I'm wondering how much of this is related to initial setup and rebranding. Iirc OpenTofu had a 2-4 week surge in PRs just getting builds, infrastructure, and rebranding cleaned up so they could build Terraform on new CI under a new name.
That's a valid question and to be fair to Redis, we should also ask ourselves what are the incentives for Redis (or any other commercial oss) to continue development of truly free and open-source Redis?
If the answer is opensource ideals, it is not an honest or realistic answer.
If the answer is they can always get paid through hosted offerings and product support, Redis folks are saying that's not a sustainable option because of cloud providers.
Redis users fall into broad categories of individual developers, startups, medium level companies and enterprise scale companies.
Individual users are unlikely to pay. Enterprise customers are big enough to have dedicated resources for support. It leaves startups and medium level companies. These users are leaving on-premise and moving to cloud providers and if there's a frictionless hosted solution by the provider itself they are likely to prefer that over paying Redis. There are always exceptions but I don't think this is far from reality.
If the quip is, Redis should offer a better product, they cannot! Not when competing with cloud provider's own offerings. They will be always be at a disadvantage in terms of total cost(for marketplace products) and resources spent for development of the core product itself.
I believe their license changes is about them trying to reduce the impact of cloud offerings.
I don't know if there is a better approach for Redis and the community but as users of their product we are also responsible to provide a sustainable path for development and come up with a solution for this common problem. Otherwise, Redis will not be the only product to take this direction.
PS: There are exceptions like postgres but there aren't enough of them at that scale.
The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. Usually you want rebrands to be loud and well known and license changes to be silent and ignored until it's too late and people have adopted the new license. In this case, they loudly announced that they're making an unpopular change and it gave everyone the will to switch.
I’m amazed that they thought that they could do this and get away with it. Redis is almost a foundational tool for modern caching architectures. Every company I’ve ever worked at used redis like candy to cache stuff that wasn’t important enough for the reliable but expensive and slow data stores. Additionally, the main features 99% of people want and need have been in redis for a decade. Even a fork that only fixed security bugs will have done better than Redis Labs after this debacle. It’s like if the author of nano, the text editor, would try this license change. I suspect this will be much like the {open/libre}office changeover. Maybe soon ‘apt get redis’ and others will be aliased to Valkey.
> The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change.
I honestly don't think that was the issue. The issue, unlike Elastic vs Amazon is, this change affects a lot of big players like Google, Amazon, and Oracle.
It's too dangerous to build a company around open source. You're trapped between AWS eating you or having to relicense and AWS eating you. Source-available from the beginning protects you from this. The problem with OSS stuff is that people are generally price-sensitive and you can't beat the platforms for this since they get the R&D for free.
It's sort of how I don't hire junior people. When others have trained them up, I can just hire them for more. The other guys have to pay to train them so they hope to get some reward for that, but switching costs are low. I can just take pre-trained guys.
And just like the pre-trained guys in this scenario, AWS can always offer a better deal. You need to moat your stuff in some way. Elastic License is ideal if you want to build a company around this. If you just want to make things for the good of mankind or whatever, you can use BSD/GPL/MIT/whatever, but you're doomed if you want to build a company around those licenses.
Elastic made it by being quick to the jump. Others have followed. The only really successful model that's different has got to be Kong and RHEL and they've both been around a while. Kong's adoption is troubled because once you get successful, using their OSS thing is better than the enterprise because their pricing tiers go up. But they seem to have good enterprise sales team. Don't know about RHEL.
But if I were starting a company around this stuff, I'd be very careful about having core tech be true OSS. Source-available yeah, but true OSS is too risky.
All well and good, except a lot of us here go out of our way not to build software on top of proprietary software. (It’s a pain in the neck to move between cloud providers, sure. You’re kinda stuck with that sort of lock-in. But RDS is popular only because it’s a hosted PostgreSQL. If you don’t like it you can switch to the real thing.)
> It's too dangerous to build a company around open source.
You could always just like, not do that? There is nothing preventing anyone from simply not open-sourcing their software. Complaining that "people can use your open source software" is like complaining about how trees split water
The reality is we've seen very few source available projects take off, and it's likely that we'd all be using a competitor if Redis had started source available from the beginning.
Saw a presentation by them at this week's Open Source Summit. Seems like a lot of the major contributors to Redis have moved over to this project. And it seems like AWS is a major supporter of it. I suspect their Elasticache Redis will soon be Elasticache Valkey.
I would never contribute to commercially backed, freely licensed project unless I was being paid. Saying this as a developer who is paid for exactly that, not it any inside knowledge that points to ulterior motives, but just the idea of giving a company free labour is unsettling.
The problem is that an open source project you contribute to can become non-free from under you at any point. This pattern is becoming more and more common now.
Redis (64.7k stars): Excluding merges, 8 authors have pushed 8 commits to unstable and 10 commits to all branches. On unstable, 173 files have changed and there have been 2,002 additions and 3,194 deletions.
Valkey (12k stars): Excluding merges, 41 authors have pushed 147 commits to unstable and 181 commits to all branches. On unstable, 473 files have changed and there have been 10,635 additions and 9,663 deletions.
You may as well just start mentally teaching yourself to alias redis to valkey.
Those numbers mean nothing because obviously a fork in its inception will have a burst of activity. Half of those changes are probably just renaming redis => valkey, too.
Let's check the numbers in 6 months or a year for a truly meaningful figure about the health of each project.
How are we supposed to interpret these numbers? In its whole history, Redis has had 8 contributors? And in less than a month Valkey has added 33 contributors?
Redis holds such a special place in my heart. It was the definition of awesome, open-source software. It always felt like Redis was THE definition of open source. The fact that the license has changed is heart-breaking.
It’s a understandable move, it’s the same reason as Elastic. AWS and other hosting companies ate their lunch, of course they want a piece of the pie to stay alive.
Even if there was no AWS product for managed Redis, how many businesses would bother paying Redis Labs and introducing extra latency to their cache server if they could easily set up their own instance on AWS (in EC2/ECS)? Configuring Redis is not rocket science.
I think the right way to frame this situation is how Corey Quinn did in the quote at the end of the article. Redis Labs is the party that forked Redis when they changed the license. Redis Labs may own the name, but the community maintainers are carrying on the original project, just under a new name.
Hopefully this will help resume work on a better High Availability code. Where one could have a cluster of 3 ValLey servers, with a superior HA protocol.
Readit News
antirez retired from Redis development a few years ago.
From https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors it looks like activity since he left has been mostly from people who didn't overlap with him much.
Redis Labs have not shown themselves to be outstanding stewards of the project as far as I can tell. Why shouldn't people support the fork?
https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef
If you ignore comments and just look at people raising issues and pull requests, Valkey has more contributors
https://devboard.gitsense.com/redis?id=f66d8a46ef&comments=i...
Full disclosure: This is my tool
That's a valid question and to be fair to Redis, we should also ask ourselves what are the incentives for Redis (or any other commercial oss) to continue development of truly free and open-source Redis?
If the answer is opensource ideals, it is not an honest or realistic answer.
If the answer is they can always get paid through hosted offerings and product support, Redis folks are saying that's not a sustainable option because of cloud providers.
Redis users fall into broad categories of individual developers, startups, medium level companies and enterprise scale companies. Individual users are unlikely to pay. Enterprise customers are big enough to have dedicated resources for support. It leaves startups and medium level companies. These users are leaving on-premise and moving to cloud providers and if there's a frictionless hosted solution by the provider itself they are likely to prefer that over paying Redis. There are always exceptions but I don't think this is far from reality.
If the quip is, Redis should offer a better product, they cannot! Not when competing with cloud provider's own offerings. They will be always be at a disadvantage in terms of total cost(for marketplace products) and resources spent for development of the core product itself.
I believe their license changes is about them trying to reduce the impact of cloud offerings.
I don't know if there is a better approach for Redis and the community but as users of their product we are also responsible to provide a sustainable path for development and come up with a solution for this common problem. Otherwise, Redis will not be the only product to take this direction.
PS: There are exceptions like postgres but there aren't enough of them at that scale.
We need more communities and projects like PostgreSQL. Why can’t Valkey be another one?
This describes Redict, not Valkey. I think it's actually great we have two forks, so they can focus on different things.
Were you self-hosting redis in all your companies, or how were you using it?
I honestly don't think that was the issue. The issue, unlike Elastic vs Amazon is, this change affects a lot of big players like Google, Amazon, and Oracle.
I think the real difference is that Redis Labs never hired the majority of contributors.
It's sort of how I don't hire junior people. When others have trained them up, I can just hire them for more. The other guys have to pay to train them so they hope to get some reward for that, but switching costs are low. I can just take pre-trained guys.
And just like the pre-trained guys in this scenario, AWS can always offer a better deal. You need to moat your stuff in some way. Elastic License is ideal if you want to build a company around this. If you just want to make things for the good of mankind or whatever, you can use BSD/GPL/MIT/whatever, but you're doomed if you want to build a company around those licenses.
Elastic made it by being quick to the jump. Others have followed. The only really successful model that's different has got to be Kong and RHEL and they've both been around a while. Kong's adoption is troubled because once you get successful, using their OSS thing is better than the enterprise because their pricing tiers go up. But they seem to have good enterprise sales team. Don't know about RHEL.
But if I were starting a company around this stuff, I'd be very careful about having core tech be true OSS. Source-available yeah, but true OSS is too risky.
You could always just like, not do that? There is nothing preventing anyone from simply not open-sourcing their software. Complaining that "people can use your open source software" is like complaining about how trees split water
Valkey (12k stars): Excluding merges, 41 authors have pushed 147 commits to unstable and 181 commits to all branches. On unstable, 473 files have changed and there have been 10,635 additions and 9,663 deletions.
You may as well just start mentally teaching yourself to alias redis to valkey.
Let's check the numbers in 6 months or a year for a truly meaningful figure about the health of each project.
Valkey just released their first stable version 3 days ago. So it might take another week or two until it's popular ;)
That’s my take away from this anyway!