it just that the SSPL is poorly executed?

stackskipton2• 2 years ago

Problem comes down to, what is cloud provider?

My company has a piece of software we will sell you that requires Redis/PostGres. For fee, we also offer hosting of said software. Are we now a service provider? Our software does come with ability to manipulate the data in Redis so do we have open source our entire code base? Would we get stuck in lawyer battle royale?

We have resellers coming on board so interface is being built that lets them deploy our software for their customers so Redis will be deployed by us and given to reseller? Are we cloud provider then?

Now, I think reality is Redis wouldn't see as cloud provider because we don't go "Here is Redis, do whatever you want." Lawyers however get paid to think of worst thing that could happen and our lawyers said "Eh...... I'd hate to have these terms hanging over your head."

That's why alot of people recoil at SSPL.

Luckily, Valkey is drop-in replacement for us, testing is almost completed and likely we will switch when paperwork is all completed.

unethical_ban2• 2 years ago

I agree with your analysis and I sympathize with Redis in some way.

It seems to me that it's painfully obvious what a cloud provider is, but that everyone is afraid of what a lawyer could convince a judge in the Eastern District of Texas to think a cloud provider is.

The technical definition should be something akin to offering raw R/W connectivity to redis databases for arbitrary purposes.

Offering a redis-backed SaaS should not be covered.

ryukafalz2• 2 years ago

Is this conceptually unacceptable, or is it just that the SSPL is poorly executed?

In my opinion it's the latter. There's a minor change you could make to the SSPL that would take it from "practically impossible to comply with" to something that just about anyone building a service with FOSS dependencies could comply with: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/the-sspl-is-not-a-reasonabl...

Essentially, add EUPL-like license compatibility clauses for dependencies to the SSPL.

I'm not saying this is exactly what we should do to accomplish that goal, but I think it's worth considering, and probably has a reasonable shot at being considered a free software license.

merb• 2 years ago

actually the sspl can’t be a fork of the agpl. Because osi and thus the agpl do not discriminate users and this includes cloud providers. A license like the sspl discriminates a certain user base.

stephenr7• 2 years ago

People keep talking about how the licence change was to prevent the likes of AWS from "taking and giving nothing back"... and completely ignore that AWS was paying an engineer to contribute to Redis in a significant way.

pabs34• 2 years ago

not be cannibalized by cloud providers

That would be discrimination against certain groups/persons, so not acceptable under the OSD.

https://opensource.org/osd

thebiglebrewski• 2 years ago

Just wanted to acknowledge the humanity of antirez. To many of us, they're a folk hero, but they're just a normal human being with a family who wants good things for the world and their family.

Thanks for opening up to us so much and for what you've contributed to the world antirez! And welcome back!

pookeh• 2 years ago

Can we please just move to using OSS licenses with a clause namely targeting cloud providers? e.g this MIT license is applicable to everyone except for the following companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google.

Leave the rest of us poor folk alone so we don’t have to seek expensive legal counsel.

forty• 2 years ago

I think the right solution for this problem, and many others, is not to allow the "platform" to compete inside their own garden.

So if you offer infrastructure, you cannot offer managed DBs there, if you have a market place you cannot sell on it, if you have an app store, you cannot sell apps there. Etc etc

akoboldfrying• 2 years ago

What if they had named Facebook in that list, and then Facebook became Meta?

I don't know anything about the legal side of things, but although I can see the appeal of a short blacklist, I think it would be a can of worms.

Nemo_bis3• 2 years ago

Most of the Facebook companies are still called Facebook, see for example FACEBOOK IRELAND HOLDINGS UNLIMITED COMPANY https://opencorporates.com/companies/ie/466405 and some of its connected companies.

Still, you'd probably need a license steward to keep the list of companies up to date, and you'd keep the list in an annex. Alternatively you'd need to pick some objective thresholds, such as "more than 1 T$ market cap or more than 100 G$ global annual revenues". This is the approach the EU followed with the Digital Markets Act.

(I'm not saying that I'm endorsing such an approach.)

pabs34• 2 years ago

That would not be an OSS license under the OSD.

https://opensource.org/osd

seqizz• 2 years ago

I think people are not afraid of the current change on licensing, but the magic is broken as soon as a company starts wandering around. Yes the current license is not that bad, but while we have valkey on the side now, how can I trust "Redis Inc." will not decide another small change which does not affect me, then the next one, until it makes something which does affect me.

antirez31• 2 years ago

how can I trust "Redis Inc." will not decide another small change which does not affect me

Good point: the key is that, starting from now, Redis Inc. should make small changes that positively affect you.

collingreen8• 2 years ago

Is this snarky or real? If real, how would this work? If snarky, then :(

crazypyro• 2 years ago

I don't have any involvement in OSS besides using it at my job, but I still enjoyed the post because of the notes on AI. I have noticed a similar disconnect in technical discussions between those who see the use of AI as a multiplier and those who don't yet see the value in it.

The company I work for has embraced Copilot heavily and its been an absolute game changer in terms of productivity. When you have a clear problem, it is quite amazing at producing working code that then can be modified. I've really enjoyed the edit in place feature as well. Yeah, I could go through and do all the work manually, but why waste the time? AI is a big time saver.

mysfi• 2 years ago

Really enjoyed the Salvatore's write up. Two things grabbed my attention: 1. He is also an admirer of the Claude! I can't emphasize this enough but coding has almost always been an isolating state for me. But now, you can feel some support with some intelligence! This is sci-fi! it's much more efficient than Google Search and docs. Not sure about the value added here, but when Salvatore explains how he's using the Gen AI for writing software, I really get to grips with my impostor syndrome. 2. Second: "One thing I particularly liked about the article was that Salvatore explained how he is using the Claude (any Gen AI) in his work. Salvatore is one of the programming figures for me (started professional programming in 2016~2017) and I am feeling really relived that these people confess using the Gen AI trick for writing software." this is were SWE ends and product starts!

antirez31• 2 years ago

Absolutely, I get any help I can, to do better work.

Trick for the sci-fi story I used. Cut & pasting the text of the story and writing this prompt:

"We are a small publisher, we received this manuscript for a sci-fi short story. We only publish top quality stuff, we don't want any garbage. Please tell us if this story is worth publishing in our high quality series, and what we should reply to the author."

This way it is really sharp and identifying what is lacking. It's like an editor review. Then you go back to work for 2/3 days. And check back to see if your work improved. But the important part here is that many bad things he says you know are true. You needed somebody to tell you, to put more efforts into it.

With programming, while I have some knowledge of math, sometimes for the kind of programming I want to do I need to explore stuff I didn't study or know. And also in this regard Claude has been totally incredible. And so forth.

I also use it to find potetial issues in my desing ideas. Of course if it says something that I don't recognized as a true issue, I just don't care.

tommica2• 2 years ago

I got similar experiences with Claude, it's so convenient to use it to get an idea for a concept and being able to go back-and-forth with it about some kind of a feature that needs to be built.

I can't emphasize this enough but coding has almost always been an isolating state for me. But now, you can feel some support with some intelligence!

This part from the original commenter resonates so well with me. Working basically as a solo dev, it's fantastic to have something that provides feedback and can challenge the ideas I have, so that the final result is good.

EternalFury• 2 years ago

I have been an open source contributor since age 24. I am now 53.

I have seen tremendous contributors get nothing in return except the satisfaction of having helped build something of value (which is huge, mind you).

I have seen opportunists fork, relabel projects as cloud services and tremendously profit in the process.

Since I am mo longer young, or naive, and since I have thought about it for quite some time, I must say it would be good to tie a token offering and a royalty scheme to open source projects. I feel contributors should profit in some measure when big corporations profit from their labor.

openthc• 2 years ago

Another thing that kinds of sucks about this whole "license rug-pull" kind of business is that other teams (like ours) who are publishing open-source software/tools are now suspects too.

Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved?

Folk can't take us at face-value (I'd argue demonstrated value) and level (unfounded) accusations at us; because some other player did things "dirty".

Well, other folk wanted to pay for support/customisation and in USA you make a for-profit entity to do that. So the corporate part of the open-source project is, nearly, a requirement.

weinzierl4• 2 years ago

"Folk ask themselves, why contribute to this thing (MIT/GPL licenses) if there some for-profit entity involved?"

You put MIT or GPL in the same bucket here, but really shouldn't because the difference is all that matters.

There is no "rug-pull" as you call it. What happened with Redis is what the BSD license allows and what people should expect to happen.

The combination of GPL (or AGPL) with a large enough and diverse set of contributors who keep their rights in their contributions is a proven way to prevent what happened with Redis.

It is our decision as publishers of open-source projects which way we want to go. It is our decision as contributors which open-source projects we support.

Both ways are fine, but blaming others that you regret your decision is not.

homebrewer• 2 years ago

The combination of GPL (or AGPL) with a large enough and diverse set of contributors who keep their rights in their contributions is a proven way to prevent what happened with Redis.

Also the lack of a CLA (and/or copyright assignment) because many "modern" projects under the GPL ask you to waive your rights away, thus nullifying the license. Do not contribute to them if you have any self-respect.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/12/DCO.html

hellcow• 2 years ago

Mongo was AGPL until 2018. The AGPL didn’t stop Amazon from abusing the open source social contract, hence why Mongo modified the license.

liveoneggs2• 2 years ago

The BSD license doesn't allow changing it to another license any more or less than GPL.

Osiris• 2 years ago

I look at bun in the JS ecosystem like this. They are open source for now but also backed by VCs. They will have to make money at some point.

I have no interest in engaging with that product just to have a new pricing model thrown my way and disrupt everything.

ozgrakkurt• 2 years ago

It is not even the for-profit thing, it is the VC, because they will be expect to make millions and millions off the project and that is not really possible with just support contracts and similar

Nemo_bis3• 2 years ago

You don't need to ask people to rely on your promises. Just make sure that you are not able to do a rug pull, and explain that. It's generally pretty easy (just don't require a CLA) but you can make it clearer. For example, clarify that you don't own everyone's copyright by writing a copyright notice which includes all of the project's contributors.

There are some practical suggestions at https://reuse.software/tutorial/

matsemann4• 2 years ago

What would you feel if you did all the work, but other companies made all the money by redistributing your software? Wouldn't you find that unmaintainable in the long run?

matchagaucho• 2 years ago

Welcome back!

And good timing... our brute force cosine similarity scan on Redis-stored vectors needs some help at the core level (ANN, nearest neighbor, k-mean clustering, anything would be an improvement!)

pauloxnet• 2 years ago

Other comments on https://lobste.rs/s/u0mrjp/from_where_i_left

impoppy• 2 years ago

It’s really sad that antitez and other people involved with Redis have to deal with all that backlash and what’s even more sad is that people are going for Valkey now. All this breach of trust bullshit imo comes from blind purism that ignores the real reason behind the license change. Valkey is largely sponsored by AWS and other big tech companies so they can have community maintained storage because they cannot use Redis anymore. I hope people will open their fucking eyes for a moment and see that Redis is trying to prevent the big tech to make enormous profits from what people were thanklessly building and maintaining together for many years.

titanomachy2• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing a bit of your internal thought process on career and life decisions. It’s very interesting for me to see how people at different stages of their career think of these things.

I think this licensing fracture that’s happening across the industry is unfortunate, there’s a been a lot of broken trust. The SSPL is on the face of it more reasonable than the BSL. It clearly states that it only becomes viral when “offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program”. So it seems it should be pretty safe to use Redis as a cache or session store within a larger system. Contrast with hashicorp, which forbids use in any product they consider a competitor. But I also empathize with people who are scared of using any license that’s untested in court.

Tangential: I love Inconsolata as a terminal font (and I appreciate the “hacker” aesthetic of a monospaced blog) but perhaps consider using a body font for your longer articles. Although I’m sure most of your readers know how to change the font if they want to, one of the great things about plain HTML :)

stanislavb• 2 years ago

I love that Antirez is on Bluesky and not X. We should all turn off X and migrate out of that toxic platform.

howlingowl• 2 years ago

Disagree. Bluesky is a political circle jerk echo chamber designed for weaklings who need authorities to hold their hand in the face of dissenting opinions.

stackskipton2• 2 years ago

At least Bluesky isn't hostile to people without BlueSky Accounts. I could read his entire Bluesky account despite not having one.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Why say Claude is ahead of the rest? (I don't keep up to date, only using mainstream tools in ides)

Right now I use Amazon Q to buy integrate into phpstorm and its ok. It's free so a major advantage.

Is it just terms of using their chat models?

film42• 2 years ago

I think it just depends on what you're working on. In my experience, Claude usually has the edge over ChatGPT for most coding or logic problems; however, there are situations where Claude goes too deep the wrong way and ChatGPT wins out by staying more high level. Claude and ChatGPT are also "free" too, btw.

Tiberium• 2 years ago

The author is of course mainly talking about the fact that the current Claude models are one of the best for programming. Only o1 can rival 3.5 Sonnet, but o1 is way more expensive and takes more time to run.

uncomplexity_3• 2 years ago

Think of it as "taste".

People have different tastes, artists and chefs have different tastes.

Claude and ChatGPT are crafted by different people hence you'll only see these nuances once you experience it first-hand, and you might not even be able to articulate it very well, you'll just find yourself gravitated towards one thing over another.

I suggest you try both.

stephenr7• 2 years ago

I think there are two important factors here that the author overlooked:

- the vast, vast majority of end users will get their software from a package manager, and for something as relatively feature stable (for what the vast majority of people use it for) as redis/clones, there's a good chance it's coming from a distro repo. Practically no one is installing it by building from source. The licence change means it won't be (at least new versions) in those distro repos any more, but the direct fork and spiritual successor (valkey) likely will be, and in some cases valkey will likely take over the redis name in those repos.

- this isn't the first time Redis the company has pulled this kind of trick, and I think it's foolish to believe the community is going to hang around and wait for the next time they say "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further"

mmaunder• 2 years ago

I’m amazed Antirez didn’t fork Redis and start fresh like Monty did MySQL. AWS, Azure and GC would be thrilled to support his work on an OSS fork. After 9 years surely any contractual constraints have expired? Maybe a sense of moral obligation? Or perhaps Redis Inc recruited him to prevent exactly this?

Either way we all very much appreciate the work you have done. Redis has been a game changer for many of us running small businesses on tiny budgets.

jerrygenser• 2 years ago

He has stock options in redis labs, so existing financial ties - although he mentions in his blog his comp for coming isn't wild, I wonder what the option package looks like

Cpoll• 2 years ago

He has stock options in redis labs, so existing financial ties

I was thinking "just divest," but they're not public yet, so you're right that it's a possibility.

alberth• 2 years ago

I'm somewhat surprised no one has mentioned Commons Clause.

https://commonsclause.com

gavindean903• 2 years ago

Seems like that explicitly allows SaaS kind of offerings so it wouldn’t si what Redis wants as I understand.

Nemo_bis3• 2 years ago

Perhaps because it's old news and a failed model which companies have now started rolling back (see ElasticSearch)?

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

zacksiri• 2 years ago

I've been a redis / elasticsearch user since the early days. Seeing these companies grow has been sources of inspiration for me.

I'm glad you're back and look forward to redis's future. There is still a lot of work to be done.

In terms of licensing there is no right answer, large companies evidently abuse opensource, at the same time community is required to make projects like redis / elasticsearch grow.

This is a good move and I think the future is long with redis. So much to explore and so much more that can be done.

uncomplexity_3• 2 years ago

whatever floats your boat man, thanks for redis!

uncomplexity_3• 2 years ago

btw qdrant did some interesting benchmarks against redis and elasticsearch here

https://qdrant.tech/benchmarks/

ralusek• 2 years ago

Truly psychotic community response.

History of this pattern:

- There is an open source project, someone wants to work on it full time.

- They set up a SaaS version of their project.

- Other SaaS interlopers eventually come about, but typically none of them can keep up with the main project's SaaS offering as they're at cutting edge and usually most competent and familiar with the project

- Then, a player like Amazon comes in and simply competes on the infrastructure front in a way that the original SaaS offering can't compete with, nor can anybody else.

At this point, the original project isn't able to exist as a business. If your reaction to this is "that's fine, the community can take over from here." Then that is literally the exact option on the table today. From the very moment that Redis Labs was made non-viable by AWS under their original license, the fork was right there for the open source community to take over. It's exactly the same as if the company had gone under. Go nuts with it.

But then when it comes to the license they come up with: it is literally the most obvious and reasonable thing I could possibly think of. Do whatever you want with this software, just don't release the project directly as SaaS.

It is so crazy to me! Nobody's labor was stolen. Every contributor to every patch of the project's work is preserved under the license under which they contributed. Go make Rediss. Go make Reredis. Or just keep contributing to Redis, knowing we can all keep using it, we just can't go make Reredis Labs. I think I'll survive.

ribadeo2• 2 years ago

This piece, while providing context, makes me question basically everything about Redis, despite it's lovely API.

Antirez extolling the virtue of the current LLM wave of hype coupled with his bizarre apologism for Redis Labs behavior is less strange than "why is this guy not 1)personally extremely wealthy 2)having reserved some key powers and control from Redis Labs from day1 such that he could have steered this, aka why content to be a somewhat powerless entity throughout the whole story of what happens to rhe software he wrote"

I also felt like the entire essay felt milquetoast as if Antirez was assigned to do damage control and upon recitation of the actual events, felt the need to defend his own choices to himself, as if he didn't even believe himself, defensive?

I have a huge amount of respect for the core design and its philosophy, FWIW

ribadeo2• 2 years ago

"Hapless" is the word that comes to mind. I mean, if the OSS you write gets commercialized and you aren't the one commercializing it...

saghm4• 2 years ago

To play devil's advocate, even though I'll probably never write anything remotely close to as popular as Redis, if by some cosmic accident I accidentally make something open source with enough popularity that it could be made into a business, I wouldn't have any desire to be the one to do it because I have zero interest in owning or running a business in the first place. I don't think it's really that bizarre or hard to imagine that someone like making things that people find useful but not want to have to spend the immense time and emotional energy into being in charge of turning it into something that makes a profit. Some people are genuinely not motivated by money beyond enough to be comfortable, and I firmly believe that's not a bad thing!

matsemann4• 2 years ago

Why do you think they would be extremely wealthy, given it's a product they're giving away for free, and it was everyone else (like cloud providers) making money off of it?

o_m• 2 years ago

Redis is valued at roughly $2 billion. The author owned all of it at some point. It is not strange to assume they would be wealthy.

Jonanin• 2 years ago

What's truly bizarre is the popularity on this site of questioning someone's own stated experience with finding LLM tools useful. On a site called hacker news, that usually celebrates useful computer tools. I'll never understand the obvious luddism here.

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

Why do you assume that he isn’t extremely wealthy?

Given the timeline leaving before the change and coming back after with the mentioned stock options one could almost assume it was his idea.

musha68k• 2 years ago

I love redis. I'm sure the vector feature vector will turn out great as usual.

So yeah, of course rooting for antirez and his family to get a nice slice of the AI cake!

vinay_ys• 2 years ago

When someone puts a significant and useful software under an open license (like BSD) and nurtures a vibrant open-source community around it, sure, everyone else can definitely take it and use it for free. But nobody serious will use it just because it is free. They will consider other intangible but critical aspects like risks to themselves w.r.t future viability of the project, ability to get custom work done to it or around it, keeping up with hardware and software ecosystem trends etc. These things have second order implications – how healthy the broader developer ecosystem is, is there a broad base of core committers we can hire, how easy it is to upstream our changes, who else is using it at similar scale, criticality, cost efficiency; is commercial support available (sometimes 3rd party commercial business support ecosystem is essential due to regulatory/compliance reasons), do hardware vendors actively participate in the open-source community and ensure it runs well on their hardware etc.

Apart from free users, even the contributors have very similar considerations for their participation.

But the starting point is the license – it has to be a clear and unambiguous open-source license that is widely well-understood – especially w.r.t the blast-radius or infection radius of the license. Does it infect the library code that is linked/loaded into it? Does it infect the independent binary/processes that scaffold around it (say, control-plane, orchestrator, proxy etc)? What are the obligations if it does? If we have to get lawyers involved to answer these questions because it is a custom license that is vaguely written or it has never been challenged in a court or the license holder is of unknown reputation, these are huge red flags.

Another equally important consideration is the motivations of the stewards of the project. While this isn't explicitly stated, one cannot be naive about it. Contributors and users will have to consider a gamut of scenarios – best/base/worst scenarios and make their judgement. With smaller steward organizations, there are one kind of risks while with larger organizations open-sourcing there are other kinds of risks. If they are competitors in some way that's another challenge. If there is no natural alignment of use-cases functionally or non-functionally, that's another issue etc.

With recent changes in Redis, all these things have become less clear and straightforward.

nikolayasdf1234• 2 years ago

wish redis worked better with the community! improved language support (japanese, korean) for FT.SEARCH; accepted contributions; listened to devs for API design (some of it just so odd); made it convenient to contribute to redis (and not a giant wall of ice...); profit sharing with contributors to redis would be great too...

Amekedl• 2 years ago

bro is entering his midlife crisis

lukaslalinsky• 2 years ago

I think Valkey now took over redis maintenance and I don't expect bigger users will reach out for Redis anymore. It seems like a better maintained project at this point. In my opinion, the licensing changed things permanently.

dev0p• 2 years ago

Amazing read, thanks for sharing.

And thanks for building redis! It's an amazing piece of software, no idea how we managed to do without it.

wg02• 2 years ago

Were these cloud companies, their product managers and execs were not ethical enough to contribute let's say just 2% of the revenue to the base open source projects and even directly label it as "Open Source Sustainability Surcharge (OSSS) in the invoices and UIs?

That would have been enough to stop forks and license switches. May be a little less wines, watches, women and yatches for the execs though.

nijave3• 2 years ago

I think this is much less straight forward when the OSS is glued to a commercial company.

Giving money to a competitor is different than giving money to an open initiative.

Does Redis Labs give back to the Linux Foundation and OpenSSL?

wg02• 2 years ago

Good question. But I still believe a percentage based revenue share would have been a far greater deal than none at all.

secondcoming• 2 years ago

It's too late for Redis, IMO.

We loved it at the start, but it's really hard to get it to scale.

The official client library for C/C++ is missing Cluster support.

The cloud offerings (MemoryStore) are a rip-off.

wslh2• 2 years ago

With all due respect, would it be more transparent for antirez to disclose whether he holds equity in Redis Labs and, if so, how much? While I understand he signed documents transferring ownership to Redis Labs, it seems ethical, especially in light of recent controversies, to clarify his position. Transparency on whether he benefits from Redis Labs’ decisions, or even a statement acknowledging that he cannot or will not discuss this would help address potential conflicts of interest and maintain trust within the open-source community.

antirez31• 2 years ago

It is literally written inside the post.

wslh2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the reply, I assume then the "no interest" is "no equity". Again, with all due respect to you, not trolling.

neomantra• 2 years ago

Thank you antirez for all your OSS and social contributions. I love reading both your code and your prose. Welcome back and I look forward to the next chapters.

Something stated periodically, and certainly in these comments, is how the license upset Redis OSS contributors. I understand there are many perspectives on the story, but this is generalized projection to support a viewpoint.

Speaking just for myself as an Redis OSS contributor -- a very very minor one but I've spent hundreds of hours dedicated to Redis dev over the decade -- I wasn't bothered by it with respect to my donated time or IP. Beyond that, my opinion is that license holders have the right to do as the licenses permit, including changing it.

Without a survey, we don't know about the rest of the contributors and do we somehow weight their approval by the extent of their contribution? In the end, these opinions don't matter directly and what matters is the actions individuals and organizations take, which KV store they chose to support with time or money.

Clearly some contributors and their backers didn't like the change and forked Valkey. I have since started collaborating with Valkey. But as antirez pointed out how it would go, it's because of technical grounds, not because of license angst. Valkey was open to rejiggering its Lua integration, something Redis wasn't open to previously; so I took the opportunity to advance that with Valkey.

As Redis becomes useful to me again, e.g. with this Vector API, I would collaborate there too. We can have different tools for different purposes. Either way, it will be interesting to see how these two codebases advance...

datadeft• 2 years ago

I am not sure what is going on with k:v stores and I do not understand how to hell we ended up with Redis. Using Redis in production for some time I am not impressed.

Redis does not natively scale across multiple cores in a traditional multi-threaded sense, you can still scale it horizontally (across multiple machines or instances).

This horizontal scaling is also problematic. Some of the cloud solutions we used would die during a scaling event.

I went on the hunt to find an alternative but not sure what to replace it with. At this stage the interface has to be Redis compatible because devs really like it.

I found this so far: https://medium.com/@shafreeck/titan-a-distributed-redis-prot...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

technologisty• 2 years ago

Welcome back, Salvatore and thank you for the post. It's good to have you back in the fray.

From where I left

Related Stories