I told a bunch of people this would happen given OpenSearch. Color me unsurprised.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store.
This fork originated at AWS, where longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson initially started the project in her own GitHub account.
Olson told me that when the news broke, a lot of the current Redis maintainers quickly decided that it was time to move on.
“When the news broke, everyone was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to go contribute to this new license,’ and so as soon as I talked to everyone, ‘Hey, I have this fork — we’re trying to keep the old group together,'” she said, “pretty much everyone was like, ‘yeah, I’m immediately on board.”
Redis’s announcement came right in the middle of the European version of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon conference, which was held in Paris this year.
One area Redis (the company) is investing in is moving beyond in-memory to also using flash storage, with RAM as a large, high-performance cache.
The original article contains 1,171 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Is it really cheaper for the mega-corps to have their own fork instead of pay Redis for a license? Or are they just capitalizing from loud open-source advocates who are OK working for free for mega-corps because they are principled?
Probably, AWS and Google probably have millions of existing customers using Redis. And AWS and Google are not going to be paying for it themselves of course, but just pass the costs on to their customers.
So they can stick to the old official Redis version for a while, before the license change happened, but at some point someone might find a vulnerability, and patch it in the official Redis, and then everyone that's stuck on the old version is fucked - it's a bit of a ticking time-bomb to be stuck on an old version.
So then AWS and Google customers can decide
- "I want to use the latest version of official Redis, and pay x per month per Redis cache" (if the new license allows that)
- Or "AWS doesn't support a free Redis anymore, but competitor does, so I'm just gonna migrate my infra to a different cloud"
So if they already switch to an open-license fork they can preemptively mitigate most of those risks
That is a different perspective I hadn't considered. Thank you 🙂
The megacorps will have to pay for the development of their new fork now - or not, if they can find suckers to do the work for them for free, but I doubt that'll happen. How much that'll be and how much the customers using the new fork will bring in will probably determine the health and existence of the fork. Unless of course the corps use "fuck you" money to kill redis.
It's worth remembering a lot of these megacorps do employ people directly to work on FOSS projects. Here's a quick and lazy example involving AWS
https://redis.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/ but Red Hat and others do the same.
I'm not a fan, and it feels almost as if by employing and embedding people in these projects they look to exert control over them. Realistically, I don't see that as any different than if they were paying money directly for the same control. Except this way FOSS still has benefits after the license change.
I'd say paying money is not as effective at influencing a project as embedding developers is.
In terms of bang for the buck, I'd absolutely agree. It's only when a company fully depends on the income of a single client, or closely aligned few, that this becomes a question.
Obvs it's about control and money, but it highlights (perhaps badly, but also validly) a need for a mechanism to get funding from profiting entities for open source development, and unfortunately GPL and charity is not it. A well-thought-out license with an expectation of sharing profit from OSS would be a boon for OSS and its (independent) developers. Sure would be nice if FOSS developers got to eat for their trouble (rather than going after yachts). Could be something for the EFF or similar minded, legally aware types to have a chew on, or maybe there are pre-existing works that are not as well known as they should be.