Probably, AWS and Google probably have millions of existing customers using Redis. And AWS and Google are not going to be paying for it themselves of course, but just pass the costs on to their customers.
So they can stick to the old official Redis version for a while, before the license change happened, but at some point someone might find a vulnerability, and patch it in the official Redis, and then everyone that’s stuck on the old version is fucked - it’s a bit of a ticking time-bomb to be stuck on an old version.
So then AWS and Google customers can decide
- “I want to use the latest version of official Redis, and pay x per month per Redis cache” (if the new license allows that)
- Or “AWS doesn’t support a free Redis anymore, but competitor does, so I’m just gonna migrate my infra to a different cloud”
So if they already switch to an open-license fork they can preemptively mitigate most of those risks
That is a different perspective I hadn’t considered. Thank you 🙂
The megacorps will have to pay for the development of their new fork now - or not, if they can find suckers to do the work for them for free, but I doubt that’ll happen. How much that’ll be and how much the customers using the new fork will bring in will probably determine the health and existence of the fork. Unless of course the corps use “fuck you” money to kill redis.
Unless of course the corps use “fuck you” money to kill redis.
I doubt the corps are angry at redis. They just don’t like the new terms.
Nothing to do with anger. It’s just business. They were allowed to leech, now they can’t and the naive, purist opensource community (notice the qualifier purist aka not the entire opensource community) will happily join the ranks of businesses that couldn’t be bothered to donate to Redis despite their money chests. Redis is now a competitor and capitalists don’t like competition. They like monopolies ergo valkey has to become the new #1 and redis has to die.
They were allowed to leech, […]
Services like AWS and Google Cloud offer 1000s of “free software” (like Redis) as a service - like AWS Elasticache - and if you look at the pricing, cache.t2.micro for example, is $0.017/hour, while just a plain t2.micro vm is $0.0116/hour. So effectively AWS is only “leeching” $0.0054 an hour on the Managed Redis that they’re offering.
An AWS managed Redis is just easier, otherwise I’d have to boot my own t2.micro, and install Redis there. I’d still be using official Redis on AWS, because self-hosting is still fine in the new license, it’s just more work for me, because the license doesn’t allow AWS to do it for me anymore.
and the naive, purist opensource community ([…]) will happily join the ranks of businesses that couldn’t be bothered to donate to Redis
It’s funny how people are now siding with Redis. When other companies did something similar (like identityserver4 was FooS, and then they created their new commercial company - and everyone was like “fuck you, you people are sellouts.”.
Most of the time when a FooS project goes commercial, people make a free fork and the commercial project slowly dies
So effectively AWS is only “leeching” $0.0054 an hour on the Managed Redis that they’re offering.
24*365*0.0054 = 47,304$/ year / instance. How many instances are hosted by AWS? How many are hosted by Google? How many by other Redis aaS?It’s funny how people are now siding with Redis
I live in the real world, not some make believe where we live from the gratification of free work alone. It was fine when ElasticSearch did it and it’s fine when Redis is doing it. If you take an opensource project, build a business off of it, make millions, don’t contribute back in a significant manner, and compete with that opensource project’s own product hampering its development, then this kind of license is in no way a surprise.
243650.0054 = 47,304$/ year / instance. How many instances are hosted by AWS? How many are hosted by Google? How many by other Redis aaS?
Formatting it like
47,304$/ yearseems like you’re saying it’s $47k, but it’s just $47. How much would it cost any company to self-maintain their Redis instance?Don’t contribute back in a significant manner
They have multiple people full time employed that are contributing, and how are they “hampering its development”?
If you look at the top contributors: https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors
- #4 Binbin works for Tencent Cloud
- #6 Zhao Zhao works for Alibaba
- #7 Madelyn Olson works for AWS
- #9 Wen Hui works for Huawei
Soo actually these cloud providers are some of biggest contributes to the project. They’re not just taking Redis and aren’t contributing. The opposite actually lol.
Besides, you’re acting like Redis is some poor little startup, but they’re a company with 991 people (by their linkedin stats). Its like if Oracle would change the MySQL license, and then you side with Oracle “Poor little Oracle, everyone uses MySQL, but no one contributes” - yea no
