Even Redis didn't create Redis. How many contributors there are? 700+? They have to have all 700+ people signed under a license change proposal. Either they have to have their sign, or death certificate meaning those people can't vote. Even if 1 out of 700 living authors disapproves, they can't change the license. They can't vote on stealing others works. So, either all 700/700 agreed, or - can't happen. Alternatively, they can drop every single commit of every person who disagrees. And the rest 12 people who actually agreed on license change, well, - good for them. But at this point, they will lose almost entirety of this software's functionality and patches, because it's written by so many people.
Bro, it's open source code with BSD license. Anybody could take the source prior to the change and sell it, whether you are Redis (the company) or not. The company nor the maintainers own the code.
@@sidma6488 The company nor the maintainers own the code, but it was indeed a betrayal of the principles held by those who use the BSD license themselves.
@@sidma6488 Yes and no. The company owns the trademark and the IP. Of course you can do a fork, but if they do employ most of the core developers, they are going the one pushing the boundaries, and the license chosen for the project is what let them do that. If the project was under GPL or Apache would have been a different beast. For the same reason Apple stole BSD, now Redis (former Redis Labs) is stealing Redis. That what BSD does. Who probably took it in the ass is Salvatore San Filippo, but he was the one choosing that license. In Italy we say: "Chi e' causa del proprio mal, pianga se' stesso". He has chosen BSD to make money, and the money has been made by someone else.
If anyone was unclear what the limitations clause was supposed to mean: redis (the company) wants soul rights to offer redis (the software) as a service. And they don't want anybody modifying redis (the software) to allow others besides redis (the company) to offer it as a service.
I mostly agree with the interpretation. They're trying to go after wrapper app around Redis re-exporting the functionality without the license. The issue is that every app using redis could be argued to re-export the capability of redis; the broader the capability, the more likely it's infringing.
Btw, I was interviewed for a job at Redis-Labs about almost a decade ago, and all I remember is that the guy who interviewed me was a total condescending ass hole who acted like what he's doing is the hardest and most important thing in the world and that I should be grateful for him even spending time with me. I actually called them after that interview and told them I don't want to continue the process since I already know that I would never be able to work for/with someone that douche baggy.
Still they were offering paying jobs to folks that would've previously been expected to just contribute pro-bono. Open source doesn't really work after a certain point, i think this rule applies globally. MongoDB had to do the same thing, Docker did a similar thing etc... the projects that don't are poor fools like the XZ guy getting taken advantage of not only by hackers but by companies like RedHat using his code and making a profit whilst he works a day job on top of this nonsense to feed his family.
I already told the company that i didnt want to continue the process 1 time because of an asshole too. And i wasnt approved in any other process yet. If someone do this in the middle of the process, companies should raise an alarm.
Redis the company raised 350 million dollars in investment money. No wonder they need to turn a higher rate of profit. This isn't about funding development, it's about roi. I think the business model is flawed. Salvatore Sanfilippo left.
Yeah, but the issue is Redis license. You see, with that money, they can make a much better Redis, without releasing the source code, because the license allows it. The main requirements of the BSD license typically include the necessity to credit the original source and to include the original license with any distributions of the software or its derivatives. However, unlike the GNU General Public License (GPL), the BSD license does not require that modifications to the source code be released under the same license (a concept known as "copyleft"). Therefore, for a project like Redis, which is released under the BSD license, anyone could technically take its source code, improve it, and then sell a commercial version of it without having to release the improved source code to the public. This flexibility is part of what makes the BSD license attractive to certain developers and companies, as it allows for commercialisation opportunities while still encouraging sharing and usage of the software. If you get 350 millions, you can afford to hire the best contributor, and make something out of Redis, that is not the actual Redis, so to speak. Something appealing big companies, that is worth buying.
@@TAP7a most things are funded because of ROI. Most major advancement are because of ROI. ROI is not just monetary. A scientist or physicist invest time and years of their life to push the boundary of science and knowledge as their return. America invested 100 of millions to beat Russia to the moon for the return of just beating Russia, communism and proving America's supremacy( with german Rocket scientist). ROI is only bad when it just monetary at all cost. ROI is usually a good incentive its just what is the return is the issue.
I also think we should reduce copyright to 30 years, build servers in every major library system designed to serve all materials in the public domain, push municipal internet, build government owned RISCV chip plants in the US instead of handing Intel bags of money (or do both), pay professors to write textbooks that are in the public domain
I'm not a lawyer either, but before interpreting vaguely written licensing text, it's important to note the words "Software" and "Modified" (note the initial capital letter) and see how those words are defined in the context of the license. I haven't read the entire license, but it's quite possible "Software" for them means Redis and not the software that you build around it. Once the scope is understood, it's a lot easier to get an idea whether the license change affects you or not, or which license is a better fit or you.
@@GackFinderso sad that Mr Magoo contributed so many back doors to open source applications. I'm still convinced that they were unintentional and manifested through comedically-unlikely series of typos, but it's hard to prove that.
I both appreciated the calm and collected take at the beginning, and the more nuanced take with specific details of this specific instance later. Also so glad IANAL people aren't seriously thinking BSD/MIT means you can't sub-license like that one post claimed.
Re: "open source for all". The simple solution is to not have the fork BSD licensed ("do whatever the F you want with the code, we don't care") but instead have it GPL (or like) licensed. Which would prohibit the Redis dual license model, while still remaining fully open source.
GPL licensing is super restrictive, only the communists over at the FSF and friends do this stuff. MIT and BSD style license are definitely a nice middle ground to avoid headaches for everyone involved and in my opinion are in the true spirit of open source. Copyleft licensed software is almost always a no-go in a business setting, on basically every piece of software except provided as a service. It's a massive pain when an excellent library takes a huge space in the open space world for a specific problem but the license is GPL. It forces proprietary software to rely on more proprietary and expensive software. It's just stupid and tribalistic in my opinion.
Most opensource in my eyes DOES have a capitalism problem but not in the way of people being greedy. It has a problem that we have to rely on a charity like system to support people who are making amazing things that they are spending time on. However it is EXTREMELY taxing on these people to be both putting in the time for this plus earning the income to SURVIVE. The support money should be bonus income not the income they need to survive.
@@sub-harmonik How else are they expected to make money and not get f****d by other companies that simply upsell their code to others for profit? People have tried to make the honor system work in OSS, it doesn't. Big corporations still use your libs to build their products on and make money, the maintainers of them get zero dollars for developing and maintaining them and RedHat's founders are fishing on their yachts because they monetized OS work by sprinkling it with some of their own on top. Open source as a concept is headed for a reckoning, and that day draws closer all the time, it's just not sustainable or fair in the slightest for the open source devs who pour their lives into some of these projects and get jacks*** to show for it
And not changing systems anytime particularly soon we need better licenses or perhaps even contracts that guarantee large organizations that freeride on open source contribute support in some meaningful way
Congrats, you've come across a criticism leftist have been making about capitalism for decades if not more than a hundred years, but about program code in this case. This is what has always happened to art since capitalism. For example, how can an artist be truly authentic to their art when they need to juggle a job and all their bills they need to cover even their basic necessities? And even if their job _is_ art, how can it be authentic when it is being condition by the biases, incentives and pressures of the forces of demand and supply in the market in which they _sell_ their art? The answer is that they can't, and capitalism stifles art and artists (which, like with open source software, doesn't mean that it can't exist. It simply struggles and we as a society and culture suffer for it) I'm not gonna ramble and write an entire dissertation on capitalism and private property, but know that lots of smart people have written about your same idea extensively, though applied to different and broader subjects.
@@Tomyb15 So pay the artists to support them and they don't have to juggle anything, it's a major problem when you don't and somehow expect them to get money anyways. How do you get them that money? Through what means? It's not an issue with "capitalism" it's supply and demand, if there's no demand for your art, nobody is interested in paying you for it and you don't make money from it, needing instead to find things people do want to pay you for, simple as. That's why we have jobs and hobbies as separate things. Socialism doesn't really fix that "problem" because it's not even a problem, it's a natural consequence of any economy, if anything, planned economies are worse at that because they just outright compel you to do whatever is most societally eficient sacrificing your own personal goals in the process
I've spoken to some Redis guys, and the reason for these changes are that AWS has internally forked Redis and made it insanely better, but refuse to share that code back with Redis. Which is why the license that applies to AWS would force them to open source their changes. But the license changes are far reaching, and if Redis wanted to profit of off software they shouldnt have stolen OSS
Somebody must have forgotten the Reaganisms and Thatcherisms of the entire 1980s that squashed labor unions only for them to return with a vengeance in 2023-2024.
Why is it rage-inducing? Everything he said was perfectly reasonable with the information he had available to him, and when he got a new piece of information he immediately changed his perspective. Try not to induce rage in yourself.
I started off with the opinion that Redis Inc was kinda in the right because they were stepping up against large companies, though a bit annoyed since it won't be open-source, just source-available. But after learning more about the situation, like the fact that Redis Inc promised to keep it BSD licensed, and that they are technically not even the creators of Redis, just a company that slowly inherited the project, and the original creator left 4 years ago, also the implications making it source-available also had on the non-commercial part of the community that used Redis ... I think I'll be supporting Valkey from now (the Linux Foundation fork of Redis) I don't think Valkey will end up in a similar situation as Redis is in now because of The Linux Foundation. Do you remember what happened when BitKeeper wanted to charge Linus Torvalds money for using their source control? He made Git. Also, without real open-source, Linux wouldn't be as big as it is today.
25:35 Redis is primarily a consulting company, if I understood correctly. So 700+ employees would be justified if 400-500 were developers/engineers providing support/consulting services worldwide.
yeah, in contract law when the party who writes the contract is ambiguous, it's assumed to be the least beneficial reading (for them) so they can't just change the effect of terms mid-stream
It's a fricken database. Why does it need 15 years of continuous development? When is software finished? (to be fair, the same could be said of any database).
If you time travel back to early commits and insert a license change, it will actually not be legally binding, it might even technically be illegal if you do it with malicious intent because it can be viewed as fraudulent.
Every production software I've tried from 3 D graphics to Computer-aided design programmes to circuit board diagram programs, To some game engines that allow you to have a community-based fork and a commercial based fork. It's pretty standard practice everywhere
always think long and hard before deciding to support an open source project. If the project becomes valuable enough for you to close it it will also be valuable enough for someone else to fork it.
I just hope that people don't reference this case when non VC backed FOSS projects try to monetize commercial usage. I like the idea of dual licensing GPL + a commercial paid license.
This story serves as a prime illustration of the current limitations of Artificial Intelligence, contradicting popular misconceptions about its capabilities. Despite the significant advancements made by leading companies like Alibaba and Amazon in Large Language Models (LLMs), we're still a considerable distance from leveraging this technology to innovate or recreate complex systems like Redis from scratch.
BSD is extreme forkable followed by monetizable. You can derive from and then close it up. It's not like ironclad forever communalism of GPL. You can take a BSD-licensed version of something, change it slightly and change the license, be it to GPL or completely closed.
I get where they're coming from: They want to keep the source somewhat open whilst trying to get some money out of the big cloud players reselling their product. My point of view is that they're hostages of ther initial license set for Redis. The fact many open source projects adopted it as a de-facto in-memory caching is also a complicated situation where most of them are now forced to find replacements as such projects now have imcompatible licensing models is a very hard problem to solve without impacting many people and multiple projects at the same time.
Yeah the fact that they built a business around an open source product, then failed to compete to the level they wanted and then changed the license in response seems like a pretty average thing to do.
@@lolkthnxbai that's a fair point though I thought they had the IP for redis. I say this because otherwise they wouldn't be able to even change the licensing for it - if they didn't have any level of control over it.
IMO They have to fork it and change it's name. It cannot reside in the same repo as the old one. Because changing licenses does not work.. like that due to how the laws handle licenses. The license it was under allows forking.. So no issues with the laws when doing so. They do control the repo so they can just lock it and only allow forking from the old one. All new stuff they add should go into the 'new' 'insert name here' project repo. With the license they wants it to have. Because of how they currently done it they got issues with code from the earlier license version existing in the same 'name space' as the new. That opens them up for issues with how the new license protects their property.. Aka I would say they could lose in a court battle due to this. 🤔 🌱🌱🌱🌱
This is the modern world, where charity and patreon-like systems seem to not be sustainable (enough?). We've seen this with Terraform, Unity and even Witcher - if someone can grab a bigger slice of pie, they would. I wonder which will happen first - Linux Kernel getting proprietary license or humanity involuntarily enrolling in hunger games.
Companies generally will use software composition analysis with tools like snyk to generate SBOMs to verify that they have no licensing issues. With things like LGPL it's fairly easy to get around nowadays with async architectural patterns. The anti-SaaS licenses are a lot more strict.
The real question is: did Salvatore San Filippo make any money when he gave Redis Lab (now Redis), the intellectual property? The content of th agreement between Redis Labs and San Filippo were not of public domain. I hope for him he took home a few millions, moreover in consideration of what is happening.
Open Source literally exists as a viable option because companies have a financial incentive to share the cost of research and development. Most major contributors to large FOSS projects are corporately sponsored. Yes, it's cheaper for individual companies to sponsor a couple of devs rather than roll their own. When a dozen companies do it, it makes a hell of a team and reduces duplicated effort. Anyone overlooking this is missing an essential part of how FOSS works at scale. This is why Redis has committed seppuku and Valkey will win this in the long run.
You can extract the module.files (json, search, ... .so files) from the docker container and loadmodule them yourself in your redis config file. Actually they hid the download of these modules for some time now and pushed people to use the docker / redis stack thing.
As an opensource contributor I contribute code to a project under the same license terms that product has at the time of submission. You can’t legally enforce a license change of the product without having obtained permission from all the past contributors as you don’t own the copyright to all of the code unless it was signed over when accepting each contribution. It’s no different from a contributor forking a project they have worked on and just changing the license terms to something else.
2:50 It's interesting. I don't know the general developer perfectly but my expectation is that what they look for in licensing when screening doesn't go beyond source available but they expect copyleft or permissive. And here redis is saying "you've voted with your usage of redis stack and you just want source available". People need to be much more concerned/discerning in their choice of open-source projects.
I remember when A Person was sent to prison for copying windows installation discs. He had manufactured quite a few of them and they contained no keys. Many people argue that because you copy the work of MicrosoftBut he was guilty. My point and my argument was that because the software could not be activated without the licencing key which you had to purchase from Microsoft separately that heDidn't pirate anyone's code. The judge disagreed and now he sits in prison. A Microsoft insulation disc is useless by itself and has no value.
36:00 I mean you're right it doesn't stop at Amazon but there are essentially zero mom and pop companies offering redis as a service solution. And no individuals either.
You seem to underestimate how many small businesses exists. I've been at my current employed for over 20 years, I can say: we run services for businesses in our city and surrounding cities who have no idea how to run these things. We put a new web interface on top so they can click to pay-per-month to run it. We are just a small company, I have no idea what Redis would charge us for it.
@@autohmae it doesn't matter, redis is still free to use as part of your stack if you're building an application on top of redis. The new licenses are specially about companies that just resell redis as a managed service. One license says you can do that but have to release your whole source, and the other says you can't do that. If you're just e.g. using redis for a session cache or message broker in your application, you're fine.
@@autohmaeif you're not selling redis itself as a service, e.g. you're just using it as a session cache or a message broker, you don't have to worry about it.
650 scrum masters I lost it. I'm working as interim scrum master at big bank Australia whilst we wait for position to be filled. Job is a joke, literally just a copy paste "pencil pusher" role that doesn't contribute much.
I assume they wanted to expand. Enterprise contract, formal support channel, training guidance program, and a product liability clause that comes with dealing on that level. Otherwise, feature lockout will annoy everyone. They would have to multi-tier that. If big companies just want as-is, separate service and contract from feature set, then the Redis project maint will go slower or the direct support will suck. It's not just some single server cache store anymore. If companies pay, the executives want something extra. It sounds ridiculous, but if a huge system rides on this thing, and you don't get a good response from an open-source team, there's the warning. Not like Microsoft or Oracle is fast on incidents, but whatever. Funding Redis to be on the forefront of something other than cooking bacon on nvme would be fine.
Check out the recently released NDC London talk, "Open Source Exploitation" by David Whitney. It is a very well argued defense of this kind of model, broadly. Minus the massive VC funding of this specific case. Basically that "free" in "free software" stands for freedom, not zero cost, and that open source is not tenable if companies can continue to exploit FOSS without supporting it.
I really don't understand how code contributed under an open source licence can be relicensed by some third party. The 3 clause BSD explicitly states it must be included with all distributions of that source code.
Hence the dual licensing. Old code is bound by old license, new code can be licensed in different terms. Some OSS license like GPL prevent this by "poisoning" the license with linking clause. But the enforcement overhead usually not worth it for smaller projects (like redis, initially) and they ended up choosing simpler one like MIT or some BSD variant.
My mini take is - Decent developers are paid a wage in their job - the open source software they are maintaining is an attempt to try and make things better as it is still free (depending on the actor, not always). The fundemental functionality of the software still allows people to build upon it and run it for free. If you wish to support the people that created it, (or other maintainers after the fact). Learn from them, it takes time out of their lives. You should appreciate their time if you're a corporate and pay for their time, especially considering they did you a favour to begin with. - Don't dog on them, appreciate the effort from multiple angles. - Let's not forget. If you pay for enterprise subscriptions you also have access to inside information with regards to the code, security etc..P.S what could you do with 37 billion?
Regardless of who started the project, the redis company is still maintaining/developing the project and I don't see what they shouldn't be paid by Amazon and others reselling the service
Bit of a tangent: It's absolutely inane that people think you have change your licensing to be viable commercially. I think the commercial success of linux as a server platform alone has proven this fact, let alone the myriad other commercially successful open source products.
I think this is fair, open source is too unsupported. They should be allowed to force the companies that use them to pay something for it. The source is still available.
With that "viral licence attack" you probably wouldn't be able to force people to release all their other code just because they infringed your licence unwittingly. I think a court would say they could just stop using your product and stop violating your licence. They'd only have to release all the other code if they think that's worth it to be able to continue using the viral licensed product.
9:30 It's not shittiness. If i understand correctly there was 1 maintainer(among other 5 main maintainer if i remember correctly) that was working in Amazon, but her primarely role was to contribute to redis. And suddenly, after all her contributions, redis decided that it can sell her work to her employee one more time... You can't just say that all the work that has been done by other contributors is only commercially usable by you to make money. It's insane. Amazon is in the right here, for once. So, basically, Amazon was paying 20% of money required to support and develop core redis functionality. I assume it's more than enough...
The embarrassing part about "standing for truth and justice" is the massive self own it is to admit about yourself that you wouldnt stand for what is right. In this case, I dont think cashing out is wrong, or that the creator is obligated to carry his creation forever. But there are times when standing up matters, and you should. And those cases are smaller than you'd think. There are people who do and have stood up, and you should try to be one.
Tbh, I was always baffled by the redis labs list price. I used to work at a company that got access to redis labs clustering before open source clustering was a thing and we got roughly a 90% discount for on prem, and there is no way in hell we would have paid even 50% of list price. It makes sense that VC money is responsible for that ludicrous markup. There is a reasonable chance that between the two licenses you could use redis and integrate the client into your code without paying or releasing your source, but until that is tested in court I'm certainly not going to test it. Honestly though, most additional functionality put into the actual redis code base at this point is probably a mistake. Let it be really good at what it does, keep up with security, stability, and usability updates with what we have, and let stuff like AI tooling come out as a new project that utilizes or wraps redis.
usually contract laws would favour the party that didn't write the terms, so a vague clause would not benefit the party that came up with it, this is why usually terms and conditions are very specific.
Under open source pretenses a value was extracted from the community, including paid hours from for profit companies. Now all that extracted value is being privatized. This should be illegal. No backsies.
All the old versions are still open source though. You can still fork them, and they have already been forked to make Valkey. Is this any worse than if the Redis company simply shut down and stopped producing new versions? We're not entitled to new versions.
Valkey should've re-licensed under the GPLv3, IMHO. Then Redis couldn't use their commits without also putting their stuff under the GPLv3 as well. I do not like the BSD license because it makes stuff like what Redis did easy to do.
I’d like to see a metric showing how much of the codebase was contributed by non-employees. That would give me something that I could use to determine if the license change amounts to grifting off of unpaid volunteers vs giving away something that was largely built in-house and given away for free (making end users more of the grifters). Some open source projects receive a lot of use but not a lot of external volunteer contributions.
You really need to stop going off on a tangent without reading enough of the story/article, only to backtrack/readjust later because you assumed wrong. Respect that you’re able to change your view/take, a lot of people seem happy continuing down an obviously incorrect path.
I love how when the guy says "redis didn't really created redis" prime * immediately * goes "ok, maybe im wrong on this one"
Even Redis didn't create Redis. How many contributors there are? 700+? They have to have all 700+ people signed under a license change proposal. Either they have to have their sign, or death certificate meaning those people can't vote. Even if 1 out of 700 living authors disapproves, they can't change the license. They can't vote on stealing others works. So, either all 700/700 agreed, or - can't happen. Alternatively, they can drop every single commit of every person who disagrees. And the rest 12 people who actually agreed on license change, well, - good for them. But at this point, they will lose almost entirety of this software's functionality and patches, because it's written by so many people.
What timestamp does it get mentioned at?
EDIT: 15:50
The linux foundation already forked it, redis is pretty much a goner now.
I highly doubt that
wait what's the name of the Linux Foundation's fork?
@@NatoBoramValkey
red is dead
@@jordixboy Remember what happened when BitKeeper wanted to charge Linus Torvalds money to use their source control?
He made Git.
“Strong opinions, weakly held”. Loved watching you change your mind in realtime
So Redis wants to say that all the developers who worked pro bono to develop Redis, they exploited them for free. Are they gonna pay them now?
Bro, it's open source code with BSD license. Anybody could take the source prior to the change and sell it, whether you are Redis (the company) or not. The company nor the maintainers own the code.
@@sidma6488
The company nor the maintainers own the code, but it was indeed a betrayal of the principles held by those who use the BSD license themselves.
@@sidma6488 Yes and no. The company owns the trademark and the IP. Of course you can do a fork, but if they do employ most of the core developers, they are going the one pushing the boundaries, and the license chosen for the project is what let them do that. If the project was under GPL or Apache would have been a different beast. For the same reason Apple stole BSD, now Redis (former Redis Labs) is stealing Redis. That what BSD does. Who probably took it in the ass is Salvatore San Filippo, but he was the one choosing that license. In Italy we say: "Chi e' causa del proprio mal, pianga se' stesso". He has chosen BSD to make money, and the money has been made by someone else.
If you volunteer for something do you expect to be paid? No.
Managing a volunteer heavy organization is NOT easy and NOT free.
"The Redis source code will continue to be freely available..."
Is that a spoon?
Is that a knife?
_No! _*_It's a fork!_*
If anyone was unclear what the limitations clause was supposed to mean:
redis (the company) wants soul rights to offer redis (the software) as a service. And they don't want anybody modifying redis (the software) to allow others besides redis (the company) to offer it as a service.
soul rights 👀
@@luckylanno😂
I mostly agree with the interpretation.
They're trying to go after wrapper app around Redis re-exporting the functionality without the license.
The issue is that every app using redis could be argued to re-export the capability of redis; the broader the capability, the more likely it's infringing.
@@luckylanno Yes, it's definitely an accurate description. They want the rights to the souls of any unfortunate enough to use it.
(For those unaware, it should say "sole rights" 😆)
Btw, I was interviewed for a job at Redis-Labs about almost a decade ago, and all I remember is that the guy who interviewed me was a total condescending ass hole who acted like what he's doing is the hardest and most important thing in the world and that I should be grateful for him even spending time with me. I actually called them after that interview and told them I don't want to continue the process since I already know that I would never be able to work for/with someone that douche baggy.
Still they were offering paying jobs to folks that would've previously been expected to just contribute pro-bono. Open source doesn't really work after a certain point, i think this rule applies globally. MongoDB had to do the same thing, Docker did a similar thing etc... the projects that don't are poor fools like the XZ guy getting taken advantage of not only by hackers but by companies like RedHat using his code and making a profit whilst he works a day job on top of this nonsense to feed his family.
Life is too short to work for assholes. 🎉
Interviewer failed the interview haha
@@pxolqopt3597Interviews should always be a two way evaluation
I already told the company that i didnt want to continue the process 1 time because of an asshole too. And i wasnt approved in any other process yet. If someone do this in the middle of the process, companies should raise an alarm.
Redis the company raised 350 million dollars in investment money. No wonder they need to turn a higher rate of profit. This isn't about funding development, it's about roi. I think the business model is flawed. Salvatore Sanfilippo left.
Of course. It’s not a charity donation. Investments are done for ROI.
Yeah, but the issue is Redis license. You see, with that money, they can make a much better Redis, without releasing the source code, because the license allows it.
The main requirements of the BSD license typically include the necessity to credit the original source and to include the original license with any distributions of the software or its derivatives. However, unlike the GNU General Public License (GPL), the BSD license does not require that modifications to the source code be released under the same license (a concept known as "copyleft").
Therefore, for a project like Redis, which is released under the BSD license, anyone could technically take its source code, improve it, and then sell a commercial version of it without having to release the improved source code to the public. This flexibility is part of what makes the BSD license attractive to certain developers and companies, as it allows for commercialisation opportunities while still encouraging sharing and usage of the software.
If you get 350 millions, you can afford to hire the best contributor, and make something out of Redis, that is not the actual Redis, so to speak. Something appealing big companies, that is worth buying.
@@JohnSmith-op7ls Maybe ROI isn't always a good incentive.
@@TAP7a most things are funded because of ROI. Most major advancement are because of ROI. ROI is not just monetary. A scientist or physicist invest time and years of their life to push the boundary of science and knowledge as their return. America invested 100 of millions to beat Russia to the moon for the return of just beating Russia, communism and proving America's supremacy( with german Rocket scientist). ROI is only bad when it just monetary at all cost. ROI is usually a good incentive its just what is the return is the issue.
Dang, I didn't know redis took investment monies. Hmm
The pre video notice was critical for this one. Nicely handled
Thank you for holding space for discussion on tech news like this, Prime. Entertaining but also informative and influential
At some point of the video (quote from chat):
«QUICK DELIVER HIM DEMOCRACY PILL»
😂😂😂😂
I just realised you are like a radio commentator on a radio program, just this is about IT world. Nice.
It's like Howard Stern and Gilbert Gottfried had a kid, one who got a job at Netflix...
Public money, public code
I think if the government is going to pay for software, often software only used by the public sector, it should be FOSS
I also think we should reduce copyright to 30 years, build servers in every major library system designed to serve all materials in the public domain, push municipal internet, build government owned RISCV chip plants in the US instead of handing Intel bags of money (or do both), pay professors to write textbooks that are in the public domain
Imagine congress forcing glowies to post their best zero-days to github
@@codyhamilton7682Copyright length restrictions in US don't work because of Mickey Mouse Protection law
@@matthewdouglas2373 Like they wouldn't just ignore and lie to congress like they do already.
@@codyhamilton7682i want nothing less than copyright reduced to 0 years 0 days and 0 seconds because "intellectual property" is not real property
Let’s rename redis to redisn’t
Redain't
what about blueis?
blueain't, last call
redwas
Rappi
I'm not a lawyer either, but before interpreting vaguely written licensing text, it's important to note the words "Software" and "Modified" (note the initial capital letter) and see how those words are defined in the context of the license. I haven't read the entire license, but it's quite possible "Software" for them means Redis and not the software that you build around it. Once the scope is understood, it's a lot easier to get an idea whether the license change affects you or not, or which license is a better fit or you.
49:48 "FLIP, It's a marker, take it out!" damn it flip!!! :P haha
As flip said a few moments later (50:26) - "get fukt bozo"
The clause you were stuck on with the Mongo license: "If you distribute our software, you must include all source--our source, your source"
When you said "the Mongo license" I for some reason read it as "the Mr. Magoo license" and was like... what fresh hell is this...
@@GackFinderso sad that Mr Magoo contributed so many back doors to open source applications. I'm still convinced that they were unintentional and manifested through comedically-unlikely series of typos, but it's hard to prove that.
I both appreciated the calm and collected take at the beginning, and the more nuanced take with specific details of this specific instance later. Also so glad IANAL people aren't seriously thinking BSD/MIT means you can't sub-license like that one post claimed.
Re: "open source for all". The simple solution is to not have the fork BSD licensed ("do whatever the F you want with the code, we don't care") but instead have it GPL (or like) licensed. Which would prohibit the Redis dual license model, while still remaining fully open source.
GPL licensing is super restrictive, only the communists over at the FSF and friends do this stuff. MIT and BSD style license are definitely a nice middle ground to avoid headaches for everyone involved and in my opinion are in the true spirit of open source. Copyleft licensed software is almost always a no-go in a business setting, on basically every piece of software except provided as a service. It's a massive pain when an excellent library takes a huge space in the open space world for a specific problem but the license is GPL. It forces proprietary software to rely on more proprietary and expensive software. It's just stupid and tribalistic in my opinion.
Finally adding links/sources to the video descriptions. Major W
Most opensource in my eyes DOES have a capitalism problem but not in the way of people being greedy. It has a problem that we have to rely on a charity like system to support people who are making amazing things that they are spending time on. However it is EXTREMELY taxing on these people to be both putting in the time for this plus earning the income to SURVIVE. The support money should be bonus income not the income they need to survive.
so redis, a fairly simple but useful open source project, shouldn't be run by a company.
@@sub-harmonik How else are they expected to make money and not get f****d by other companies that simply upsell their code to others for profit? People have tried to make the honor system work in OSS, it doesn't. Big corporations still use your libs to build their products on and make money, the maintainers of them get zero dollars for developing and maintaining them and RedHat's founders are fishing on their yachts because they monetized OS work by sprinkling it with some of their own on top.
Open source as a concept is headed for a reckoning, and that day draws closer all the time, it's just not sustainable or fair in the slightest for the open source devs who pour their lives into some of these projects and get jacks*** to show for it
And not changing systems anytime particularly soon we need better licenses or perhaps even contracts that guarantee large organizations that freeride on open source contribute support in some meaningful way
Congrats, you've come across a criticism leftist have been making about capitalism for decades if not more than a hundred years, but about program code in this case.
This is what has always happened to art since capitalism. For example, how can an artist be truly authentic to their art when they need to juggle a job and all their bills they need to cover even their basic necessities? And even if their job _is_ art, how can it be authentic when it is being condition by the biases, incentives and pressures of the forces of demand and supply in the market in which they _sell_ their art? The answer is that they can't, and capitalism stifles art and artists (which, like with open source software, doesn't mean that it can't exist. It simply struggles and we as a society and culture suffer for it)
I'm not gonna ramble and write an entire dissertation on capitalism and private property, but know that lots of smart people have written about your same idea extensively, though applied to different and broader subjects.
@@Tomyb15 So pay the artists to support them and they don't have to juggle anything, it's a major problem when you don't and somehow expect them to get money anyways. How do you get them that money? Through what means?
It's not an issue with "capitalism" it's supply and demand, if there's no demand for your art, nobody is interested in paying you for it and you don't make money from it, needing instead to find things people do want to pay you for, simple as. That's why we have jobs and hobbies as separate things.
Socialism doesn't really fix that "problem" because it's not even a problem, it's a natural consequence of any economy, if anything, planned economies are worse at that because they just outright compel you to do whatever is most societally eficient sacrificing your own personal goals in the process
I've spoken to some Redis guys, and the reason for these changes are that AWS has internally forked Redis and made it insanely better, but refuse to share that code back with Redis. Which is why the license that applies to AWS would force them to open source their changes.
But the license changes are far reaching, and if Redis wanted to profit of off software they shouldnt have stolen OSS
“That power the modern enema… I mean internet” 1:55 😂😂
😂
46:42 this is where the role of the government matters, but in 1970s in the US they made buying politics legal, this is why we are now in this mess.
Somebody must have forgotten the Reaganisms and Thatcherisms of the entire 1980s that squashed labor unions only for them to return with a vengeance in 2023-2024.
A Redis employee always gave good conference talks explaining graph databases using DND metaphors and that was fun.
Thankful for the callout at the start of this, first half is rage inducing
The most important thing in this video is the flip at 15:50 when he finds out that Redis did not create Redis
These are honest reactions. And I try to make sure when I have a big flip I add some context
Why is it rage-inducing? Everything he said was perfectly reasonable with the information he had available to him, and when he got a new piece of information he immediately changed his perspective. Try not to induce rage in yourself.
The 2008 financial crisis changed the Internet and created bunch of companies that shouldn't exist
Ha..LoL good take.
huh?
Primagen think the term “boomer” didn’t exist 15 years ago is the funniest part of this.
Did it though? Without the Baby part?
@@shaunpatrick8345 I think people usually said “baby boomer”. But it’s obviously the same thing.
It wasn't used in the way it is now.
I started off with the opinion that Redis Inc was kinda in the right because they were stepping up against large companies, though a bit annoyed since it won't be open-source, just source-available. But after learning more about the situation, like the fact that Redis Inc promised to keep it BSD licensed, and that they are technically not even the creators of Redis, just a company that slowly inherited the project, and the original creator left 4 years ago, also the implications making it source-available also had on the non-commercial part of the community that used Redis
... I think I'll be supporting Valkey from now (the Linux Foundation fork of Redis)
I don't think Valkey will end up in a similar situation as Redis is in now because of The Linux Foundation. Do you remember what happened when BitKeeper wanted to charge Linus Torvalds money for using their source control? He made Git. Also, without real open-source, Linux wouldn't be as big as it is today.
the timing of that lola ascii art before the "rabbit hole" comment was perfect
That kind of makes the crazy "rust rule" a little more sense now!
25:35 Redis is primarily a consulting company, if I understood correctly. So 700+ employees would be justified if 400-500 were developers/engineers providing support/consulting services worldwide.
Flip is the true goat
yeah, in contract law when the party who writes the contract is ambiguous, it's assumed to be the least beneficial reading (for them) so they can't just change the effect of terms mid-stream
Man that was a really deep RABBIT HOLE sure glad I was lucky enough to see it
It's a fricken database. Why does it need 15 years of continuous development? When is software finished? (to be fair, the same could be said of any database).
If it doesn't need all that development, why are you even complaining? Just use an older version.
New features, better algorithms and bugfixes. Feature completion is only possible if the features list is limited😊
If you time travel back to early commits and insert a license change, it will actually not be legally binding, it might even technically be illegal if you do it with malicious intent because it can be viewed as fraudulent.
Looked at the evidence, considered it, changed his mind. Wow -- when does that happen on the internet? Well played, Sir!
Every production software I've tried from 3 D graphics to Computer-aided design programmes to circuit board diagram programs, To some game engines that allow you to have a community-based fork and a commercial based fork. It's pretty standard practice everywhere
Those are attached to employees/work seats, an entirely different distribution model.
always think long and hard before deciding to support an open source project. If the project becomes valuable enough for you to close it it will also be valuable enough for someone else to fork it.
I just hope that people don't reference this case when non VC backed FOSS projects try to monetize commercial usage. I like the idea of dual licensing GPL + a commercial paid license.
This story serves as a prime illustration of the current limitations of Artificial Intelligence, contradicting popular misconceptions about its capabilities. Despite the significant advancements made by leading companies like Alibaba and Amazon in Large Language Models (LLMs), we're still a considerable distance from leveraging this technology to innovate or recreate complex systems like Redis from scratch.
Garnet C# FAST BOIIIIII Let's gooooo
C# let’s go.
C# let’s go boiiiiiii
BSD is extreme forkable followed by monetizable. You can derive from and then close it up. It's not like ironclad forever communalism of GPL. You can take a BSD-licensed version of something, change it slightly and change the license, be it to GPL or completely closed.
I get where they're coming from: They want to keep the source somewhat open whilst trying to get some money out of the big cloud players reselling their product. My point of view is that they're hostages of ther initial license set for Redis. The fact many open source projects adopted it as a de-facto in-memory caching is also a complicated situation where most of them are now forced to find replacements as such projects now have imcompatible licensing models is a very hard problem to solve without impacting many people and multiple projects at the same time.
Their product? They didn't even invent it.
They betrayed every single supporter and commiter of the repository over the years that was commited to the free open source principles.
Have your opinions changed since watching the video? Y'know, since you commented 2 minutes after it was published.
Yeah the fact that they built a business around an open source product, then failed to compete to the level they wanted and then changed the license in response seems like a pretty average thing to do.
@@lolkthnxbai that's a fair point though I thought they had the IP for redis. I say this because otherwise they wouldn't be able to even change the licensing for it - if they didn't have any level of control over it.
IMO
They have to fork it and change it's name.
It cannot reside in the same repo as the old one.
Because changing licenses does not work.. like that due to how the laws handle licenses.
The license it was under allows forking..
So no issues with the laws when doing so.
They do control the repo so they can just lock it and only allow forking from the old one.
All new stuff they add should go into the 'new' 'insert name here' project repo.
With the license they wants it to have.
Because of how they currently done it they got issues with code from the earlier license version existing in the same 'name space' as the new.
That opens them up for issues with how the new license protects their property..
Aka I would say they could lose in a court battle due to this.
🤔
🌱🌱🌱🌱
This is the modern world, where charity and patreon-like systems seem to not be sustainable (enough?). We've seen this with Terraform, Unity and even Witcher - if someone can grab a bigger slice of pie, they would. I wonder which will happen first - Linux Kernel getting proprietary license or humanity involuntarily enrolling in hunger games.
Companies generally will use software composition analysis with tools like snyk to generate SBOMs to verify that they have no licensing issues. With things like LGPL it's fairly easy to get around nowadays with async architectural patterns. The anti-SaaS licenses are a lot more strict.
50:26 Flip did it again xD
The real question is: did Salvatore San Filippo make any money when he gave Redis Lab (now Redis), the intellectual property? The content of th agreement between Redis Labs and San Filippo were not of public domain. I hope for him he took home a few millions, moreover in consideration of what is happening.
"Boomer" is an OLD term, way older than 15 years. It originated in the 40s.
Open Source literally exists as a viable option because companies have a financial incentive to share the cost of research and development. Most major contributors to large FOSS projects are corporately sponsored. Yes, it's cheaper for individual companies to sponsor a couple of devs rather than roll their own. When a dozen companies do it, it makes a hell of a team and reduces duplicated effort. Anyone overlooking this is missing an essential part of how FOSS works at scale. This is why Redis has committed seppuku and Valkey will win this in the long run.
You can extract the module.files (json, search, ... .so files) from the docker container and loadmodule them yourself in your redis config file.
Actually they hid the download of these modules for some time now and pushed people to use the docker / redis stack thing.
Considering AWS literally had engineers on the core team and they really made it popular with Elasticache this is a horrible scum bag change.
As an opensource contributor I contribute code to a project under the same license terms that product has at the time of submission. You can’t legally enforce a license change of the product without having obtained permission from all the past contributors as you don’t own the copyright to all of the code unless it was signed over when accepting each contribution. It’s no different from a contributor forking a project they have worked on and just changing the license terms to something else.
"I have officially changed my stance [in light of this evidence]"
With full seriousness, this is the only truly big brain move in the world
2:50
It's interesting. I don't know the general developer perfectly but my expectation is that what they look for in licensing when screening doesn't go beyond source available but they expect copyleft or permissive.
And here redis is saying "you've voted with your usage of redis stack and you just want source available".
People need to be much more concerned/discerning in their choice of open-source projects.
the last 10% effort is the hardest part. it makes sense that the price goes up after people have dependencies on it, and maintenance gets hard.
I remember when A Person was sent to prison for copying windows installation discs. He had manufactured quite a few of them and they contained no keys. Many people argue that because you copy the work of MicrosoftBut he was guilty. My point and my argument was that because the software could not be activated without the licencing key which you had to purchase from Microsoft separately that heDidn't pirate anyone's code. The judge disagreed and now he sits in prison.
A Microsoft insulation disc is useless by itself and has no value.
Imagine taking a single-threaded hashmap with an HTTP API so seriously
36:00 I mean you're right it doesn't stop at Amazon but there are essentially zero mom and pop companies offering redis as a service solution. And no individuals either.
You seem to underestimate how many small businesses exists.
I've been at my current employed for over 20 years, I can say: we run services for businesses in our city and surrounding cities who have no idea how to run these things. We put a new web interface on top so they can click to pay-per-month to run it. We are just a small company, I have no idea what Redis would charge us for it.
@@autohmae it doesn't matter, redis is still free to use as part of your stack if you're building an application on top of redis.
The new licenses are specially about companies that just resell redis as a managed service. One license says you can do that but have to release your whole source, and the other says you can't do that.
If you're just e.g. using redis for a session cache or message broker in your application, you're fine.
@@autohmaeif you're not selling redis itself as a service, e.g. you're just using it as a session cache or a message broker, you don't have to worry about it.
@@georgehelyar yeah, but this is running it as a service: the customer orders the specific 'redis cache', etc.
Rowan Trollope.
Trollop: A woman considered promiscuous; a lady of the night.
_The universe doesn't. make. mistakes._
Had the same thought the moment I saw that surname. Oddly appropriate indeed.
650 scrum masters I lost it. I'm working as interim scrum master at big bank Australia whilst we wait for position to be filled. Job is a joke, literally just a copy paste "pencil pusher" role that doesn't contribute much.
I assume they wanted to expand. Enterprise contract, formal support channel, training guidance program, and a product liability clause that comes with dealing on that level. Otherwise, feature lockout will annoy everyone. They would have to multi-tier that. If big companies just want as-is, separate service and contract from feature set, then the Redis project maint will go slower or the direct support will suck. It's not just some single server cache store anymore. If companies pay, the executives want something extra. It sounds ridiculous, but if a huge system rides on this thing, and you don't get a good response from an open-source team, there's the warning. Not like Microsoft or Oracle is fast on incidents, but whatever. Funding Redis to be on the forefront of something other than cooking bacon on nvme would be fine.
I love watching your vids but dude you have some hard arse groupies in your channel.
I was a muso once in my life there die hard man well done ;)
Check out the recently released NDC London talk, "Open Source Exploitation" by David Whitney. It is a very well argued defense of this kind of model, broadly. Minus the massive VC funding of this specific case. Basically that "free" in "free software" stands for freedom, not zero cost, and that open source is not tenable if companies can continue to exploit FOSS without supporting it.
The best current alternative is Microsoft Garnet!
37:40 Oh my god. that's true, and needed to be heard.
I really don't understand how code contributed under an open source licence can be relicensed by some third party. The 3 clause BSD explicitly states it must be included with all distributions of that source code.
Hence the dual licensing. Old code is bound by old license, new code can be licensed in different terms.
Some OSS license like GPL prevent this by "poisoning" the license with linking clause. But the enforcement overhead usually not worth it for smaller projects (like redis, initially) and they ended up choosing simpler one like MIT or some BSD variant.
My mini take is - Decent developers are paid a wage in their job - the open source software they are maintaining is an attempt to try and make things better as it is still free (depending on the actor, not always).
The fundemental functionality of the software still allows people to build upon it and run it for free. If you wish to support the people that created it, (or other maintainers after the fact). Learn from them, it takes time out of their lives. You should appreciate their time if you're a corporate and pay for their time, especially considering they did you a favour to begin with. - Don't dog on them, appreciate the effort from multiple angles. - Let's not forget. If you pay for enterprise subscriptions you also have access to inside information with regards to the code, security etc..P.S what could you do with 37 billion?
Regardless of who started the project, the redis company is still maintaining/developing the project and I don't see what they shouldn't be paid by Amazon and others reselling the service
Bit of a tangent: It's absolutely inane that people think you have change your licensing to be viable commercially. I think the commercial success of linux as a server platform alone has proven this fact, let alone the myriad other commercially successful open source products.
"the calmagen", the first thing I read after 1 minute and 3 seconds.
we love flip ❤
Thank you for being my only source of technical news
Prime has been full-time streamer for a day, and he's already yelling about 5$ and engaging in furry content
I think this is fair, open source is too unsupported. They should be allowed to force the companies that use them to pay something for it. The source is still available.
50:26 how to we nominate Flip for a best editor award, because that was funny AF
With that "viral licence attack" you probably wouldn't be able to force people to release all their other code just because they infringed your licence unwittingly. I think a court would say they could just stop using your product and stop violating your licence. They'd only have to release all the other code if they think that's worth it to be able to continue using the viral licensed product.
9:30 It's not shittiness.
If i understand correctly there was 1 maintainer(among other 5 main maintainer if i remember correctly) that was working in Amazon, but her primarely role was to contribute to redis. And suddenly, after all her contributions, redis decided that it can sell her work to her employee one more time...
You can't just say that all the work that has been done by other contributors is only commercially usable by you to make money. It's insane.
Amazon is in the right here, for once.
So, basically, Amazon was paying 20% of money required to support and develop core redis functionality. I assume it's more than enough...
Well, they were also selling Elasticache. Pretty sure they raked in enough by now to cover that 1 maintainer.
Rabbit hole 🐇
The embarrassing part about "standing for truth and justice" is the massive self own it is to admit about yourself that you wouldnt stand for what is right.
In this case, I dont think cashing out is wrong, or that the creator is obligated to carry his creation forever.
But there are times when standing up matters, and you should. And those cases are smaller than you'd think. There are people who do and have stood up, and you should try to be one.
This video needs a followup that talks about Valkey.
Tbh, I was always baffled by the redis labs list price. I used to work at a company that got access to redis labs clustering before open source clustering was a thing and we got roughly a 90% discount for on prem, and there is no way in hell we would have paid even 50% of list price. It makes sense that VC money is responsible for that ludicrous markup. There is a reasonable chance that between the two licenses you could use redis and integrate the client into your code without paying or releasing your source, but until that is tested in court I'm certainly not going to test it.
Honestly though, most additional functionality put into the actual redis code base at this point is probably a mistake. Let it be really good at what it does, keep up with security, stability, and usability updates with what we have, and let stuff like AI tooling come out as a new project that utilizes or wraps redis.
There are many great examples of forks of projects that have gone redis that are still very much alive after 10+ years...
there should be a lisence that requires companies to pay if they are making (not profits) more than 10 mil a year.
I just come here to keep up with the latest developer lingo :) Never heard of DevRel!
"LLM Take" feels like such a good insult
usually contract laws would favour the party that didn't write the terms, so a vague clause would not benefit the party that came up with it, this is why usually terms and conditions are very specific.
Alfresco is the worst license possible if you need to do anything commercial.
Under open source pretenses a value was extracted from the community, including paid hours from for profit companies. Now all that extracted value is being privatized. This should be illegal. No backsies.
Isn't this what all the Linux companies like RedHat did years ago?
All the old versions are still open source though. You can still fork them, and they have already been forked to make Valkey. Is this any worse than if the Redis company simply shut down and stopped producing new versions? We're not entitled to new versions.
It's the classic. "If you're not happy, go out there and do your version."
i hate employee numbers they should just separate that into categories
Valkey should've re-licensed under the GPLv3, IMHO. Then Redis couldn't use their commits without also putting their stuff under the GPLv3 as well. I do not like the BSD license because it makes stuff like what Redis did easy to do.
The thing is, you can make your own 'Redis'
Maybe I misunderstood the license terms, but the license changes only affect you if you're not the end user.
the valkey fork is backed (and owned) by the linux foundation... because they need to still have redis.
I was listening to this and asked myself about halfway in why Prime was reading an article in such a strange voice.
I’d like to see a metric showing how much of the codebase was contributed by non-employees. That would give me something that I could use to determine if the license change amounts to grifting off of unpaid volunteers vs giving away something that was largely built in-house and given away for free (making end users more of the grifters).
Some open source projects receive a lot of use but not a lot of external volunteer contributions.
You really need to stop going off on a tangent without reading enough of the story/article, only to backtrack/readjust later because you assumed wrong. Respect that you’re able to change your view/take, a lot of people seem happy continuing down an obviously incorrect path.