{"id":42863,"date":"2024-04-16T23:45:17","date_gmt":"2024-04-17T03:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=42863"},"modified":"2024-04-24T15:23:52","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T19:23:52","slug":"the-race-to-replace-redis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/16\/the-race-to-replace-redis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Race to Replace Redis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven Vaughan-Nichols<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

For those of you who aren’t open-source licensing experts, this means developers can no longer use Redis’ code. Sure, they can look at it, but they can’t export, borrow from, or touch it.<\/p>

Redis pulled this same kind of trick in 2018<\/a> with some of its subsidiary code. Now it’s done so with the company’s crown jewels.<\/p>

Redis is far from the only company to make such a move. Last year, HashiCorp<\/a> dumped its main program Terraform’s Mozilla Public License (MPL)<\/a> for the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1<\/a>. Here, the name of the new license game is to prevent anyone from competing with Terraform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Joe Brockmeier<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

So it should be apparent that code contribution is beside the\npoint. Redis is a venture-backed company that has taken more\nthan $350 million in funding over many rounds since 2011. The company,\nand its investors, seem to have calculated that they can safely move\naway from open source to try to capture more revenue.<\/p>

They have some reason to believe this is the case, if MongoDB’s\nresults are any guide. The company went public in 2017 and moved to\nthe SSPL a little more than a year later. Shortly afterward, major Linux\ndistributions stopped packaging the database because it no longer met\ntheir licensing standards. But, by that time, the company had set its sights\non a\nplatform model<\/a> that would encourage developers (and their\nemployers) to use and pay for MongoDB and ancillary offerings with the\nas-a-service model. Distributing a source-available version of\nMongoDB could be seen as a loss-leader<\/a>\nstrategy to reach developers that the company wagered did\nnot care<\/a> about open-source.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Having to find a replacement to ship in place of Redis is not the\nonly problem for community distributions. Jacob Michalskie called\nout<\/a> several services in use by the openSUSE project that will need\na Redis replacement, including the Pagure<\/a>\ncode-hosting software (created and used by Fedora as well) used for code.opensuse.org<\/a>, and the Discourse<\/a> forum software.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

It is, of course, too soon to predict whether one or more of the forks will gain significant traction—but it seems likely that Valkey will be a credible alternative. The possibility of a swift fork with widespread community and industry backing should give pause to vendors who expect a smooth path after abandoning open source.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n