redis sure did give up on its key values

don't worry a Rust open source version of Redis is going to rise up called Rudis :)

Be prepared for AWS to launch OpenRedis in 4-6 days

This is good. This license change made me realize Redis is slower than all the other open source alternatives

This compromise licenses look more and more like businesses trying to have a community of contributors without giving them full freedom, just enough to basically have the benefits of proprietary software and open source software. Kind of like Roblox managed to motivate people to spend a lot of effort into creating all that content just for Roblox to effectively own it all.

Redis cant retroactively change the license of old versions. Everything can still use the version that was bsd licensed and fork it. Still a bit sad to see redis doing this

Someone archive that Redis blog page about them remaining with the BSD license. I wouldn't be surprised if they delete it in the near future

Of all words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: 'Richard Stallman was right again'.

Something that's interesting to note is that Microsoft recently (same day maybe) released Garnet, a redis compatible, open source alternative, that's written in C# so no code share either. MS Garnet is also MIT licensed

This is why BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are risky. At any point, the project could just up and decide that your contributions are their property now and cut off the whole community from their open source software. Quite frankly, Qt has never done this, not because they wouldn't want to, but because they've integrated lots of code changes from KDE and already agreed that license changes can be vetoed by KDE project, so they simply cannot do that. For most GPL projects, code contributions are licensed from the contributor under the GPL, so now even the project manager is prohibited from changing it. GPL projects will almost never suddenly change their license from underneath their community, unless they are the only ones who wrote everything.

This was an incredibly detailed breakdown of the Redis rugpull, and really appreciate the time you'd put towards this video.

this is one of the main advantages of copyleft: you can’t change the license to something more restrictive later. at least not if people don’t sign CLAs

Stuff like this makes me more and more warm up to the GPL family of licenses

"...or put on my makeup" definitely got me

Exciting news for the community! valkey is here, a new project developed as a fork of Redis, thanks to the dedication of most of Redis’s top contributors.

Those who truly value Open Source use a viral license like GPL. It’s very hard to back out of GPL and switch to a less permissive licensing model, as every contributor must be willing to change the licensing of their particular contributions, and for any large active project this is nigh impossible.

Basically a bait and switch. Get devs hooked in with a great open source tool, then when the VCs gets antsy, switch the license to suddenly generate vendor lock in. Thing is Terraform showed what a disastrous strategy this is. It’s not even a hard database to deploy, especially when used as an ephemeral storage or cache layer. I fully expect a forked project to swiftly take over. The sad reality is that the megacorps get to make money off of it for free and I really think open source needs a license that demands contribution to the project if firms of a certain size use it

I would argue that this path is the path for any VC backed and public company These type of company structures makes sure that the incentives for the shareholders will won over the original goals and visions with time

Thanks for the video! It's my understanding that a CLA would only be needed for future contributions. Since past contributions were made under a permissive license Redis has the ability to change the license. The reverse wouldn't be possible though, commits made under a restrictive license couldn't be changed to a permissive license.

This was setteled long ago with the BSD license; otherwise, Apple would have had to jump through hoops when creating Darwin after forking from FreeBSD. If they wanted to keep the code, all they should have to do is adhere to the BSD license and give credit. After that they are free to use it how they please.

We not getting a Planetscale video soon?

Isn't it necessary to get approval of all contributors to a project before a license can be changed? I doubt they have done that and all 500 contributors have agreed to that.

I'm curious to see where the source available companies are compared to companies like grafana and element that went from permissive to copy left when facing similar problems

Interested as well to hear more on Theo’s thoughts on what happened over at Planetscale.

ElasticSearch 2.0?

Interesting thing is that if something were to come from the legal "threats" (entirely justified in my opinion) from contributors, especially those with corporate backing there might be a chance that the fork of Redis will have more funcionality that the official product if those contributors successfully withdraw their contributions from the main project and add them to fork(s).

Richard Stallman was right.

Meanwhile Microsoft open-sources Garnet at the same time

Time to fork it!

the ideal thing to do is to make AWS/Jeff to support Redis financially. it's a win win since Redis will be stable economically and AWS could always got a nice maintenance of a good software

I was already using keydb and other mit/bsd based KV. but I in contrast want keep using redis in my current projects or even new projects. because I actually love the code base , and I can fork anytime if there is a real rug pull.

I use Redis for almost every project. My message queue and caching is entirely based on Redis and i've even used it for analytics (write-through cache instead of just key-value dump)

FYI, Valkey (formerly PlaceholderKV) is a direct fork that is BSD licensed and under the Linux Foundation as of yesterday, and Redict is also a direct fork that was relicensed LGPL. Both seem to have strong communities, and it looks like current or former AWS engineers are involved in Valkey and possibly Redict. So I think it meets the conditions to be a rug-pull. Also.. Redis Ltd. has a really great product without this license change, they just don't market it very well (they really want you to use modules, but their core competency is Redis Enterprise Cluster, where nobody else even comes close to offering something that works as well). This was unnecessary, and it makes me sad.

"I hate [Mongo's SSPL]" Well I personally hate people siding with Amazon of all effn companies.

it will produce short term profits like for MongoDB's case, which will still produce profits for probably another decade due to large companies using it and not wanting to just change a database, it's just a hard thing to do and prepare for while in production. It can turn into a huge, and financial mess if you're not careful.

I wouldn't really call "Dual Source-Availiable" a new term, though that doesn't mean that it isn't stupid. "Source-Availiable" is already a thing (it's when the source code is availiable, but the use of it is limited, so not open source) "Dual" just means that it uses two licenses.

20:05 That's a very clever compromise indeed.

I agree with you on nearly every point, rug pull included, up until seeing the contribution license takes. On people claiming their copyright under the BSD License and trying to force Redis to stay open: Redis can (likely with a simple script) add notes to their licensing docs and say that all the external contributions are still BSD licensed. Consider that WinSock, the windows sockets library for older Windows OS was entirely closed source and used BSD licensed socket code internally. Those contributions are likely useless on their own, but can be open on their own. I think a "viral" license like the GPL2/3 would work to prevent inclusion of those contributions. But I am not a lawyer, just a long time license geek.

As a sidenote on the whole Sentry bit of the article - a Sentry-compatible, MIT-licensed, project exists. It's called GlitchTip and it's actively maintained. It's probably not a fork of Sentry in the strictest sense of the word "fork", but I'm not sure whether the fact that somebody basically saw Sentry and decided to reimplement it in their own new project is better or worse for Sentry here.

Wizards of the Coast tried doing something extremely similar to this with Dungeons and Dragons and the OGL. The community struck back hard against it and they pulled back a bit on the changes.

If that's not a rug pull, I'm a helicopter.

The BSD license, in allowing everything, also allows redistribution under a new license. Past contributors can't force Redis to remove their code, because the license they released their code under allows it. Old versions of Redis containing their contributions remain open-source.

Kind of ironic his twitch bot was advertising an Upstash link

33:30 SSPL was introduced by MongoDB ^^

10:10 Are we going to see a fork similar to what happen with teraform?

i remember playing with the 1st release of redis and sharing idea with antirez, that take me back :D

I'm currently working on something that I know will be a game changer. I want to make it fully available to the community, but I also want to be able to earn some money from it. I've seen the pain involved in choosing a license. Since I'm building on Rails, I decided to just go with MIT. If I make money fine, if I don't, fine.

A few moments later: - Freedis - Fredis

the same happened with mongo, that's why now we have dynamo and cosmos db

Can redis-lite be built on top of vitess?

There will be a main fork from the old version

This is the year of tokio-miniredis.

Question, is the old license one of those where you maintain the rights to use that version as you did, and the license only applies to the new version?

I wonder if this will make ppl still contributing to software using these kinds of licenses to change to licenses which forces the software to stay open-sourced such as the GPL, unless their code is removed.

So basically elasticsearch all over again, can't wait for Amazon to fork Redis

When you mentioned "i don't know if it's BSL-based" it made me wonder can licenses themselves have a license, can a license restrict the forking of itself?

DON'T SIGN CLAs. please please please!

Can understand redis...the cloud companies just absolutely exploit these open source... If open source won't be able to sustain then sadly there will be no open source. Just closed source behind the cloud. I mean how hard can it be for google and aws devs to build up something like redis....matter of months maybe

Just when Microsoft announces its Redis compatible Garnet project. :)

that issue about licence changing is so interesting, let's see what is the response

We going back to memcached bois. Let's gooo

Well, redis is about to be forked like elasticsearch

We're already looking forward for Redis's MariaDB... Sad they decided to kill their company this way.

Whats a good actual open source alternative to Redis?

Considering forks like KeyDB, I wonder what is the benefit of a license change this late in the game?

Can't wait to use upstash-radish

Msft just open sourced Garnet which competes with redis showing benchmarks that Garnet could be better. Right time I guess 😅

it is okay. If big companies abuse open source there is nothing they can do.

27:54 Jirutka, great Alpine dev

7:56 The competition you're referring to is cloud companies selling their technology as-is. As a open source advocate, I think it's completely fine for open source maintainers to prevent corporations from cynically profiting off of the develpers' volunteer labor in their licensing. Sure it's not 100% free software, but in my opinion it's a worthwhile tradeoff to not have the FOSS community be just a group of free labourers for companies to profit off of, and it could be argued that this more "limited" licensing model is more in line with the open source philosophy.

I find it interesting claiming that Mongo didn't suffer. I remember thinking about trying it, and then after the license change, it was never mentioned again and I never thought about it again.

Like mentioned by others, this is similar to ElasticStack’s move with ElasticSearch. Now, waiting for AWS’s move: ElasticRedis? 😉

Even on an off day Theo looks great

so how much code was written by community?

I love Apache ignite

It makes me question: aren't all contributors of open-source software the owners and therefor a democratic voting-like system should decide if the license may and can be changed? Imagine being a developer with a huge contribution to open-source software, could you hypothetically win a court case if the recognized owner of the software decides to change the license? Edit: just saw that this is spoken about in the video.

One more reason not to fully trust any project staying available that’s not under AGPL *with external contributors* - 15:05 That they relicensed from AGPL to Apache 2.0 *due to VC money* is a pointer to where the problem comes from.

So just tell me only one thing, am I able to use redis freely ?? or I have to pay ??

just started watching this but kinda makes sense imho. Amazon really screwed them over.

I think the lesson here is: Don't give authority of your open source project to someone who makes money by providing it as a service. It was their own choice to sponsor an open source project instead of creating their own in-house project. Donating money is not a valid justification. They get away with a lot of "explanations" because their company "Redis" used to be called Redis Labs, but since they got the trademark, they can use them interchangably so you have no idea if they're talking about themselves as a company or the software.

Not only jeffing, but I also feel sad that smaller providers like Railway and Upstash , that they are actually also harming the interest Redis Cloud. I think relicensing is unavoidable but just need to make the terms clear. Though frankly speaking, as many ppl would know, redis is not that hard to reimplement, but, it is not related to if it is good or bad to relicense.

fork is avaliable? if not, lets do it...

Involvement of Microsoft here could be strategy to attract people having big systems relying on redis, migrate to azure for continuity.

There is a huge misunderstanding that you own an IP with an open source license. All you do is create a flavor of a product but no necessarily an IP and by no means something that is only yours. When it is (truly) open source, it belongs to everyone.

Hackernews flashbang 😭

A lot of people are getting the law wrong here. First, copyright is created automatically for anything which does not fall under some very narrow restrictions as to what can be copyrighted. Second, the copyright automatically goes to the author unless you have a naff clause in your employment contract giving it to your boss, or you are allowed to sign a contributer license agreement and do so. Third, when you contribute to a project without a contributer license agreement, you retain your copyright, but license the project to distribute your code under the applicable license at the time you contributed. This cannot be changed without your consent. Fourth, this has been tested in court. In the usa it was found that the author and copyright holder retained copyright, and granted permission to use it under the applicable license. By rejecting the license by trying to change it, you are not complying with the license, and are distributing it without permssion, which is piracy. In a seperate case, it was found that when the company tried to enforce its copyright, and included code it did not own without an appropriate license grant, they had unclean hands, and therefore were not allowed to enforce their copyright until after they had cleaned up their own act. This leaves any company not complying with previous licenses with a serious problem unless all contributions are under a copyright licence agreement transfering the copyright to the company, and always has been unless they track down every contributer and get consent for the license chenge for every single contributer. If they cannot get that consent for any reason, then they have to remove the code of that contribute in order to distribute the software nder the new license.

Resis does backup to disk which is probably why its slow.

What is REDIS? For those of you that like me were brought here by youtube algorithm and don't know what redis is, here is a 100sec video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fZeigteZrruRpaM.html Or in text: Redis (REmote DIctionary Server) is an "open-source?", in-memory database that stores data as key-value pairs. It's used as a database, cache, message broker, and streaming engine. Redis is known for its speed, reliability, and performance, which comes from storing data in memory rather than on a disk or solid-state drive (SSD).

I really like the FSL idea. I would call it "Delayed Open Source" Actually the license of ZFS is *more* permissive then the GPL. Both include a clause that requires it be distributed under it's own terms (so they are the same level on that front) but the license ZFS is under is scoped to the individual source file (so it's more permissive from this perspective). The GPL requiring it be applied to the entire binary (less permissive) is the problem. That said, there is a zfs module produced independently from the kernel that can be used, and is supported by most major distros. There's no question the CDDL permits this, it's more questionable the GPL does, as it's the same category as the old "NVidia blob problem," which, exempting some non-acted on complaints, seems to be generally accepted as okay.

9:44 5 years was plenty enough time to migrate

Did Theo say makeup😊

what implication does this have on existing projects that use redis. e.g say i have a service in railway that uses redis ??

for redis this decision is all about cache

28:00 - they don't need to remove anyone's code. All they need to do is dump all contributor names into a file and say the project contains BSD-licensed code by those people. They can take BSD code and slap whatever other license on top of it. There's no legal venue to stop that. (If you don't like that, don't contribute to projects using permissive licenses).

I've seen lately, in the last 2 years an increase in rails projects that need background jobs use gems that avoid redis or any other external service like redis.

everything worthful sooner or later will be commercial. it's the nature of the things.

Dragonfly, let's go baby!!

Never forget what happened when Elasticsearch was forced into a CopyFarLeft because of Amazon's shenanigans. Never forget...

So it's going to be kinda like a Red Hat Linux thing? A paid version is expected to work easily and flawlessly.

I used to be a fan of these license types. It’s not surprising, but sad to see big corporations exploiting them. The GPL, a license I wasn’t fond of, is the only answer here. “Viral” licensing is better than what these companies are doing.