Why AWS Supports Valkey
aws.amazon.comIt's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized. Let's not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc/compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it's their prerogative. However, it's worth noting that many others were left with a sense of dissatisfaction after the license change.
The same is true for ES, Mongo, and Grafana (to name a few). If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period. Don't bait people by giving something for free and then making all sorts of excuses later.
IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here. ES and Mongo still use and rely on AWS for their managed offerings. OpenSearch (mainly pushed by AWS) is vibrant and very alive. Redis will be ditched by distros and die a slow death, and (probably) Valkey will be in the next distro major versions. But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value.
I largely agree, except what the “bait” is.
Here’s where antirez said he chose BSD because he wanted to allow forks that change the license. [1]
Under BSD, forks that change the license and forks that don’t change the license are both okay, full stop. When antirez chose a BSD license, thinking he might do a proprietary fork later, it wasn’t “bait,” it’s how it works.
But when Redis, the company, said that Redis “has always been and will continue to be BSD licensed” [2], this was an implicit promise about what license the company would use for their own future improvements to Redis. In that sense, what they said is misleading, and maybe that’s bait.
So giving things away for free isn’t wrong, and making a proprietary fork isn’t wrong. It’s promising that you won’t do it and then doing it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39863371 [2] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/
I get that people get upset that their software of choice license is changed at the philosophical level. But I don’t get it at the economical level. When a project changes the license for a future version, the older versions are still available in the older open license right? So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”? License changes, people don’t like the new license, they don’t contribute anymore (let’s keep the forks aside for a second), all new change are now by the employees of the company, they own the rights to that like every other product company. What am I missing here? Why do people get upset about the economics of effort and benefit?
I have always been to afraid to ask this ask this question for fear of appearing stupid. But gotta live and learn. So here goes nothing.
What you're missing is that people contribute (time, energy, code, attention) in the now expecting to be able to reap the benefits into the future.
When I learn redis, I spend time and want to amortize that over a long period. When I integrate elastic search into my application, I expect to be able to use it in the same way far into the future.
Relicensing, as you point out, doesn't affect past versions, but it sure does future ones.
Now I have a surprise chore on my plate, to figure out if and how I need to replace the existing component or learn about an alternative.
More than that, my confidence is shaken. Will they make changes in the future requiring more work on my part?
Changing a license is very similar to an increase in price, but even more fundamental in terms of uncertainty. And people hate change.
(I'm explicitly not addressing the impact of a license change on software freedom because I think it is very important to some. But IMO most folks are more interested in free as in beer than free as in speech. I don't know enough to speak to the free as in speech aspect, so won't.)
I think you asked a great question, hope my answer sheds some light.
But you are not forced to upgrade. You can just keep using the foss version indefinitely exactly the same way as before. That's the great benefit of foss, upstream changes can never force downstreams to do anything.
Depends on the regulatory environment you work in. If you are in anything related to the financial industry, when CVEs are filed, you absolutely do have to upgrade to the version that doesn’t have them. The company I was working for at the time of the license change did three things. One, they initially forbid the new version to be used. Two, they recommended no new projects use redis. And then they negotiated a license with them, but still kept the recommendation to not use them. So they got some short term revenue, and long term they will be replaced.
sounds like a problem for the financial industry, thank God they have money to pay for it! they certainly don't use any of it to actually support anything of course.
An ever-increasing list of CVEs represents erosion of value over time.
Software is a shark - if it stops moving, it dies.
(I heard that saying somewhere, and I think it is untrue of actual sharks but it is definitely true of software)
Thank you. I was more interested in the “free as in beer” part of the reaction. So it absolutely addresses my question.
But why do you feel like you need to replace Redis because of this license change? The license change impacts the hyperscalers which at the end of the day contribute little to the project but try to profit off of it the most.
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3714688/the-bizarre-defens...
> So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”?
It's undoubtedly bait and switch.
You have a company that portrays itself as the host of a project that relies on community contributions for maintenance, and all of a sudden that host unilaterally forces a licensing change where all users, including those who have been directly and indirectly contributing to maintain the project, are faced with an invoice-or-lawyer threat.
Yes, the source code is still available. Yes, anyone can pick up the last release and run with it. But it isn't business as usual anymore.
It disrupted day-to-day operations of all companies that have been using the software. Managers of all levels had to hold meetings, internal and across organizations. They had to ask lawyers questions and decide what to do and how to act based on their answers. People scrambled to react to this change.
To make matters worse, this change was overtly designed to extort money from it's users. There is no two ways around it. The first step is a sudden change in licensing terms, and expectedly the second step of sending in the lawyers to collect payments under threat of legal action.
Which is included in the as is part of the license.
A ton of projects have stopped working which forced to fork or replace completely due maintainers not caring anymore, getting sick or just switching priorities. Why is this different. For all the licenses change cases, contributors who disagreed forked and stablished a new route. This is 100% the spirit of the license.
I have no idea what you tried to say. Your comment sounds like machine-generated garbage.
> forces a licensing change where all users [...] are faced with an invoice-or-lawyer threat.
You're spreading misinformation. See other comments about RSAL/SSPL.
> You're spreading misinformation. See other comments about RSAL/SSPL.
I think you are commenting on things you know nothing about.
Take the time you need to read through the license you are quoting.
Here's a link to the Redis Source Available License 2.0 (RSALv2):
https://redis.com/legal/rsalv2-agreement/
With RSALv2 you do not need to reach very far in the licensing terms to read the part where it explicitly prohibits users from providing Redis as a service, or even a modified version of it.
With Server Side Public License (SSPL) it's an even bigger shit show, as it forces any business that uses the software to release under the very same license all software and systems and even user interfaces (?!) that directly or indirectly interact with their project. As it is very easy to understand, this prohibits any company from adopting any software released under that license.
And of course it's so very convenient and an incredible coincidence that the same company that tries to force-feed these licenses to the world just so happens to sell proprietary "enterprise" versions of the same project.
> With Server Side Public License (SSPL) it's an even bigger shit show, as it forces any business that uses the software to release under the very same license all software and systems and even user interfaces (?!) that directly or indirectly interact with their project. As it is very easy to understand, this prohibits any company from adopting any software released under that license.
Not "any business", only a business that offers a hosted version of the software. AWS has a problem offering a hosted Redis service, but no one who self-hosts (including running it on a cloud) is affected.
> Not "any business", only a business that offers a hosted version of the software. AWS has a problem offering a hosted Redis service, but no one who self-hosts (including running it on a cloud) is affected.
Does "hosted version of the software" mean that the hosted service has to exactly match the API semantics to count? Or does it mean any service that's semantically similar (and powered by) the software (e.g. simply storing and retrieving data on a user's behalf)?
Or does it mean something else?
Where is this actually defined?
The license defines it: "Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version."
I'm definitely not a lawyer; but as a layman I would interpret that as meaning you can't just change a few cosmetic things in the API to get around these terms, since that clearly still "entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version" as well as "accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version".
There's certainly edge cases here which I assume will remain a gray area unless they're eventually worked out in court as part of some lawsuit. But given the intent of the license terms and motivation for adopting it (preventing cloud providers from reselling infrastructure software as a managed service), I would really not expect to see lawsuits against non-cloud providers. I mean there's no logical motivation whatsoever for vendors of SSPL-licensed software to start suing random users who aren't competitors. If they wanted payments from all self-host users, they would have used a very different license.
So my guess is the only way this goes to court is if a cloud provider blatantly violates those SSPL terms, which seems unlikely to happen.
> There's certainly edge cases here which I assume will remain a gray area unless they're eventually worked out in court as part of some lawsuit.
Alternatively, I could just use Valkey and not worry about being sued.
I have more thoughts on this, but seeing as you already ignored the several sentences I wrote after the one you've quoted here, I suppose it isn't productive to discuss further.
The bait and switch is because people feel the social contract has been broken.
If you start a project, invite people to come along and donate their free time to making it better, building (and benefitting from) a community of people working towards a common goal, suddenly switching that project to proprietary is a bit of a dick move.
Sure, it's legal, but for the people who thought they were collaborating together on something it feels a bit crappy.
You can't just use old versions of software. You need security fixes, dependency updates, etc just to keep it running
As soon as there’s a security problem you have to update though.
Have you actually taken the time to understand the RSAL and SSPL?
> If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period
There is essentially only one restriction (the other is about formal notices) imposed by the RSAL, and it forbids to "Commercialize the software or provide it to others as a managed service".
> IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here
This is an uninformed opinion. Nothing changes for small companies and developers. Actually, nothing changes even for larger companies, unless they are cloud providers.
Large companies can actually provide Redis as service for internal use ("as a service internally or to subsidiary companies"). Companies are even free to sell support for Redis.
The licence forbids
> offering a product or service, the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Software or Modified version
How do you define how much value your app derives from Redis? If Redis is the primary data store for your app, does it count?
> How do you define how much value your app derives from Redis? If Redis is the primary data store for your app, does it count?
It will be if your app is a data store service . i.e. your apps is a thin wrapper around Redis.
If your app is more than that, then its clear the value does not primarily derive from Redis.
There are inevitably grey areas (e.g. if your app is a Redis based data store but adds a lot of functionality) but 99% of users do not need to worry.
> If your app is more than that, then its clear the value does not primarily derive from Redis.
This is about as far from clear as it's possible to get.
How thin is “thin”? If I build a chat app on top of Redis, is it safe? There’s a tutorial on the Redis website: https://developer.redis.com/howtos/chatapp/ — is it a sign that it’s too simple to be distinct?
Or I can just migrate my app to Valkey and be sure I’m safe from lawyers.
Its a chat app not a data store, so it fails the "primary purpose" test so its safe: its pretty obvious that a chat app serves a different purpose to a key value data store.
Nothing is definitely "safe from lawyers". In some ways BSD is less safe than SSPL - no patent licensing clauses for example.
Re "But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value."
You shouldn't have to do anything: I don't get it I think you're making a choice because you have a preference for non-copyleft licenses in software you use? That's your choice
Sure you do. You have to worry about which fork has the best chance of succeeding in the long run (and my bet wouldn't be on the one from the company that was struggling enough that it felt the need to risk upsetting the community with a licence change). You need to worry about if the new license is acceptable, and even if you aren't selling a managed service for the software, these licenses make lawyers nervous (and I suspect that is intentional). And you have to evaluate if the license change is an indication that the company no longer values the community and users.
Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness?
As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not.
The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or whatever) to trusted institutions like Apache or the FSF or Linux Foundation.
It seems too easy for big "open" endeavours to change their mind after they've built trust and a userbase. It would be great if there was a way to guarantee that that won't happen.
> Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness?
Of course there is. Don't require a CLA and use GPL instead of permissive licenses. Then any derivative work will have to legally be GPL compatible.
More details on the why behind no CLA: There are dual licensed GPL/Proprietary projects out there. The trick is whether copyright is assigned to a singular entity. If copyright is retained in a distributed (but licensed) manner, then it is harder to relicense.
No. The solution is to use a different license, one that doesn’t allow contributions to be re-licensed in this way. This isn’t as complicated as people are making out. They just don’t want to admit that the license is operating as intended, but rather, their feelings about classical ‘open-source’ have changed. Admitting that would be admitting that the Software Gods of the last ~50 years are imperfect in their eyes, which is jarring for the sort of people that complain about these situations in the first place.
The best option is to use GPL.
How old is Redis again? It seems like a pretty big stretch to accuse them of having just been baiting people into depending on it this entire time.
>> IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here. ES and Mongo still use and rely on AWS for their managed offerings. OpenSearch (mainly pushed by AWS) is vibrant and very alive. Redis will be ditched by distros and die a slow death, and (probably) Valkey will be in the next distro major versions. But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value.
While I agree with you on not changing licenses mid-way, what is a small software company supposed to do? What is the Day Zero playbook that balances the desire for growth, creating customer value, and co-existing with the big cloud companies? I'm disappointed about the outcomes for companies like Redis/Elastic who obviously did create much value.
>It's interesting how Redis's decision is often defended while AWS and other 'big corps' are criticized.
We in the same universe? I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money, at least around here anyway.
>I've seen nothing but Redis thrown to the wolves for daring to ask for money,
Reducing it to purely "asking for money" is not what the criticism is about. The issue is the changing of licensing terms and not the money.
Other open source projects that also have commercial paid products/services include SQLite, Bitwarden, TrueNAS, etc and yet there isn't endless arguments about those projects "asking for money" because their licenses have remained stable and don't change. GPL, AGPL, BSD, public domain, etc. doesn't matter; they didn't change the license.
That's what the whole "rug pull" arguments have been about.[1] One can choose to side with Redis Inc over Amazon but you can't mischaracterize what the debate has been focused on: changing the license.
Did Redis Inc have legal right to do that?!? Yes. But the debate wasn't about their legal right.
The following 2 types of timelines have very different reactions from the community:
- start with SSPL license on day 0 and never change
vs
- start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL
[1] 2018-08-22 >, this is Yiftach, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs. First, let me assure you that Redis remains and always will remain, open source, BSD license. -- from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819392
> start with BSD license and keep it for 15 years and then change to SSPL
Well, the competition landscape was a lot different 15 yrs ago.
In the same way, GPL went from version 2 to 3, in response to the landscape
I think it's unwise to not respond to environment changes.
>I think it's unwise to not respond to environment changes.
True, but killing your company and make your code proprietary is most likely the wrong response.
so trillion dollar public companies get to use all their legal rights (and lobby governments to extend them), but the little guy can get fucked if he does?
It's not "asking for money", it's shutting down a usage of the code, and that's completely against the spirit of "free software", and even against the broader meaning of opensource[1].
However, I think everyone understands that it's a problem to make a living from small but important part of an bigger infrastructure, but this is the wrong way.
The Linux Foundation will throw money at Valkey, Amazon will still sell the service and Redi's will lose (because it's just one company and not opensource).
[1] https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
And I'm not even talking about external contributors whose work is re-licensed under a proprietary license.
The Linux Foundation won't "throw money" at it, it will probably provide some legal support if needed, but project work is largely funded by the membership fees for the subfoundations, and at this project membership level thats not much unless eg AWS etc are contributing it.
>but project work is largely funded by the membership fees for the subfoundations
That's something completely different you are right ;)
>>Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Valkey Community
>>Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...
You don't know what restrictive means.
I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK.
Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.
According to LWN [0], Redis was already maintained by big corporations/cloud providers:
[0] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/6bf2063136effa1e/Tencent - 24.8% Redis Labs - 19.5% Alibaba- 6.7% Huawei - 5.2% Amazon.com - 5.2% Bytedance - 2.0% NetEase - 1.3%On the surface of it, it looks like literally no one wins. Redis Labs are going to lose a large amount of labour they've been getting for free. This seems like biting the hand that feeds it.
Users lose out on the fruits of that labour, harming bug fixes, feature development etc., as well as now having to consult with legal experts and the like to ensure there is no chance the fall afoul of the new license (you need to be really careful with the wording and the way it might be interpreted, not just how you interpret it or how Redis Lab's blog post suggests it is), and any time and hassles spent switching.
The people providing that labour now have the hassles and expense of forking, setting up governance, legal stuff etc, when they could have been just getting on with things.
They already do. People think of OSS as manna from heaven, which is naive. The reality is that almost all OSS is made possible by large amounts of companies that are sponsoring development directly or indirectly. Even developers working on OSS in their spare time get their money from somewhere. And quite often OSS interests and professional activities of course align; i.e. their OSS activities are paying their bills directly or indirectly.
Amazon has people contributing to a lot of projects. Google and Microsoft do so too. If you look at who actually contributes the most to things like the Linux kernel it's all the big software companies you can name: Amazon, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. That's not ideology but just out of necessity. Linux is as big as it is because it has had big companies backing it and working on it for the last thirty years.
You could actually turn this argument around and say that for an open source project to be successful and have lots of users, it's absolutely critical for big companies like this to be able to get involved. The more the better. This requires robust communities backed by an OSI endorsed license providing a neutral place for development to happen.
I would not be surprised to see most of these companies re-engaging with their OSS forks a few years down the line. Assuming they survive the implosion of their user and developer communities of course. If the business is there (and it will be) and they have the expertise, why would they ignore that? And there will be lots of upstream contributions to their forks that they'll find themselves rebuilding in closed source form. It's going to be tempting to just take the upstream OSS stuff that's there ready to be used. And from there to contributing back to it is a natural transition.
As a long time Elasticsearch user and consultant, I've been following Opensearch pretty closely. It's attracted a lot of users, companies, and activity. Essentially all my clients are defaulting to Opensearch at this point. That has got to be majorly annoying if you are a sales manager working for Elastic. Lots of their former employees are working on Opensearch as well. All of their business partners are now also supporting Opensearch, etc. As a strategy to stop that from happening, their closed source moves have largely failed. They just accelerated it.
They do that because it's required of them out of sheer necessity, but it's the absolute bare minimum they can do because capitalism dictates it so
Just like you might imagine a leech could evolve some attribute to help defend its host against other predators.
I can't speak on the elastic vs open search topic though - does being part of the fiefdom of amazon work as a survival strategy?
But this just isnt true, and hasnt been true. There are bad companies out there: There are also good companies out there. This reductive "every company is capitalism and every capitalism is evil" mindset for sure feels good, but is wrong. And there's really no further argument beyond a simple denial until you decide to take cognizance of the ecosystem you're detracting.
It's hard to quantify, but I think Amazon would have to be in the top contenders for most value gotten from open source software
If I use Redis software on AWS, am I getting the most value, or does AWS? Exactly by offering ready to go implementations of known open source projects, are they increasing or decreasing my AWS lock in? Does it even matter? If they didn't offer these, which are saving me effort (thus money) today, wouldn't I just be running these myself on an EC2 or ECS setup?
Why don't you compare tax returns to find out?
Wouldn't that apply to all cloud providers, not just AWS? All of them are heavily based on open source software, from Linux, KVM/Xen, and K8s to MySQL/Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra, etc.?
I’d guess the OP is right in nominal terms, because I think those companies combined have made less profit than AWS.
I don't think OP is right at all. Just because a company offers managed instances of any random FLOSS service that does not mean they are profiting out of that service.
From the customer standpoint, the choice is between running self hosted instances on bare VMs or use managed instances, and if managed instances are not available then they don't have a lot of alternatives. Managed instances are cheaper to run and operate, and are more reliable, thus it's more advantageous to use those services. For the cloud provider, they are getting paid either way.
It's not like function-as-a-service offerings, where cloud providers charge users a premium for computational resources that run on spare cycles and allow far higher utilization rates, thus getting paid in two or three different ways.
The irony here is that this AWS post is correct content-wise, but has nothing to do with AWS itself, they are just in it for the money.
The same article would apply to Terraform (and OpenTofu as the fork now), which was a much more clear "community doesn't want this" case. There were a few companies that provided a bit of hosted terraform services, but it was hardly at any significant scale. Yet the same thing happened: community doesn't want a restrictive license.
I would be far more sympathetic to these sspl corporations if they subjected themselves to those same license terms. But instead they play this some animals are more equal than others game.
That wouldn't ever make sense though. They're the licensor. You don't ever need a license in order to use intellectual property that you own. By definition the license is what allows third parties to use or redistribute copyrighted software.
It makes perfect sense. They claim all these benefits to users for these non-foss licenses and then themselves avoid them like the plague
No, legally what is being suggested above is nonsensical.
If you own the copyright to a work, you can freely use that work, and you can license it to others. As the copyright holder, you get to decide what terms go in that license, but you do not need to abide by those terms-of-use yourself since you are the licensor, not the licensee.
Suggesting otherwise would be a bizarro-world where musicians need to pay to listen to their own music, authors need to pay to read their own books, and so forth. That's completely absurd, nothing works this way.
There are certainly valid reasons to be upset at a software company for changing the license for new versions of its software, but this is not one of them!
They're total hypocrites! For instance Graylog switched to OpenSearch to reap the benefits, but themselves push the awful SSPL on their users.
I have no respect for these organizations. Provide real open source software or start up closed from the get-go, don't build on community contributions for a while and then switch to closed while marketing as being open!
Big bad Redis Inc. won't let us host their software as a service anymore! Good thing AWS(champions of open-source software) are here to help!
Seriously though, very duplicitous framing by AWS. Ignoring the clear existential threat to Redis's business if they allow other managed offerings to undercut their own.
What other framing is there? There was an OSS project called Redis that existed before Redis Inc., who gave their software to the OSS community in the hope it that would be useful to others. Millions of people including AWS started using it under the pretense that it was and would continue to be OSS. Redis Inc. saw $$ after Redis Enterprise and their hosted offering were luke warm successes at best and took all the code, even the parts that were contributed by other members of the OSS community, and made it proprietary.
Even if you're not affected by this license change because you aren't hosting Redis there is no reason to believe that you won't be on the chopping block for the next license change when Redis Inc.'s numbers must go up. The trust has been completely broken. You would be crazy to base your business on Redis now.
AWS and the Linux Foundation are the ones keeping the original Redis, the community project that existed before the business, alive for the benefit of everyone.
I see it as an incentive problem. How are the maintainers of these projects to receive the support they need? Companies like AWS are incentivized to take all they can take and contribute nothing in return, "it's FOSS, baby".
Redis Inc. is incentivized to continue the development and improvement of Redis, because the success of Redis is directly proportional to the success of their business. Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat.
> Meanwhile, a shit-hot new open-source KV database could come out tomorrow, and AWS would forget their newfound OSS goodwill towards Valkey in a heartbeat.
Why do you say that? AWS is going to be providing Valkey as a service to millions of paying customers via their ElasticCache offering. Every cloud provider will be doing something similar. It's the same story with OpenSearch, it's now deeply integrated into AWS and used not just directly by their customers but by other AWS services. That's honestly the best model for OSS, many financially interested parties who want the software to exist to support their business, but the software itself isn't their business.
And now there's not a conflict of interest for the project to hold back features because they want to save them for the enterprise tier. The software getting better for everyone directly benefits their hosted offering.
I think there's a strong case that given a time machine Redis should have never been OSS so they could sell software licenses. But at the same time Redis wouldn't have become a household name for developers and have the huge ecosystem of tooling surrounding it were it not for the fact that it's OSS.
The only misleading framing here is your comment, and redis claiming anything about their license is good for users.
It seems recent years give us a lot of licenses (for core infra software) and now for LLMs. They all say in very legalese basically: these top 5-10 tech companies will not compete fairly with us, thus they are banned from using the software. The rest are welcome to use everything.
I wonder if US monopoly regulation actually starts to work well, which I see some signs of happening, will all this license revert back to fully open source?
We really need to investigate the implications of monopoly power mixed with open source. That really wasn't contemplated originally.
Sorry, I loose respect for those defending Amazon. Terrible behavior towards their workers, push against consumer protection, and anticompetitive antics like price-fixing highlight their deplorable behavior. They only way I do business with them is taking their money and not giving them a penny.
Their Walk Out technology original statements and working reality show they find with grifting to prop up their image.
Here is good example of economics. How much is a $25 Amazon gift card worth? Some it many be $25 and others it is $0, and in-between for people looking to off load their gift card for pennies on the dollar.
Was Redis Labs founded by Redis developers? I looked at its corporate history and was a bit confused (eg antirez seemed to be a consultant for them)
No, which is why I think there has been less support for the (previous) OSS company than some other projects.
Redis labs effectively became the defacto owner of the project later down the line when Antirez joined them. They inherited the project then tried to capture all of the value.
This isn’t a case of the original maintainers trying to sustain the project. It’s a hostile takeover that’s backfiring significantly. They brought Microsoft onboard as a partner hoping that would get them through the mess. Turns out that wasn’t enough.
They talk about OpenTofu, are they going to do cdktf for opentofu then?
https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1335 It’s currently working, but a commitment to ensure it stays that way is marked as pending decision.
Absolutely hilarious and ironic for AWS to say they support an Apache project fork of Redis when it was their hosting Redis and ostensibly not paying Redis or somehow working with them to do it causing RedisLabs to do what only they can and go closed to be able to sell their own hosted services providing Redis. How else would they compete with AWS?
“To save a buck”. Didn’t even need to read the article :)
Free Software is the only way
I'm sorry, I just hate this foul language. Amazon claims that "Redis broke with the community that helped it grow and left them stranded" whereas the sole reason for the license change was Amazon itself who takes open source projects and gives its creators nothing in exchange. They will bend over backwards and create their own forks like OpenSearch rather than collaborate with the creators. And at the end, they will stab the creators with passive and active-aggressive accusations like these.
> […] rather than collaborate with the creators.
How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL? Also, who do you believe the creators of Redis are?
> How do you propose AWS “collaborate” with Elastic or Redis Labs under the terms of the SSPL?
This is quite simple, and should have happened before these companies decide to switch licenses because of Amazon. Each time Amazon decides to use an open source product, instead of doing it for free, they should contact the parent company and offer them a fee. There are many advantages of such an arrangement: a single version exists, the parent company has a stable source of income etc.
I might be mistaken, but this path was possibly chosen by Citus and Azure, and nobody seems to complain.
> Each time Amazon decides to use an open source prouct, instead of doing it for free, they should contact the parent company and offer them a fee.
What if, instead of doing that, they hired some of the people making significant contributions to the project? Would that count?
It depends. For example, when Ubuntu first appeared and Canonical hired some prominent Debian maintainers, they were criticized for that. But I believe the final net benefit was positive.
The problem here is what happens when Amazon stops to pay them. If the owner of the project is a foundation or a similar organization, it may have better chances of survival.