Redis is open source again

by antirez • 1 year ago

1896 787 1 year ago

I'm curious whether the community will trust Redis-the-company again after this, or if they'll choose to stick with Valkey. The other concern is at least some big company legal departments are wary of AGPL software, which makes Valkey, still BSD, more attractive to them.

Edit: Regardless, thank you and the rest of the folks inside Redis for pushing to bring this back to OSS!

ksec2• 1 year ago

I am thinking the same that going to AGPL may actually push more people to Valkey.

Although I haven't checked if ValKey any substantial development since the fork.

reconditerose8• 1 year ago

Yeah, there has been a lot of stuff like performance [1] and efficiency improvements [2]. A lot of the contributors, that didn't work for Redis labs but worked on Redis OSS before the fork, moved to Valkey and they continued to contribute.

[1] https://valkey.io/blog/unlock-one-million-rps-part2/ [2] https://valkey.io/blog/new-hash-table/

olavgg• 1 year ago

Valkey has RDMA support, which offers significant performance improvements.

graton2• 1 year ago

Well Valkey has more commits to their repository then Redis does, and more contributors. So it appears to be active.

https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey

https://github.com/redis/redis

skywhopper4• 1 year ago

In fact, some of Redis 8’s new features were taken from Valkey source code.

VWWHFSfQ2• 1 year ago

I very much doubt that anyone will stick with valkey after the PaaS providers switch back to just offering Redis proper.

md39110275146• 1 year ago

Why would PaaS providers switch back to offering Redis? They've clearly all already invested a lot in Valkey (AWS, GCP, Heroku).

kiitos6• 1 year ago

Statistically nobody is using valkey.

echoangle5• 1 year ago

Are there usage stats available? How do you know this?

teaearlgraycold• 1 year ago

I don't know about valkey but I got word Nvidia was switching away from Redis.

cyrnel• 1 year ago

Amazon really encourages valkey in the elasticache dashboard. There's a banner advertising lower prices and it's listed first in the dropdown when you go to create one. Default settings do have power.

rmsaksida• 1 year ago

I've been using Valkey simply because after I updated to the latest Fedora version, it dropped redis and pointed me to Valkey instead. I assume as more distros do this and more people update their systems, the Valkey user base will grow. But perhaps with the AGPL redis that will no longer be the case.

shaky-carrousel2• 1 year ago

Yeah, all the open source distributions and most open source projects switching to valkey must be "nobody".

_msw_11• 1 year ago

If you use the latest versions of Redis, you are benefiting from the continued efforts of the Valkey development community. [1]

This is Open Source working well.

Unfortunately, the reverse flow does not work.

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13638

jzb• 1 year ago

That kind of assertion really needs some backup or it's just noise. I'll be honest and say that I have no idea what the usage stats for Valkey are -- and it may be that it's a drop in the bucket compared to Redis. But I don't know. Can you back this up or is this just your gut feeling?

oweiler• 1 year ago

Yet. It's a drop-in replacement, and both faster and cheaper.

lurking_swe2• 1 year ago

what do you mean? i work at a FAANG-adjacent company and our entire engineering org was told to switch to valkey, with an internal deadline from ops. My team supports a public facing service and we made the switch 2 months ago.

It was pretty easy, a small config change and some performance testing to make sure it worked well at scale.

Maybe nobody is talking about it online but some people have definitely switched.

seneca• 1 year ago

All of this aside, Redis-the-company has some of the least tactful salespeople I've come across in my long stint in this industry. Used car sales level tactics.

Between that and the licensing, I would never consider dealing with them.

antirez17• 1 year ago

The team of sales was, AFAIK, rebuilt from scratch recently. Please if this happened recently tell me, and I'll make sure to report back. Thanks.

cortesoft7• 1 year ago

We kept using redis, the license change never affected us. We had no reason to switch.

ketzo• 1 year ago

I imagine there is quite a large, quiet fraction (majority) of users who were the same way.

Not to say it’s not an important discussion!

ramon156• 1 year ago

Same here. The response from the community was valid, but basically didn't affect us.

dharmab5• 1 year ago

From the blog post it seems like existing users kept using Redis but new users adopted alternatives instead.

llmthrow103• 1 year ago

We switched to Valkey on our Elasticache instances and immediately noticed a performance improvement in our usecase that allowed us to reduce number of instances. Not really interested in moving back to Redis at this point.

eknkc2• 1 year ago

During this time I believe a lot of alternatives (mostly protocol compatible to redis so they would be drop in replacements) came into light.

Has there been a consensus on one? Is there a winner?

I love redis and will probably keep using it. Just curious.

DeepYogurt• 1 year ago

Valkey has replaced redis in a few distros

ezekg4• 1 year ago

Also PaaS like Heroku adopted Valkey as a drop-in replacement for Redis.

eknkc2• 1 year ago

It is a fork of the latest oss release right? I thought some completely new implementations were introduced.

ezekg4• 1 year ago

Of course it's the AGPL, which is essentially the SSPL in practice.

kstrauser13• 1 year ago

Except that it’s actually open source.

ezekg4• 1 year ago

In word, but not in deed. I'll say it over and over again: COSS startups don't adopt the AGPL because they want to prioritize user freedom, they adopt it as a means of defense.

ndiddy• 1 year ago

The difference is how compliance is handled for cloud providers. Complying with the AGPL requires releasing the source code for the program you're hosting as a service. Complying with the SSPL requires releasing the source code for "all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software" under the terms of the SSPL. This is effectively impossible for any cloud provider to comply with (it would require a massive engineering effort to rewrite every single piece of software used to convey the service), which is why the OSI didn't approve it as an open source license.

xiwenc• 1 year ago

A bit more info from CEO: https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/

Sounds like SSPL did not yield the desired outcome.

Glad AGPL is an option now.

ocdtrekkie6• 1 year ago

It did yield the desired outcome: Google and AWS are no longer using it.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

If by desired outcome you mean split the developer community and then chase them away to a newly forked competitor that is now widely used by all the cloud providers and users that prefer open source; complete success!

But I doubt that was the outcome that they hoped for. They created a large and successful competitor that by nature of being a fork does exactly the same thing. It's pretty hard to compete with yourself and the differentiate from your own product.

Honestly, I think Redis Inc. was better off when there was just one code base. AGPL just marginalizes them further. It's not an acceptable license for many corporate legal departments. So, it would necessitate buying a commercial license for such companies. I.e. Fortune 500 companies, public companies, and pretty much anything with a legal department worthy of the name. Note how Redis advertises AGPLv3 as "one" of the available licenses. The whole point of that license is selling commercial licenses.

Valkey is at this point stable and supported and a drop in replacement. It's pretty much the default choice for anyone not interested in buying a commercial license. That genie isn't going back in the bottle with this license choice.

More importantly, Valkey is a pretty active Github project with dozens of contributors in the last month. More than double those in Redis. Those commits aren't going to Redis. And Redis still requires the right to re-license your commits if you try to contribute. That's how they were able to pull this stunt to begin with. I doubt a lot of the Valkey contributors will be moving back to that status quo.

skywhopper4• 1 year ago

Not sure how the hyperscale clouds switching to a compatible/competing project from which Redis Labs gets no value or contribution is a win.

HackerThemAll• 1 year ago

How did you come to that conclusion? GCP is still offering Memorystore for Redis, Valkey and Memcached. https://cloud.google.com/memorystore

VWWHFSfQ2• 1 year ago

I'm guessing valkey will be dead now?

detaro4• 1 year ago

why? The investment into it has already been done, and quite a few places will be happier with its license still. I think enough has happened/too much time passed that its not a given everyone will just quietly move back to Redis.

kubatyszko• 1 year ago

Sure, but the damage is done already, and it's AGPL too.

MrFurious• 1 year ago

I can understand problems with SSPL license, but i cannot understand the problems with AGPL. If you use software for your SAAS service for free, and made changes in it, you should share the changes with others. Is free software, not a gift for your business.

dismalaf2• 1 year ago

AGPL is cancer. Valkey already exists, people already switched, it's already landed in a bunch of distros. I don't see anyone moving back, especially when Valkey has some big corporate support.

And for my personal usage, Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

nilamo• 1 year ago

Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

Databases could always do what redis did. Redis doesn't bring functionality to the table, it brings speed. If database caching, pub/sub, and streams are good enough for your use case, there was never a reason to pay for an extra instance just to stand up redis.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

Extra instance and developer overhead.

mattl2• 1 year ago

AGPL isn’t cancer. It’s a license that exists to solve a particular problem: the proliferation of free software in a world of network services.

If you don’t like it, don’t use AGPLv3 software. Those of us who do like it will keep writing AGPLv3 software.

dijit• 1 year ago

AGPL is cancer[0] in exactly the same way GPL is cancer, in that it's intentionally designed to *BE* cancer (or, congenital at least).

If you modify GPL code you are expected to open source the changes, AGPL adapts that to the networked world, if you modify AGPL code to serve something, you should open source those changes too, otherwise you're violating the original spirit of GPL which was designed in a time that was not as perpetually internet (and SaaS) driven as today.

If you want a true free license, BSD or MIT have you covered, but then you shouldn't expect corporations to give back.

A good example of what happens if companies don't give back is Linux VS the various BSD's. BSD is a lot more popular in appliances than you might otherwise believe but the popularity is starting to wane as Linux (despite GPL) has improved so much with companies giving back that the "free license" BSD is no longer being seen as good enough in some cases. People do not tend to give back to the BSD's.

[0] https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2014/01/17/gpl-living-with-canc...

antirez17• 1 year ago

RMS was enough of a genius to understand the potential of open source software, and basically gave us, with GPL and his evangelism (and his code! plenty of it), and the free software movement, the software world we are living now. AGPL reflects the fact that he understood before everybody else that something was happening with software as a service.

I love the BSD license, but now who says that AGPL is a cancer is making a big favor to the few huge companies that want to abuse the original dream that spawned modern and open software. Times changes, the best license to use change with times.

_msw_11• 1 year ago

RMS was not convinced that the Affero clause was a good idea as a general rule, though he approved the Affero-sponsored fork of the GPL that created AGPLv1. Hence, he did not support the addition of network copyleft obligations in GPLv3 during its drafting.

RMS has long expressed concerns about "Service as a Software Substitute" [1], and I think he hesitated to endorse the AGPL because it would conflict with his philosophy on the dangers of "Service as a Software Substitute".

Henry Poole should be given credit for raising the concern; Bradley M. Kuhn and Eben Moglen should be given the credit for advancing the license to address the concern.

It took a long time for the Free Software Foundation to accept Affero versions of the GPL under their stewardship with the release of AGPLv3.

So, perhaps he did understand before many people that services posed some challenges for his social movement. But it's my belief that he favored self-reliance and maximum "freedom" by running computer programs on hardware you own yourself as the remedy, rather than extending copyleft obligations to reach over the network.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

rdtsc2• 1 year ago

AGPL is cancer.

Good, you can think it is cancer and stay away from it. You don't like it, don't use it. It's like those bright colored poisonous frogs from the Amazon. That's better than some newly made up license that's different than anything else, and you have to wonder how it would hold up in practice.

dismalaf2• 1 year ago

I agree it's better than their previous made up license. It won't win back everyone who left though. The ship has sailed. They should have gone GPL.

md39110275146• 1 year ago

Our company made the switch over to Valkey, and we've invested hundreds of engineering hours into it already. I don't see us switching back at this point especially when it's clear Redis could easily pull the bait-and-switch again.

benwilber02• 1 year ago

Your company invested hundreds of engineering hours switching from Redis to a clean fork of Redis?

cogman102• 1 year ago

I can easily see this for a midsize company.

While it's likely an easy process to drop in valkey, creating the new instances, migrating apps to those new instances, and making sure there's not some hidden regression (even though it's "drop in") all takes time.

At a minimum, 1 or 2 hours per app optimistically.

My company has hundreds of apps (hurray microservices). That's where "hundreds of hours" seems pretty reasonable to me.

We don't have a lot of redis use in the company, but if we did it'd have taken a bit of time to switch over.

Edit: Dead before I could respond but I figured it was worthwhile to respond.

It's literally just redis with a different name, what is there to test?

I've seen this happen quite a bit in opensource where a "x just named y" also happens to include tiny changes that actually conflict with the way we use it. For example, maybe some api doesn't guarantee order but our app (in a silly manor) relied on the order anyways. A bug on us, for sure, but not something that would surface until an update of redis or this switch over.

It can also be the case that we were relying on an older version of redis, the switchover to valkey necessitates that we now bring in the new changes to redis that we may not have tested.

These things certainly are unlikely (which is why 1 or 2 hours as an estimate, it'd take more if these are more common problems). Yet, they do and have happened to me with other dependency updates.

At a minimum, simply making sure someone didn't fat finger the new valkey addresses or mess up the terraform for the deployment will take time to test and verify.

md39110275146• 1 year ago

By switch I mean that all new projects use Valkey instead of Redis, and we've invested hundreds of hours into those new projects.

brookst• 1 year ago

At the very least you have to validate everything that touches redis, which means finding everything that touches redis. Internal tools and docs need to be updated.

And who knows if someone adopted post-fork features?

If this is a production system that supports the core business, hundreds of hours seems pretty reasonable. For a small operation that can afford to YOLO it, sure, it should be pretty easy.

txcwg002• 1 year ago

I believe it. There are companies that invested hundreds of engineering hours to rename master to main.

mperham2• 1 year ago

There are companies using many thousands of Redis instances storing petabytes of data with millions of users.

Now consider a no-down-time migration. How long do you think that'll take to engineer and execute?

dbacar2• 1 year ago

Even the infrastructure switch and testing should take a lot of time, yet the application level tests etc.

edoceo• 1 year ago

What? Isn't Valkey a "drop in" replacement? I switched a couple of deployment, it "just worked" but maybe I'm just too simple.

tinix• 1 year ago

how does it take hundreds of hours to swap out a back end when you're using a trivial protocol like redis?

did you switch out the client or something? maybe the problem is not using pluggable adapters? is your business logic coupled to the particular database client API? oof.

I know the cluster clients are different (been there, done that) but hundreds of hours, seriously? or was that just hyperbole?

md39110275146• 1 year ago

By switch I mean that all new projects use Valkey instead of Redis, and we've invested hundreds of hours into those new projects. We've also tried stuff with the Valkey Glide client.

tuckerman• 1 year ago

Hundreds could be 200 which, at 10 hours a day 5 days a week, is like a week and a half for a team of 3. It seems quite possible if you had to do testing/benchmarking, config changes, deploy the system, watch metrics, etc.

Twirrim• 1 year ago

I think you might underestimate how little time hundreds of hours is. It's very, very easy to reach your first hundred hours in a task, e.g. taking a 40 hour week, 3 engineers = 120 hours.

If valkey is working, why spend that time reverting to redis, when you could be spending it on things that are actually going to provide value?

poincaredisk• 1 year ago

My company is relatively small. With probably 6 separate redis instances deployed in various places (k8s, bare metal, staging and prod environments) and dozens of (micro)services using them it's probably at least 40 hours (one person-week) to migrate everything at this point. Also there are things like documentation, legacy apps that keep working but nobody wants to spend time updating them, naming problems everywhere (renaming "redis" everywhere with zero downtime would be a huge pain), outdated documentation, possibly updates in CI, CD, and e2e tests, and probably more problems that ight become apparent in scale.

And we're honestly not large. For a mid size company, hundreds hours sound reasonable. For a big company the amount of work must be truly staggering.

geysersam2• 1 year ago

Why did you not pay Redis for a licence instead? I'm genuinely curious. Did you feel uncomfortable being tied to a license fee that might increase in the future, or was it just too expensive?

linotype• 1 year ago

No thanks, going to stick with Valkey for all future projects.

bravetraveler7• 1 year ago

After what Mullenweg has pulled, in the era of Blogging CEOs I have to be cynical.

Valkey.

kstrauser13• 1 year ago

Heh! While I appreciate what you're saying, I see this as the opposite of WordPress. It's basically a CEO saying oops, we messed up, let's fix this, which is fundamentally different than doubling down and ending up in court.

bravetraveler7• 1 year ago

Oh, I agree... I want to be wrong

fastball11• 1 year ago

antirez is not the CEO of Redis.

bravetraveler7• 1 year ago

Sorry, you're right. ICs, CTOs, and CEOs. Oh my. Pardon me for not subscribing to another accountability shell game. I again call Mullenweg.

/s in case I haven't piled it on thick enough to make an impact.

Read the last link of TFA [0], the last time this came up [1] (noting the timespan), and extrapolate as necessary.

0: https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ (CEO)

1: https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/ (CTO)

Or don't, I don't care. Point/fix has been made.

not_your_vase• 1 year ago

This will be very relevant when Valkey decides to go closed source.

It's better than the previous state of course, but it would have been even better if the previous license change didn't happen.

As the french people say: fool me once, shame on you...

benatkin2• 1 year ago

fool me can't get fooled again

But in seriousness, the chances of valkey going closed source are low. It's run by Linux Foundation. It would be like suggesting that Node.js might go closed source...

Zambyte5• 1 year ago

They were obviously making a tongue in cheek comment instead of seriously suggesting Valkey may go proprietary.

paavohtl• 1 year ago

Valkey is a Linux Foundation project. Talking about license changes is just pure irrational FUD.

ac130kz• 1 year ago

Good luck to them, everyone is moving to Valkey, especially with its major backing and already better performance.

mattl2• 1 year ago

Redis should step up and fund an independent foundation now and encourage Valkey to contribute where relevant.

Some code under a 3 clause BSD and some under AGPLv3 could be interesting.

_msw_11• 1 year ago

Why? They can already just copy the code they want from Valkey, since Valkey is 3 clause BSD...

But maybe Valkey should switch to GPLv3 instead to correct this imbalance.

https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13638

gray_-_wolf3• 1 year ago

I am not sure what that would achieve? Combining programs under GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is possible (the resulting work is under AGPLv3).

jamessinghal• 1 year ago

Similar move to Elasticsearch, tacking on AGPL with their existing source available licenses. [1]

The products (commercialized open source) that are often chosen by and championed by developers as opposed to executives see the harm that a bait and switch has on their popularity. With their competitors being more permissive, I don't see many devs moving back unless Valkey loses significant feature parity.

[1] https://ir.elastic.co/news/news-details/2024/Elastic-Announc...

remram• 1 year ago

This doesn't solve anything, Redis has proved that it is willing to do a rug pull, and how much they are willing to hurt the community when they do (taking over client libraries, etc). I don't see a reason to go back from valkey. Again and again, Redis Labs has been the worst thing about Redis, I'm glad we now have an other option.

kamranjon• 1 year ago

One of the big things I love about Redis is that it’s become this tool for me to learn new techniques and explore data. Like, the new vector sets feature has let me really explore dense vectors and custom search and taxonomy mapping and all sorts of areas that seemed like a high barrier to entry for me, but now I’m just streaming stuff into llama.cpp with an embedding model and storing it in Redis and being able to do mappings between different data sets super efficiently.

A big part of that is API design - I can’t think of another system that is as well thought out as the Redis API - it’s deceptively simple and because of that I didn’t have to wait for client libraries to incorporate the new Redis features - they just work cause they all speak RESP and I can just send raw commands.

All of this is to say that I was really happy to hear Antirez was back working on Redis and it’s paying off in more ways than I could have imagined. People can use valkey or whatever they want as an alternative - but I like Redis because it’s always pushing forward and letting me explore new things that otherwise wouldn’t feel as “at my fingertips” as it does in Redis.

antirez17• 1 year ago

Thank you so much for your kind words! I tried hard, with Vector Sets, to follow exactly the "wave" you are referring here, I hope I was able to. Thanks.

Implicated• 1 year ago

The Vector Sets, omg. Thank you, so much thank you :)

wg0• 1 year ago

Redis is in SQLite and Wireguard league of simplicity and elegance.

boruto• 1 year ago

Could you please link any blog post which goes into what you are talking about, I feel I am also at the high barrier to enter situation about this stuff

c0l0• 1 year ago

I contributed a minor (but imho still neat :p) improvement to Redis under its original license, and personally moved to using redict when the unexpected license change to SSPL was announced - and I was feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase. (Had they switched to AGPL right away, I'd have been perfectly fine with that change from a moral perspective, ftr.)

I have a great deal of respect for antirez and recgnize him as a kind and benevolent member of the FOSS community, but no matter what Redis, Inc. announced or does, they have lost my trust for good, and I will continue to use Redis forks for as long as they exist.

homebrewer• 1 year ago

The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull, so you should have expected it instead of feeling betrayed.

I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.

echelon5• 1 year ago

All advantage accrues to hyperscaler "managed" versions. That's so much more fucked than a rug pull.

Amazon gets to make millions off of the thing you built.

"Equitable source" licenses with MAU / ARR limits, hyperscaler resale limits, and AGPL-like "entire stack must be open" clauses is the way to go. It's a "fuck you" to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in particular and leaves you untouched.

Open source today is hyperscaler serfdom. Very few orgs are running Redis on bare metal, and a equitable source license can be made to always support the bare metal case.

pcthrowaway2• 1 year ago

You do realize the owners of the copyright can relicense it under any terms they want, even if it's a copyleft license like GPL, right?

dharmab5• 1 year ago

There are good legal reasons to avoid the GPL; there are open legal questions about whether the GPL and its variants are enforceable.

KZerda• 1 year ago

A copyleft license like the AGPL didn't stop MongoDB from rugpulling. I'd argue that the AGPL, and the copyright assignment that tends to go with it, makes it easier to rugpull because forking entities would be at an extreme disadvantage in keeping the lights on compared to the closed-sourcing company. A non-copyleft license, on the other hand, makes it much easier for a forking company to cover all the same niches as the original company, making a rugpull that much more difficult.

umanwizard• 1 year ago

The only real reason to use non-copyleft licenses for these kinds of projects is to be able to do the rug pull

That’s an exaggeration. The vast majority of permissively licensed projects have never “rug pulled” and never will. It might be one possible reason to choose such a license but it’s very far from the only one.

giancarlostoro• 1 year ago

Microsoft made one called Garnet, I wouldn't say its a fork though, its basically compatible with Redis and implemented mostly in C#. It supports the RESP wire protocol from Redis for ease of compatibility.

https://github.com/microsoft/garnet

cess116• 1 year ago

You do see how that's even worse, right?

avinassh2• 1 year ago

Garnet fascinates me. Their benchmarks even claim that it is better than Redis and also Dragonfly. Are there any papers or write ups explaining what makes Garnet fast? (I do know its based on FASTER)

neonsunset5• 1 year ago

Yup, it’s a complete reimplementation in pure C#. It’s built on top of FASTER KV / Tsavorite project from MSR.

gschizas2• 1 year ago

Nice. I've been using Memurai (https://www.memurai.com/) for development on Windows (native, no WSL or Docker - for reasons), but this looks much better.

EDIT: Weird that being a program from Microsoft (well, it's Microsoft Research, so that probably explains it?) it has no installer and doesn't run as a service on its own.

rs999gti• 1 year ago

Wow. First time hearing about Garnet. MS should package and deploy it as a service in the Azure SAAS offerings.

weinzierl2• 1 year ago

I think we need to get back to state where we take software licenses serious in letter and in spirit. The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 1 year ago

The transitions Redis made are pristine on a legal

Yes, of course.

and moral level. Feeling betrayed is absolutely uncalled for.

Er, no, that's an unsubstantiated leap.

md39110275146• 1 year ago

I mean isn't lying bad? They literally made public statements saying they "will always remain BSD." https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/

antirez17• 1 year ago

Anyway: thanks for having contributed to Redis :)

revskill2• 1 year ago

Not quite. Company can easily change license at any time. No string attached.

noshitsherlock• 1 year ago

Good decision, I hope the best for Redis!

elAhmo• 1 year ago

Likewise. Respect for antirez and all of that he is doing, but his hiring back feels like just trying to lure developers back after ridiculous move by the Redis corporation.

Given there are viable alternatives out there, I see no reason why someone should invest any time in Redis (we are using Valkey as a replacement).

antirez17• 1 year ago

Nothing wrong in checking other alternatives, but Redis the company didn't call me to rejoin. I approached them to do something like an evangelist and bring back some kind of community vision inside. Then... if you can code, you end coding often times, and instead of doing the evangelist I wrote the Vector Set data type :D Just to clarify that me rejoining was not some kind of "winning back the community plan". I wrote at large about all that, even clearly stating that even the paycheck is modest (to avoid that kind of conflict of interest of the economical motivation).

fastball11• 1 year ago

I use Redis in basically every project, and this "ridiculous" move had literally zero impact on my usage of Redis, so maybe that is a bit hyperbolic.

SSPL is not as bad as the OSS community pretends it is (unless you're a hyperscaler).

lolinder16• 1 year ago

Yeah, we just did this whole ride with Elastic [0]: company changes the license out from under the community, community revolts, company gives up and changes it back. Both companies even pulled the same "it worked" excuse ("while it was painful, it worked", "this achieved our goal").

Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later and both companies have shown themselves to be untrustworthy stewards. They came groveling back when it turned out that community goodwill really did matter after all, but this is definitely a "fool me twice, shame on me" situation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797

citizenpaul• 1 year ago

This seems to be accelerating. I guess the era of lighting investment money on fire and pretending that the flames equal success is coming to an end.

Unless of course you are an AI startup.

jaapz• 1 year ago

Interestingly their CEO states that AWS an Google forking redis and maintaining it separately was their "goal" all along. Because fragmentation is apparently good?

echelon5• 1 year ago

This keeps happening:

1. People put a lot of work into building databases. The license choice is OSS / FOSS.

2. Some people in the community (original authors, community leads) make a company around the database and continue developing it for years on end. They sometimes raise venture capital to expand the business.

3. Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily millions in revenue. Original creator / company doesn't get anything, and the hyperscaler isn't obliged to pay.

4. The company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee.

5. Amazon / Google / Microsoft fork the database. The community revolts. Sometimes the people revolting are employees of the hyperscalers, other times these are just FOSS fans that hate "source available" licenses or relicensing.

6. Database company is forced to walk back the changes. Still no revenue.

---

The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.

Basically your license needs one of a few things if you want to prevent Amazon from walking off with your money:

- A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright.

- A MAU / ARR clause such that hyperscalers are in the blast radius. Note that this also hits your customers.

hmottestad• 1 year ago

Dunno about Redis, but for Elastic I still feel sorry for them being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon. On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. Amazon is more than willing to sell you their Elasticsearch fork at a loss as long as they can eventually recoup the losses when Elastic inevitably dies. At which point they will naturally abandon the open sources side of their fork and continue development in private, at a much slower rate, while doubling the price of the AWS service. At which point you’ll have no choice but the pay up, cause there aren’t any competitors left.

atombender• 1 year ago

NATS almost ended up doing it recently, too. Fortunately they caved in just today, after the CNCF and the community protested. [1] While the outcome is great, it was a bunch of drama for nothing, and their reputation has been harmed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863721

golergka• 1 year ago

Neither company has built in a legal safety mechanism to prevent themselves from pulling the rug again later

Previous versions are still available under the original license, right? So if you don't want to use it with a new license, you're in the same situation as if company went out of business or stopped support and development for any other reason. There are no safety mechanisms for that either.

immibis18• 1 year ago

The legal safety mechanism is the license. They gave you software under a certain license and you're in the clear as long as you follow it. You don't have to delete it if they give different software under a different license.

If you do need constant updates, you may trust forks more not to switch license, but forks tend to disappear at about the same rate that originals switch license, so why does it matter? Such is the nature of relying on free stuff - you're at the mercy of the one who hands it out.

bobsoap• 1 year ago

I agree. That ship has sailed, at least for the foreseeable future. We switched to Valkey and it's our choice for a couple upcoming projects as well. To switch back now after this whole ordeal would make no sense at all.

tasuki2• 1 year ago

contributed a minor improvement to Redis under its original license [...] feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase

How does this work legally? You write some code, contribute it under a certain license... and... a company can just re-license your code under any license they like?

lolinder16• 1 year ago

They require a Contributor License Agreement [0] whereby you grant them the copyright to your contribution. Which means they become the ultimate decision-maker for all contributions and can relicense however and whenever they wish.

[0] https://redis.io/legal/redis-software-grant-and-contributor-...

andix• 1 year ago

If you contributed before the license change/fork, you've also contributed to valkey and redict ;)

gigatexal• 1 year ago

I get the feeling. I also live in the real world and know that nobody except for a few (most notably RedHat) have figured out how to make sustainable money in open source. These closed licenses didn’t come out of nowhere. They came in response to places like AWS using the open source license to make a mint with a project — and doing so legally (it’s there in the license to do so) — but then the project suffers. So the license change is done to prevent that so the project — ostensibly — can survive. It makes sense. And so does wanting to live up to the promises of open source. It’s a tough situation for sure.

jeswin• 1 year ago

If anyone betrayed the spirit of Open Source, it is those who were trying to siphon off the entire commericial value of these projects while contributing little back to the project.

Companies have to pay people to work on it. Hell, they are even entitled to profit from it. A world with commerically viable Open Source is way better than without it. Ditching OSS companies for trying to survive 90% of revenues going to $1T cloud vendors is counter productive.

maxloh• 1 year ago

I am wondering why did you choose Redict over Valkey? The latter seems to be more popular.

microflash• 1 year ago

Due to license rug pull, I started an org wide movement from Redis to Valkey early this year and now there’s no turning back. It also does not help Redis that Valkey is cheaper offering by AWS (at least through Elasticache).

Snakes37272• 1 year ago

I contributed heavily to a project during its early days and spent almost 2.5 years helping it grow. For awhile i was one of the most active contributors.

Then there was talk of turning the project into an actual business, and myself and a few of the original contributers were offered extremely poor paying jobs. That no one took. Then they got a CEO, investors and we were basically forced out of the project unless we joined the company.

I distinctly remember being in a call where we were told they would be relicensing it eventually and launching a SaaS. To protect our work from being used by large companies. I laughed and pointed out the irony in that call that you were doing the same thing.

After that they changed their policy such they do not accept outside PR's. It has killed any interest in supporting open source projects outside personal stuff.

jjmarr• 1 year ago

If you're the most active contributor, you could've just forked it yourself, launched it as a SaaS, and been the CEO.

jamespo2• 1 year ago

Come on, at least give us a hint what it is!

MYEUHD• 1 year ago

Did you sign a Contributor License Agreement? If not, then I'm pretty sure it's illegal to keep your changes while relicensing, without obtaining your consent.

spyc• 1 year ago

Lost trust for sure. Who knows if Redis would be AGPL now if Valkey did not exist.

NetOpWibby• 1 year ago

It's a bold strategy, let's see if it works out for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HVejEB5uVk

xiphias2• 1 year ago

,,for companies rooted in open source, it has posed a fundamental challenge: how do you keep innovating and investing in OSS projects when cloud providers reap the profits and control the infrastructure without proportional contributions back to the projects that they exploit?''

I don't see any exploitation happening. As DHH said, the main reason engineers open source their work is to give a gift to the world.

immibis18• 1 year ago

Open source is a gift to everyone (including Jeffrey Bezos); free software is a sharing economy. The difference is whether the sharing is reciprocal. With open source it's a one way gift from you to Jeffrey. He could have paid you for that. At the very least you can make him pay with reciprocal sharing.

jraph8• 1 year ago

I think you are not describing the difference between open source and free software but the difference between copyleft and permissive license.

Open source and free software licenses are basically the same (there are a few exceptions). For me, the difference is the focus. Free software cares about user freedom first.

immibis18• 1 year ago

User freedom means not giving someone else the freedom to take away user freedom though, which is what doormat licenses (can we call them cuck licenses or is that too far for HN?) do.

liviux• 1 year ago

Wishing all real-open-source projects best of luck, including valkey, OpenTofu and so on. These are my clear first choice!

DetroitThrow2• 1 year ago

Copyleft does not mean fake-open-source, I'd not consider Linux fake-open-source for example. Though plenty of reason to use permissive licenses instead of copyleft and vice versa depending on your situation.

immibis18• 1 year ago

Copyleft is Free Software, free as in freedom. Pushover licenses (such as MIT) are working for free for Amazon, Google and Oracle. Which is fine if your boss is paying you money to work for free for Amazon, Google and Oracle - it's their money. If it's your own spare time, you might not like it as much.

infogulch• 1 year ago

Congrats antirez! I'm sure this was a huge effort internally, and I hope the Redis team can be successful releasing software under SSPL+AGPL.

mmaunder• 1 year ago

Here's the play: Open source with AGPL, then offer an enterprise license. You get two wins. The OSS community applauds your adoption of an agressive OSS license. Enterprise customers can't use software under AGPL because it risks infecting their IP, so they're forced to buy an enterprise license.

Zambyte5• 1 year ago

    s/can't/choose not to/
    s/'re forced to//

matesz• 1 year ago

Wait, AGPL is a good license for enterprise, they don’t need to buy unless they want to modify source without releasing, am I wrong about this?

Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good

umbra072• 1 year ago

the alternative is/was BSD.

enterprise hates AGPL. AGPL is generally not a serious alternative to BSD/MIT in corpoland, because something something (A)GPL-poisoning.

whether it's true or not doesn't matter. what matters is whether big tech considers AGPL infectious - which they do.

immibis18• 1 year ago

The goal of free software (noting that "open source" is a watered down version of "free software") is for everyone to share their sohrce code. To that end, licenses that require sharing of source code are used. LGPL says, roughly, you must share the source code of this software to anyone you shared the binary to. GPL is more extensive: anyone you shared the binary or the binary of something built on this software to. AGPL is even more aggressive: anyone you shared it to or gave access to it over a network. And SSPL is currently the most aggressive: you have to share the whole thing you built, not just what's linked with this software.

The more aggressive a license you pick, the more likely a corporation won't want to use it. But that's by design. They're allowed to use it, even commercially - they just have to give the source code back. If the software is useful enough, they will. We should make software useful enough for corporations to consider the be benefits of using it to outweigh the cost of having to share their source code. (Also the more source you make them share, the less likely this is. The Linux kernel succeeded at this.

SSPL is controversial and untested (and goes against the business interests of the OSI so will never be box-tick certified compliant) and likely counterproductive if it means you have to share things like Windows. AGPL is the normal "aggressively free" license. GPL is mostly for those who haven't discovered AGPL yet and MIT is for those who don't agree in the goal of source code freedom to begin with.

bananapub• 1 year ago

Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good

what? why would you ask an LLM to generate some random text instead of looking up the actual answer?

doctoboggan• 1 year ago

I think you are thinking of GPL. Many companies are happy to use AGPL licensed software in their stack.

kstrauser13• 1 year ago

I think you're thinking of the LGPL. The AGPL is basically GPL plus some additional requirements. I could see a company being OK with ~AGPL~ GPL but not ~GPL~ AGPL. I can't imagine the opposite.

Edit: Oops, typoed the license names.

kstrauser13• 1 year ago

Enterprise customers can't use software under AGPL because it risks infecting their IP

This is factually untrue. If you want to link an AGPL blob into your app and ship it to customers, sure. In the vastly more common case where you're using a permissive client library[0] to connect to an AGPL server, there's no risk whatsoever.

At most, you might need to make your local changes to that server available to clients if they connect to it directly, as opposed to hosting a cloud SaaS setup where everything is internal to you. However, that's not the worst thing in the world. "Oh no, we improved a Free server our company depends on, and we have to share those improvements so that the person who gave us the server for free can also benefit from them" is pretty hard for me to sympathize with.

This is vastly more business-friendly than the non-FOSS SSPL.

[0]https://github.com/redis-rb/redis-client/blob/master/LICENSE...

mperham2• 1 year ago

Enterprise customers can't use software under AGPL because it risks infecting their IP

Yeah, this is BS.

If you simply use AGPL software, it doesn't "infect" anything. If you *change* the AGPL software, you have to release the changes. It forces the big clouds to open source their Redis improvements.

okanat• 1 year ago

For the type of software that Redis is intended for, integration over network is a must. Hence "just using it" isn't a viable option. AGPL isn't LGPL, it infects anything that uses it over a network. If Redis was AGPL when it was released, nobody would touch it.

Most of the readers of HN make their living from closed source software. You know well enough that non-hostile open source is just a market entry strategy and the type of copyright-driven maximally selfish capitalist markets just force open source to be not viable for a single company to thrive. Projects like Linux kernel are exceptional infrastructure projects that external companies support not build businesses just to ship.

codeguro5• 1 year ago

Enterprise customers can't use software under AGPL because it risks infecting their IP, so they're forced to buy an enterprise license.

This is a lie. It's FUD. And it should be disregarded with extreme prejudice. Stop it.

First and foremost, AGPL'd software must remain free. They could use it in their stack. The rule is they must point to the sources of the AGPL'd software. If they make a change to the AGPL'd software and users interact with that (even over a network) then they must disclose the changes to the AGPL'd software. That's it. They don't have to open their whole stack. That's SSPL, so stop spreading this FUD.

Second, it's not their IP. They didn't write the AGPL'd software. They must abide by its terms.

Third, even if they chose (emphasize on "chose" and not "forced") to use AGPL'd software, they could simply disclose the changes they made to it. There is little to no excuse not to. The fact is that if the software meets their needs, they have little reason not to. The AGPL exists to protect Software Freedom so if they find that objectionable it can only be concluded that they intend to harm Free Software.

threatofrain• 1 year ago

Notably, Redis is about to sue Dragonfly for deliberate trademark confusion.

tiffanyh• 1 year ago

While I applaud the effort to repair developer trust, do note that many organizations prohibit the use of AGPL.

Linked below is Google's own stance on why AGPL is banned:

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

_msw_11• 1 year ago

My personal opinion: we shouldn't let Google's bad policy poison our brains. The people who wrote that policy had their reasons for taking this position. It might have been the right thing for Google at the time the policy was written.

That doesn't mean it's the right position for you, or for every situation. Many organizations with a higher levels of maturity in open source matters will take a more nuanced approach when it comes to AGPLv3 licensed software.

jraph8• 1 year ago

Their loss, at some point…

I'm quite fed up with this GAFAM FUD against the AGPL and the GPLv3.

vvillena• 1 year ago

That's the license working as intended, isn't it?

WD-423• 1 year ago

So a hyperscaler bans the AGPL? Shocking. Seems to be working as intended.

DetroitThrow2• 1 year ago

I think the big drop in trust was the change in licensing away from permissive in the first place, but AGPL-today is a much better choice than SSPL-forever.

You probably can't recover from a loss of trust in low single digit years unfortunately, but this is a good first step towards the project rebuilding the OSS community that existed around redis initially.

Thanks for fighting for this. Hopefully this shows more companies stuck on source-available that you can achieve similar goals with OSS licenses.

ibnurasikh• 1 year ago

Gladly, Valkey has other benefits besides its more permissive license compared to Redis. One of them is multi-threading support, which makes it pretty easy for someone like me—who has a bit of a skill issue with DevOps—to actually utilize all CPU cores for my caching layer.

antirez17• 1 year ago

The I/O threading was initially implemented by myself, when I was still working on the core before rejoining, and is also available in Redis. So this is actually another case of the benefits ValKey got for being able to clone Redis, receiving money from the hyper-scalers that just want to maximize their revenues...

They made certain improvements later, but Redis 8 (see the release notes in my blog post if you are curious) improved this stuff a lot, too.

Also, Redis 8 contains a new data structure, Vector Sets, that allows to do many useful things, together with more probabilistic data structures, single hash fields expires, and many other stuff. It is not factually correct that ValKey has any features edge over Redis I believe. We will see in the next year which project takes the best development path: this is what really matters.

reconditerose8• 1 year ago

The Valkey implementation of multi-threading is fundamentally different than what existed in Redis. The history dates back to work done in ElastiCache that was released as "Enhanced IO", https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/amazon-el.... The version released in Redis could only do about 350k RPS because of poor memory locality of operations, the inability to do command processing while handling I/O, and the inability to offload much of the TCP read path. The new version in Valkey can achieve 1.2M RPS.

"They made certain improvements later", should be "we threw away the old implementation and built a better one."

yjftsjthsd-h6• 1 year ago

So this is actually another case of the benefits ValKey got for being able to clone Redis, receiving money from the hyper-scalers that just want to maximize their revenues...

I don't think you want to sling that mud, unless Redis switched to being a nonprofit when I wasn't looking.

blotfaba• 1 year ago

Hashtag #ThankYouValkey?

md39110275146• 1 year ago

https://redis.io/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/

Zambyte5• 1 year ago

Very interesting that this is happening at the same time that NATS is going proprietary. Obviously Redis is way more well known, but as someone who has built a bunch on NATS over the last few years, this makes Redis an interesting choice to migrate to again.

nchmy• 1 year ago

apparently synadia is working with the linux foundation now to find a better way forward, and will release a joint statement soon. (CEO mentioned in their slack)

Zambyte5• 1 year ago

Cool, I'm definitely hoping for a sensible outcome. NATS has been a great tool to work with, and Synadia has also been great to work with.

kermatt• 1 year ago

https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/05/01/cncf-and-synadi...

williamstein• 1 year ago

Context:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829008

- https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/1632

- https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/issues/6832

I also built a lot on NATS Jetstream, and I'm questioning my decision in light of the threatened license change.

snotreal• 1 year ago

Why? Have you actually ready Synadia's comments where they made it clear that they always intended to maintain the Apache 2 Version by contributing the stuff they build back to the main repo? It just won't be as fast, so they can make some money first which will fund them giving it away.

You said "I also built a lot" Are you making money off those projects or get paid for your services for that use?

captn3m0• 1 year ago

- 8.0 - Tri-licensed under RSALv2/SSPLv1/AGPLv3

- 7.4 - Dual licensed under RSALv2/SSPLv1

- 7.2 and earlier - 3BSD

zoogeny• 1 year ago

I am starting a new web app project and I wanted an in-memory store for session data. I just defaulted to Redis, literally yesterday doing the `npm install`.

I mean, I remembered the whole Valkey saga after the license switch. I guess I'm just not as ideological as some here? I just thought "I need a fast in memory object store" and went with Redis as my default. I treat it like an appliance within my infrastructure.

I also vaguely recall antirez going back to Redis (the company) during the AI boom to work on vector extensions to Redis. I believe he is a big part of why Redis is such a rock-solid piece of tech. I am more confident in this product with him influencing the trajectory.

I also have the decision on license in the back of my mind. As I said, I am not an OSS zealot, but I do like the idea of an OSS license that has some protection against someone completely ripping off the code with no recourse. AGPL might be a decent compromise, especially with a dual license.

immibis18• 1 year ago

Flagged for misleading headline. SSPL is open source. It's just not the open source you want.

It meets all the criteria and the only difference from AGPL is how much source code you have to release and when - which is also the difference between GPL and AGPL. It has problems, but being closed source isn't one of them.

The OSI will never certify it, of course, because that would go against the business interests of the OSI members. The OSI is a consortium of companies who receive free labour from permissively licensed projects and to a lesser extent GPL projects, and it would like that to continue, which it cannot in practice under SSPL. The OSI article linked in a reply does not make a single point against the open-sourceness of the SSPL, and essentially just says they don't like it, and that some companies won't be able to comply, which is true of every free software license.

The FSF, Debian, etc haven't decided one way or another because it's not a very widespread license and they can just use valkey instead of wasting the effort.

kstrauser13• 1 year ago

This is not a widely accepted claim. I do not see SSPL as open source, and neither do OSI[0] or FSF[1] or Debian[2].

[0]https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...

[1]https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

[2]https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/

ocdtrekkie6• 1 year ago

We need to stop taking the OSI or FSF's positions on anything as particularly valuable.

The OSI is captured entirely by corporate sponsors. Amazon was paying a full-time salary a year to the OSI when the SSPL issue happened, the OSI had no ability to take a moral pro-labor stance without crippling their own operations. They still do not meaningfully answer to individual users: The OSI recently refused to disclose who won their board election and installed their preferred candidates.

And it will be inherently unethical to even consider the position of the FSF as long as it lacks the moral fortitude to permanently punt RMS from the board.

If the OSI wasn't owned by corporate interests, and had rightfully declared SSPL as a copyleft license... nobody would argue it isn't. The problem is we've let an extremely problematic organization "define" something in a way that does not serve our interests.

jwitthuhn• 1 year ago

The difference is that SSPL is a license that was written in bad faith with the explicit intent that people can't comply with the parts about running a hosted service.

https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-l...

See section 13, "Offering the Program as a Service". To comply with that you need to release all software used "to make the Program or modified version available as a service" under the SSPL.

For something like redis this includes: redis itself, the os you are using to host redis, the drivers and firmware for the hardware you are using to host redis, and more. Also your whole deployment stack up to and including the mouse drivers you use to click on the "deploy" button.

It is an absurd condition that effectively makes section 13 say "you can't offer a hosted version" and the OSI and FSF are right to reject that fig leaf of "it is like the agpl, but more".

nailer• 1 year ago

If you care about open source, and would like Llama 3 to also be open source (instead of the current license which, like Redis' SSPL, isn't, depite Meta saying it is), you might want to add your vote to:

https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/issues/156

edweis• 1 year ago

Mesmerizing number of views. I must admin I refreshed the page multiple times to see the count increase. If I increased the view count several times, I must admin I did not read the article multiple times.

rdtsc2• 1 year ago

That's great news. I never liked the newly sprung up licenses. I understand the background but always felt a burden having to read and understand them, and wonder how they'd hold up in practice. GPL licenses have been around for decades and is something people, including legal teams, know more about.

And when I say "know", I don't mean "like": it could be that this will just make it easier for a particular team to decide that it doesn't want to deal with the AGPL, and they should go find something else, but at least it's clear what it is. As opposed to some BSSXYZWL license that you never heard of, which kind sounds like it's open source but kind of isn't...

tombert• 1 year ago

I fairly recently dodge a bullet; I rewrote a large chunk of code I was working on using Akka because my idea lent itself fairly well to an actor system. I got it working fine with Akka on my local machine, I was about to make a PR for it at work, and then saw that it was using BUSL instead of Apache, which I had assumed it was using (since a lot of stuff in the Java world seems to use Apache).

I did get my stuff working with Pekko (the Apache fork of Akka), and it did work, but I was so pissed off at the entirety of this that I ended up rewriting the entire thing again using Vert.x, which I double checked the license for before doing more work.

I do understand why Akka feels like they have to use something like BUSL, it's hard to make money as a smaller software company, doubly so for open source software, and I also realize me complaining that "this free product made with free labor isn't free enough for me" is pretty entitled, but fundamentally I really don't think that the BUSL (and its similar licenses) are the right way forward. Whether or not it's fair, stuff like Akka does have competition from stuff that has more OSS-friendly stuff, and fundamentally I'm just going to use those, and if they're not up to snuff I'll augment them myself.

antirez17• 1 year ago

That's a good point, traditional OSS licenses, we can like them or not, but they are "understood".

CaptainFever• 1 year ago

"Choose boring licenses."

badmonster• 1 year ago

great news

rustc2• 1 year ago

They still require a CLA [1] so there's nothing stopping them from doing another relicense to a proprietary license tomorrow.

The only way this remains open source forever is to accept AGPL-only licensed patches.

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/d65102861f51af48241f607a...

Macha2• 1 year ago

That's sort of fine. As a personal user, someone could fork and maintain redis in that case, which wasn't true in the SSPL era.

Now AGPL+CLA is not a license I'd contribute under, but also Redis is so far down my priorities that it wasn't a project I was going to be issuing PRs for anyway.

jenadine3• 1 year ago

AGPL+CLA is not a license I'd contribute under,

Why not? Is it because only one company can make proprietary fork?

Would you rather contribute to MIT software where everyone can make proprietary fork? Or AGPL without CLA where nobody can make proprietary fork?

dbacar2• 1 year ago

Thanks, maybe this will be exemplary behavior for Elastic and Mongo.

simonw2• 1 year ago

From this post on the Redis blog https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ it looks like they've made a bunch of new features available under the new AGPL license too:

Integrating Redis Stack technologies, including JSON, Time Series, probabilistic data types, Redis Query Engine and more into core Redis 8 under AGPL

Redis Query Engine is new-to-me (I stopped following Redis closely after the license change) - it looks like an in-memory alternative to a lot of the things you might do with Elasticsearch: https://redis.io/docs/latest/develop/interact/search-and-que...

With syntax that looks something like this:

  FT.SEARCH places "museum @city:(san francisco|oakland) @shape:[CONTAINS $poly]" PARAMS 2 poly 'POLYGON((-122.5 37.7, -122.5 37.8, -122.4 37.8, -122.4 37.7, -122.5 37.7))' DIALECT 3

(This is a smart move in terms of answering the question "Why would I switch back to Redis if I've moved to Valkey" - Redis just grew a bunch of new interesting features.)

kragen• 1 year ago

Dismayingly, the CEO misspelled antirez's last name in this press release, https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/. That's so incredibly disrespectful:

Following our license change, in November of 2024 Salvatore Sanfillipo (antirez) decided to rejoin Redis as a developer evangelist. Collaborating with Salvatore on new capabilities, company strategy and community engagement has been a true privilege that has made a major impact that will pay dividends into the future.

If it's a true privilege, you should earn it by not misspelling his name. Actions speak louder than words.

Pink Floyd has a song about this:

Well, I've always had a deep respect and I mean that most sincere

The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think

Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?

We call it riding the gravy train

We're just knocked out, we heard about the sell-out

You gotta get an album out, you owe it to the people

We're so happy we can hardly count

Everybody else is just green, have you seen the chart?

It's a hell of a start, it could be made into a monster

If we all pull together as a team.

dec0dedab0de2• 1 year ago

So with redis being AGPL, who counts as a user?

If you have a webapp that uses redis on the backend for a task queue, do the users of the webapp count as users of redis, and you then have to provide source to redis? Is there a chance that you might have to release your apps code to be compliant?

jopsen2• 1 year ago

I just read the AGPL and the FAQs and it's not entirely clear to me either.

Probably why many companies find AGPL toxic.

ensignavenger• 1 year ago

This is my number one objection to the AGPL. Still way better than the SSPL or BUSL, but I will stick with valley for now.

kstrauser13• 1 year ago

No. Users of Redis are the ones connecting to it. Furthermore, the Redis client library that you link into your program is MIT licensed. Unless you embed Redis directly into your app, you'd never have to release your own code to use it.

dec0dedab0de2• 1 year ago

I think this is correct, at least I hope so.

I wish it were common for projects to explain in common language how they expect the license to work, with examples of how it applies to their project.

sneak3• 1 year ago

This is disappointing. The AGPL is a nonfree (and nonsensical) license.

The fact that the FSF wants a EULA but can’t have a EULA without violating Freedom 0 doesn’t make the AGPL suddenly logically sound.

marcan has written about it in more detail than I care to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30044019

Stop using the AGPL. It violates the basic principles of free software.

The ability to run a SaaS company with free software is a feature, not a bug.

jraph8• 1 year ago

You can run a SaaS company with AGPL-licensed software, no problem.

What do you think is nonfree about AGPL?

sneak3• 1 year ago

Not a differentiated one.

The AGPL, in its quest to be a EULA, violates free software Freedom 0 ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose").

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

The AGPL literally demands specific functionality be present in the software that cannot be removed without breaking the license. The anticapitalist FSF zealots got so in love with the idea of closing what they call "the ASP loophole" that they wrote themselves a EULA.

anonfordays2• 1 year ago

You should stop imagining things like "the AGPL is non free."

The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Li...

bk496• 1 year ago

cool, does this means it works on Windows now?

gray_-_wolf3• 1 year ago

I am bit confused by the comments here. Sure, it remains to be seen whether Redis Ltd. can be trusted again, but cannot we just be a happy for a bit that we (again) have a good software under a free license?

simonw2• 1 year ago

Lots of cynical takes in this thread - and I get it, there isn't a guarantee they won't relicense again in the future (they have a CLA that would let them) and people feel betrayed by the last license change.

I think we should celebrate this anyway. It's a smart decision, it's what the community wanted to happen and it would be great if other companies with janky licenses could see "Redis relicensed to open source and had a great boost out of it", not 'Redis relicensed to open source and it didn't help them at all".

I'm delighted. Thank you, team Redis.

antirez17• 1 year ago

Thank you, Simon. I believe that cases like Elastic and Redis returning back to an open source license is like writing on the rock: "open source won", at least in the system software space. Companies get created, prosper and fail over time, but this message is here to stay with us for a long time, and shapes the society of tomorrow. It's a win of the software community itself.

lolinder16• 1 year ago

It's a win for the community over and against the corporations that are Redis and Elastic. They're not the good guys for giving in to the pressure. They tried to ride FOSS to prominence and then extract wealth on the backs of the community and found that the community mattered more than they did.

So sure, let's celebrate, but celebrate the community, not those who tried to pull the rug out from under them.

znpy3• 1 year ago

I’d say that open source definitely lost, and lost real bad.

Free Software won, as you ended up adopting the AGPL.

It’s an important distinction.

primitivesuave• 1 year ago

I also appreciate this perspective because you never know what's going on in the board room. I have seen some morally upstanding leaders make questionable decisions that were totally out of character for them, all for the sake of appeasing a narrow-minded investor.

overfeed2• 1 year ago

it would be great if other companies with janky licenses could see "Redis relicensed to open source and had a great boost out of it", not 'Redis relicensed to open source and it didn't help them at all".

If the other companies can't figure out that adopting a janky license and alienating the community is the self-inflicted problem, then they are beyond help. Relicensing to open source not helping the company may serve as a cautionary tale for other companies and may prevent them from repeating the same mistake. As an open source enthusiast, the worst case scenario is companies switching licenses tactically and frequently to test the waters and walking back with no consequences; I'd prefer the cost of such actions to be swift and severe.

ksec2• 1 year ago

Lots of cynical takes in this thread - and I get it, there isn't a guarantee they won't relicense again in the future (they have a CLA that would let them) and people feel betrayed by the last license change.

Oh good. There is still hope of it returning to the original BSD license. ( I am still using good old Memcached )

mort96• 1 year ago

I don't want companies to see, "re-licensing to janky licenses is risk-free, because we can always go back to the old license if people react too negatively". I would like them to see, "re-licensing to janky licenses is a death sentence which immediately makes your product almost completely irrelevant and causes the community to switch to a fork and never switch back".

gloomyday• 1 year ago

It could be cynical, but I think it is important to show severe consequences for breaking trust between a company and its community. Anyone that saw their history and contributes to it must be aware they are doing unpaid work for a company.

createaccount99• 1 year ago

AGPL + selling under other licenses seems to be the way

otterley2• 1 year ago

If there's a lesson to be learned from this drama, it's that changing a software license from a liberal open-source one to a anti-competitive one (even if the source is still available and open to contribution) is a one-way door and loses trust. Once done, even if you recognize your error and revert the license, you're not getting that trust back.

freeAgent2• 1 year ago

The announcement just happened. I don’t know that we know the results yet.

lolinder16• 1 year ago

Elastic announced they were switching back a few months ago, we should be able to measure the results by now.

jonny_eh2• 1 year ago

you're not getting that trust back

It's not black and white. They'll get some trust back at least.

otterley2• 1 year ago

Anyone capable of pulling a rug once is capable of doing it twice.

ConanRus• 1 year ago

stop clowning around already

umajho• 1 year ago

MinIO also switched to AGPLv3 a while back, and they stated that “the AGPL license requires that all software connecting with MinIO be 100% open source for you/your users not to be in violation of the license.”[^1] Since Redis and MinIO are somewhat similar, (Both can be used to store and retrieve data. Redis uses a custom protocol, and MinIO uses an S3-compatible API.) Should I assume that this statement also applies to Redis?

[^1]: https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929...

pingiun• 1 year ago

I believe the AGPL doesn't actually require this, even though MinIO may think it does. I hope someone gets sued over this some day so we may find out

merb4• 1 year ago

It would not even make sense. Since you do not even always know what license the thing has you are connecting to. And not even the fsf sees it that way.

preisschild• 1 year ago

Should I assume that this statement also applies to Redis?

I dont think it applies to clients using the API at all. It just specifies that the modified source should be offered to clients connecting over the API, but not that the client itself has to be open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...

jan_g• 1 year ago

Yeah, min.io really soured AGPL license, for me at least. Because of their stance I've switched away from min.io in our company and avoid everything AGPL like a plague. Having read the license many times and also all discussions around it, I understand that it should be fine to use an AGPL project in a commercial enterprise (without modifications, internally in backend network). However, if authors themselves of such a project believe and say otherwise, I'm really not going to risk anything and definitely not asking lawyers if "my specific use of min.io violates the license or not". I'm just using it as-is over network, internally in my backend deployment. Not modified and not exposed to external world.

codeguro5• 1 year ago

I understand that it should be fine to use an AGPL project in a commercial enterprise (without modifications, internally in backend network).

Making changes is fine too, so long as those changes are also distributed. "The source come with the binaries" is the general rule. You don't even have to open your whole stack (that is FUD), only the parts under the AGPL that you changed and only when you distribute it. Companies can and always have used these projects internally without risk.

revskill2• 1 year ago

Is it a business decision right ?

ksynwa• 1 year ago

I ask this as a scrub end user. What are the implications of forking when it comes to a Redis? Specifically, what I am wondering about whether forks like valkey which are worked on by competent programmers[1] continue to be good choices or does Redis Inc. having founded redis give it a distict advantage?

[1] I am assuming this because valkey comes under the Linux Foundation umbrella.

ingen0s• 1 year ago

amen

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

I wonder whether they did deals with AWS and Google behinds the scenes. Something like "you poured money into Valkey, how about you give that kind of money to us instead and we'll switch to AGPL and you can stop confusing two customers with two practically identical but differently priced options". Could that ever work? (I have no idea)

reconditerose8• 1 year ago

Google is well known for having banned AGPL (https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...).

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

Oh nice! Smart move then. Makes me wonder why they went with SSPL in the first place.

hsnice16• 1 year ago

In time, I built this - https://github.com/hsnice16/golang_learning/tree/main/One2N/...

eduction5• 1 year ago

I'm always grateful for open source code, but on AGPL I can only quote the lawyer Kyle Mitchell:

"Inebriated aliens might as well have beamed it down from space as a kind of practical joke..."

"It’s not just hard for lawyers, who have the legal picture and can parse the whole license very carefully without passing out...It’s also hard for hackers, even those familiar with free software lore, who lack the legal side of the picture and a sense of what other ways things might have been said. Imagine how people who don’t know software, law, legal drafting, software architecture, hacker culture, or the self-styled 'philosophical' musings of one Richard M. Stallman feel."

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL

As Mitchell implies folks who want network copyleft should look into the more straightforward OSL3, IMO.

But it's something, and it's not my call to make because I didn't write the code, so properly I can only be grateful.

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

This is the first time I read about OSL3 (https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php).

I'm bad at licenses, and I admit I don't completely get it. At first glance, it seems like a simpler more readable license that tries to accomplish something similar to AGPL. I think the "license terminates when you sue me for patent infringement" clause is nifty.

But it says that an "external deployment" counts as "distribution" (ok, fair), which means you must OSL-license your changes too (ok, fair too).

But how does that in practice prevent AWS and GCP from cloud-hosting your software without giving back? Seems to me that if Redis went OSL3, GCP could host it fine so long as they'd OSL3-distribute any changes they made.

em-bee4• 1 year ago

how does that in practice prevent AWS and GCP from cloud-hosting your software without giving back

it doesn't. but neither does the AGPL. the only reason companies avoid the AGPL is because the AGPL stipulates that anything that the software is integrated with must be distributed as well. they are avoiding the GPL for the same reason. i don't know if the OSL does that too. if it doesn't then it would be less protective than the AGPL.

the AGPL works to prevent competition because companies are scared of it, but that was not its intention. none of the GPL licenses are intended to prevent competition without giving back.

and that is the real problem that redis and other companies are facing: how can we share source with our users without allowing well funded competitors to eat our lunch.

there are several experimental licenses that are trying to address that problem, among others, FUTO is working on that, as is bruce perens. but so far no clear choice has emerged. and unfortunately many see the idea of limiting competition as against the spirit of FOSS. personally, i think that needs to change.

eduction5• 1 year ago

But how does that in practice prevent AWS and GCP from cloud-hosting your software without giving back? Seems to me that if Redis went OSL3, GCP could host it fine so long as they'd OSL3-distribute any changes they made.

What is your definition of “giving back?” To me that means open sourcing your changes, which as you note is what the license requires.

em-bee4• 1 year ago

maybe if you are a lawyer, and if you are trying to get around the license somehow, or of you have to defend the license against an abuser then the AGPL is challenging, but as a FOSS user and developer, it is pretty straightforward: the software runs on a server, you connect to it, you get access to the source that is running on the server. if you believe in the spirit of Free Software then there is no question what you should do.

if you are fussing about the details which code you need to share and which not then you are not following the spirit of Free Software. it's as simple as that.

also, consider that the AGPL is trying to be compatible to the GPL. that forces it to be more complicated. the OSL doesn't have that problem, and the OSL is also not compatible with the GPL, which is only ok if you don't want to integrate any other GPL software. although i suppose since the GPL doesn't require distribution on network access, this may not be an issue. but i don't know, i am not a lawyer. and so to be sure, i'll prefer the AGPL.

eduction5• 1 year ago

if you are fussing about the details which code you need to share and which not then you are not following the spirit of Free Software. it's as simple as that.

Kyle’s point is pretty clear: it’s really hard to tell what agpl actually requires. So it’s a bad, unclear license whatever your position is - whether you think your code should virally make everything that links it open source, or if you expressly don’t want that and only want the library itself network copyleft. What does agpl actually require? Even lawyers are stumped.

Nemo_bis• 1 year ago

As noted by others, this is irrelevant unless Redis actually uses AGPL as the primary license for the software (that is, in an inbound=outbound fashion). https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/

rcarmo2• 1 year ago

Great to see this. 12 years ago I wrote https://github.com/rcarmo/miniredis during a very slow weekend where I both wanted to get a feel for the internals of how Redis worked and have a little PubSub server I could call my own.

I spent the entire weekend poring over the C code and found it some of the most beautiful C I'd ever read (ever since the heady years of SunOS), and now I feel I should at least go and update miniredis to asyncio/Python 3--for kicks...

eGQjxkKF6fif2• 1 year ago

Do it. I'm thinking of making one for node.

rcarmo2• 1 year ago

Already started. python3 branch. Claude removed all my nice idiomatic conditional expressions, but the (few) tests I have for the server already pass, and the aioserver is coming next :)

theturtletalks• 1 year ago

When Antirez left Redis, he wrote an amazing blog post I go back to often [0]. In there he said:

"I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer."

I'm glad Antirez was seeing his art losing it's beauty and now, is reclaiming it!

0. https://antirez.com/news/133

parrit• 1 year ago

So nice to hear talk like that in the AI "your code is worthless age". Keep the craft going!

radium3d• 1 year ago

Wow I chose to start using redis in the right week :)

martinsnow• 1 year ago

They can seriously screw themselves with the rugpull they made. I reported so many bugs and helped diagnose them in the sentinel module. Seriously fuck them.

tonyhart7• 1 year ago

they realize that they dont have a "moat" and if entire industry try hard enough to replace them then its over for them

foobarian• 1 year ago

I'm happy to see the news after having a chance to look at sources more closely (for unrelated reasons). The Redis geohash/gis related implementation is such a pleasure to read.

alabhyajindal• 1 year ago

LMAAOO

osigurdson4• 1 year ago

I think a project has to be Linux or Postgres big to really operate as open source. Why? Because cloud providers can easily sell your product and contribute nothing back. So, for anything < Postgres in size you need to create a new license to allow you to run a managed service. The problem is, with something like AGPL, companies that aren't selling your stuff (just using it), now need to release their stuff as AGPL as well. With so many things using Redis, it seems that millions of companies will now be in violation of the license agreement upon a given update in the future.

Personally, I think it is better just to call a spade a spade and release things with commercial licenses. Let all companies with < 1T market cap use your stuff for free. Companies that are making money will want a managed service or support anyway. Companies that want to host your stuff in their environment fall into the > $1T category.

The above is a bit of a strawman but what we really want is for valuable projects to continue to exist.

lukaslalinsky• 1 year ago

What about looking at it the other way around, neither Linux nor PostgreSQL is a commercial product, never were and never will be. Many people create commercial products on top of them, and that's OK, it's allowed by the license. Even Redis started as a fully open source project. But then it was sold to a company, and company cares more about making money than taking care of open source product. If you are a small company, and want to create an open source product, that's only free for personal use, just say so up front. Don't try to pretend the product is something else. It's really not about size, it's about motivation, and the motivation of a company is always making money in the first place.

_tom_2• 1 year ago

Doesn't AGPL give you LESS rights? (fewer?)

AGPL is pretty much a non-starter for any commercial development.

The RSALv2 let you use Redis, unless you were a service provider. Now, you can't use it for anything (EVERYTHING is accessed over a network now) without sharing your source.

So, before everyone but amazon could use it for commercial purposes, now no one can.

skywhopper4• 1 year ago

1) you can still use it under RSAL.

2) you only have to share what you change. You don’t have to change it to provide it as a service, but if you do, you have to share the code. That doesn’t seem particularly harsh and certainly doesn’t prevent providing it commercially.

roetlich• 1 year ago

Unless you modify Redis, what do you want to share? You don't have to share any of your server code or anything. No reason to be so dramatic. :)

_tom_2• 1 year ago

You have to make the choice about sharing at the start. If you use AGPL and later decide to make changes, you'll have to share. So most don't want to risk it.

But more important, AGPL software is banned at many large corporations. It's simply not an option.

aftbit• 1 year ago

From the CEO blog post - https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/

This achieved our goal—AWS and Google now maintain their own fork

Was this really the goal though? Forcing your biggest users to fork your software and maintain their own divergent version is not really good for anyone. Sure, Amazon and Google (or AWS and GCP - type confusion in the source material) now have to contribute some more engineering hours to the open fork, but why would anyone still want to use Redis now that there's a permissively licensed alternative maintained by the same cloud hyperscalers who will end up running it for you?

skybrian• 1 year ago

Are there compensating benefits? For web browsers, having multiple, competing implementations is considered good.

jacobgkau• 1 year ago

Are there benefits to the ecosystem? Possibly.

But the person you replied to was talking about Redis's goal, and I don't think it's likely their goal had anything to do with having a competitor to themselves around. Even if they did want that, they could've just bankrolled (or engineered) a fork; changing a license to one that causes your largest users to do the work themselves is a rather roundabout way to do it.

I can almost kind of see the large users needing to work together on a replacement, meaning that replacement might as well be open-source, meaning Redis can get future improvements that were funded by the fork users (who Redis was upset wasn't paying them) as a semi-vindictive, semi-useful goal. But it's still roundabout. If that was really the plan, it could've been articulated better in this postmortem to make it clear the "goal" bit hadn't just been BS'd.

Spivak2• 1 year ago

Yeah this take kind of surprised me, you really wanted Valkey to be the default option for cloud customers ensuring they'll have no migration path to your own offering? I just don't get it. You were getting $0 and now you're getting $0.

fastball11• 1 year ago

How often were people migrating from AWS Redis to Redis Cloud in the first place? I'm guessing not a lot.

fastball11• 1 year ago

Isn't it though? They weren't contributing before and they weren't paying Redis corp before, now they are at least contributing to a fork (and still not paying Redis corp).

Presumably some of the things being worked on in Valkey, etc can be upstreamed back to Redis in some form (not entirely straightforward since it is a hard fork with a diff license, but concepts can be borrowed back too).

e.g. apparently Valkey has introduced some performance improvements. Redis can implement similar if it seems worthwhile. Without the fork those performance ideas might have never surfaced.

mzi• 1 year ago

They were contributing a lot. So Redis-the-company lost a lot of engineering expertise when they all left for valkey.

arthur-st• 1 year ago

They weren't contributing before

That is not true. Companies like AWS had paid staff working as OSS Redis core maintainers before the licencing schism. This talk of "achieving their goals" is just bluster serving no reason other than damage control.

geysersam2• 1 year ago

I don't get it, why don't gcp and aws just pay the Redis company instead of paying their own (expensive!) engineers to maintain a fork?

ddorian43• 1 year ago

Because they think it's cheaper/better for them.

znpy3• 1 year ago

The post is a bit misleading as the agpl is a licensing option but not the license.

It’s a good trade-off though. Grafana does the same and they’re doing just fine.

I hope redis gets to live a long life now that’s more open than ever (essentially it’s free software now) :)

After the redis troubles I hope more people start to realise that the GPL license is the way really, and that other licenses (like the BSD that Redis used to use) are really just too risky.

fooker• 1 year ago

Does anyone use redis any more?

gitroom• 1 year ago

was honestly waiting for something like this, but that trust hit doesn't really fade for me - you think companies ever recover from stuff like this or do folks just move on for good?

bionhoward• 1 year ago

Again? Didn’t it go from BSD to some infectious copyleft thing? Doesn’t seem “open source again” to me if we can’t use it in private work projects without being forced to open source our project. Isn’t AGPL even WORSE than what they switched from? Wouldn’t “open source again” imply going back to BSD?

yjftsjthsd-h6• 1 year ago

Again? Didn’t it go from BSD to some infectious copyleft thing?

They went to SSPL, which isn't open source. (Whether it's copyleft is an interesting exercise left to the reader. I genuinely don't know, I'd have to stare at definitions for a bit to form an opinion.)

Doesn’t seem “open source again” to me if we can’t use it in private work projects without being forced to open source our project.

Er, I'm not a lawyer, but why wouldn't you be able to use it in a private work? AFAIK the viral parts of AGPL/GPL only say you have to share source with users of the software; if your only user is you then it's immaterial.

Isn’t AGPL even WORSE than what they switched from? Wouldn’t “open source again” imply going back to BSD?

Worse/better is somewhat subjective, but AGPL is a (Free and) Open Source license. It was open source (BSD), then it wasn't (SSPL), then it was open source (AGPL).

redbell• 1 year ago

Ironically, when Redis changed their license a couple of months ago, I commented back then [1]:

But who knows what the future holds? Maybe the Redis team will change their mind and revert back the decision like Elastic Search did a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797

Yeah, that future had come, and Redis is free again!

Thanks antirez and to all the team behind Redis.

_________________

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41611636#41612750

mkoubaa• 1 year ago

No need to trust them. Use it and if the license changes fork it again. Where is the problem?

donatj• 1 year ago

Literally the day after I started working on moving to Valkey... That's how it goes.

fastball11• 1 year ago

Why the change yesterday? Were there developments happening in Valkey that made you feel like a switch would be worthwhile?

senderista• 1 year ago

Why I will never try to monetize my own project:

1. To monetize a project, it must first gain wide adoption.

2. To gain wide adoption, it must have a permissive license.

3. To successfully monetize (after gaining wide adoption), it must have a restrictive license.

4. Changing a project's license to be more restrictive will alienate the community and hurt adoption.

I see no solution to this dilemma.

bpiroman• 1 year ago

I still don't understand what Redis does or why we need it as web devs...

PeterZaitsev3• 1 year ago

Note AGPL license is in completely different class compared to BSD. Where BSD was level playing field allowing anyone to do commercial derivatives, now only Redis can do it.

I also question whenever this decision comes from the pure change of heart rather than threat of Valkey... and if so what else should we expect in the future

sammy2255• 1 year ago

Kati Perri Hot Cold.

pabs37• 1 year ago

I would love to see Amazon offer a Redis service, comply with the AGPLv3 instead of using the other Redis licensing options and do revenue sharing to incentivise more commercial source-available projects to go that route.

antirez17• 1 year ago

Microsoft does this.

pabs37• 1 year ago

Interesting, is there any more public info about this? If not, have you/Redis considered blogging about it?

thr0waway001• 1 year ago

AW YEEAH!

fmxsh• 1 year ago

Not seen any mention of KeyDB... Maybe I miss something obvious, but it solved my small use case that would stretch to the other side of Redis pay wall. I'm very happy with KeyDB.

bradgessler• 1 year ago

I got a really stupid email from Redis®* a year ago that wanted me to put a disclaimer on the “first page” where Redis®* appeared on a website, as if it was a paper legal document.

That was the very moment Redis®* died for me—I’ve never encountered a tech company that was so aloof about how tech works.

Hopefully that damage is undone.

—

*Redis is a registered trademark of Redis Ltd. Any rights therein are reserved to Redis Ltd. Any use by Brad Gessler is for referential purposes only and does not indicate any sponsorship, endorsement or affiliation between Redis and Brad Gessler.

hodgesrm• 1 year ago

It's not the only company that does this. That's why foundations typically ask for the trademark and logos as part of donating code.

antirez17• 1 year ago

You are right, and this attitude was reverted. You can't imagine what law departments can do even without explicit mandate, if not correctly moderated. Redis grew very fast in the middle of a CEO switch and I believe this created many issues like this one. Now, we should be past that. To provide an example in a very important field, client libraries, the decision was to help with the code sending PRs and don't interfer with things like trademarks.

nicman23• 1 year ago

yeah no thanks

FooBarWidget• 1 year ago

Cloud vendors have been strip-mining open source for years, yet judging by user and contributor sentiment on forums such as HN, and the lack of OSI-approved licensing innovation, there’s been no meaningful progress toward a solution. If anything, I get the feeling that the community is effectively more on the side of cloud vendors than on the side of authors. It seems the community at large doesn't care about authors' businesses suffering. Meanwhile, they largely don't oppose cloud vendors forking the latest open source version either.

AGPL protects better against cloud strip-mining than most opens source licenses, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem of big cloud vendors easily outcompeting authors' businesses. AGPL only compels source sharing when the software is modified and offered over a network. But cloud providers can sidestep that by hosting the unmodified version. They excel at operations at scale and sales. Most open source consumers seem to care more about benefiting from this than about the authors' struggles.

Fair source licenses — such as SSPL and Elastic License — while not OSI-compliant, are designed thoughtfully to balance authors' business and user needs, and don’t impact the vast majority of users. They often only restrict cloud-scale commercial hosting, not self-hosting or local use. Yet they trigger disproportionate outrage.

This is part of a broader problem: the community’s lack of empathy for authors. It is unsustainable. Open source maintainer burnout has been going on for a long time now. The "indie" open source author community is aging. Meanwhile, many big open source projects come from large coporations who use open source as a loss leader.

My impression is that:

1. the community at large is too stuck in ideological purity, in an age where the original FOSS ideology is a bad fit. Permissive licenses made sense when open source was a grassroots movement fighting for adoption — not when it’s powering trillion-dollar clouds.

2. People prioritize their own short-term interests too much.

Companies are doing open source because of the momentum we built over the past few decades. This momentum is being eroded by maintainer burnout, fragmented ecosystems, and declining trust between authors and users. Yet the open source consumer and authorities such as FSF and OSI effectively neglect indie author health. This is going to collapse one day.

If we want open source to survive as more than just free labor for cloud providers, we need a new movement—one that defends both user freedom and author sustainability.

globular-toast• 1 year ago

The increased use of AGPL is a good sign. Hopefully more people start to realise copyleft licences are what is good for us (people, communities). Permissive licences are for big corporations.

Looking at the comments it's amazing how much damage Ballmer/Microsoft did to free software with their "infection" rhetoric. Amazing that people would choose something that's good for Microsoft. Hint: if Microsoft likes something then you (a person) almost certainly want the complete opposite.

xolve• 1 year ago

From BSD clause to AGPL, I see it as a huge win!

danielovichdk• 1 year ago

Some of these open source licenses are somewhat flawed when it comes to building a business on things that are "free".

Wouldn't it be possible to add a clause to some of these licenses that if you are using open source software and generate a certain amount of revenue from it, something has to be given back to the project.

I totally understand that the software is meant to be free but isn't there a balance here, where at some point it must be enforced that some the money it generates in a business, must flow back to its contributors/project ?

I have worked plenty of places where Redis was a thing that served at least some backbone for success for a business. Those places could pay a fee for generating revenue based on free software ?

Does it make sense ?

Spivak2• 1 year ago

Yes, and it's called proprietary software which is free for non-commercial use and companies under a certain size. Docker Desktop uses this license.

Voultapher• 1 year ago

IMO for that to make sense the license would have to be infectious and even then you run into the anything but trivial and gameable issue of splitting royalties among the tree of dependencies. Redis itself uses other open source libraries and so on. It's a tricky problem but it shouldn't stop us from trying, any amount of no strings attached funding for open source is better than what we have today. Personally I'd like to see it solved by diverting some amount of tax payer money to open source project maintainers, via some hopefully non conflicted government agency that ascertains what projects are more funding worthy than others.

saltysalt• 1 year ago

Great news antirez, well done!

manupati• 1 year ago

Engineering/ Designing applications with Apache Foundation's software's might be the first option, less pain. It is extremely stressful to change the base architecture. As, AGPL threatening commercial apps to open source their code. It is unfair changing the license after getting popular.

amaran19992• 1 year ago

I guess so

amaran19992• 1 year ago

yeah

yesterdayjones• 1 year ago

AGPL: Uselessly open-source. Anyone who wants to make money with it, even if it's just one of many components in your tech stack, would have to open-source everything. This drives people to adopt the paid versions of the same software over the open-source version, and that's no doubt the point. Adopting the AGPL is a cold, calculated move.

codeguro5• 1 year ago

would have to open-source everything

Stop lying. This is FUD. It must be disregarded with extreme prejudice. It is completely, factually, unequivocally, incorrect.

You can connect to Redis using their first-party, MIT-licensed client library. You can write proprietary software using that library with no requirement whatsoever to release your software under any particular license (although of course you still have to comply with the MIT license's attribution requirements). Heck, you can even serve this software to your users. The only condition being that you you distribute the original source or your modified changes of the AGPL'd part of the software in your stack to your users under the terms of the AGPL license. Nobody said you have to open up your whole stack. That's SSPL territory.

rootnod3• 1 year ago

Nah, as much as I loved the original Redis, they dropped the ball with the license change. To me it looks like they realized way too late. There was a window for them to turn back, but now it looks like they are bleeding some way or another and just trying to recuperate. In the meantime, other drop-in solutions took over.

Can't say that I feel sorry for them though.

rednafi• 1 year ago

The bridge has already been burnt. They can always pull the rug again.

zwaps17• 1 year ago

Genuine question: i want to start a project which fundamentally i would line to open source. I want people and in particular people working in companies to use my project.

However i also want to be able to make a living from it if it takes off ie build a business on it. I guess if that business has competition purely from hosted copies, that is also fine.

However, I do not want any hyperscalers to fork and close source the project. I want sny benefit to continue to be available.

So it seems I should choose Agpl. But i know that in most companies this leads to being blacklisted, especially in the EU where its legally unclear what the AGPL entails. Without corporate adootion i do not see the project gaining traction so i would only do it for myself.

With permissive licensing it seems a rug pull is inevitable to be able to do it full time.

What to do?

f33d5173• 1 year ago

You could dual license, under the agpl and a proprietary license.

ray0232• 1 year ago

"We heard from some customers that it is easier for them to operate under an OSI-approved license, so we’ve added that option." ROFL.

Yeah, translation. We got the biggest backlash ever from the license change, the community HATED us so much for this. THIS is why we backpedaled.

Valkey was created and already took over Linux distro package distributions with easy AF drop in replacements installs. I installed Valkey on my VPS for a WordPress Object Cache and I just installed the package, did not even need to edit any file or anything, just runs and works and the WP plugins for Redis just thinks it's Redis. Besides the name as an end user, literally nothing changed. Valkey got a massive interest and if clearly became obvious that it made zero sense, and it was the wrong decision.

Redis is open source again

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