I have yet to hear a single positive story about this Redis Inc... it's like a giant company full of only assholes. Story after story is just "wow, these people all suck"
Redis the project was essentially taken over by a company that had nothing to do with its development.
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) started Redis and developed it by himself from 2009 to 2015, gaining massive popularity and building a large community in the process. It was FOSS the entire time.
A separate VC-backed company called Garantia Data used to make money by offering a hosted version of Redis. That company changed its name to Redis Labs in 2014 (and eventually just Redis), likely themselves violating antirez's Redis trademark at the time.
They then hired antirez in 2015 and started officially sponsoring the project.
From there began a slow transformation of Redis from a community run FOSS project to a proprietary locked down service. The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him and then finally kicked him out in 2020.
> The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him
How did that happen? He must have given/sold it to them, right? I remember him making an announcement that he was done with Redis and stepping away from involvement.
Impossible to know as an outsider. They could have tricked him with false promises ("we'll take good care of the project and always put the community first, trust us"). Or he could have decided that the check was big enough and not really cared beyond that.
PE/VC-backed bait-and-switch takeovers of "open source" projects have cost me a significant amount of time and money over the past few years.
My rule of thumb now is that I now consider any project that has a pricing page OR requires copyright assignment/CLA to a for-profit company to be effectively proprietary and just using open source as a marketing technique. That doesn't mean I won't touch it, but like with proprietary software, I'll evaluate it against the risk that the price will probably be jacked up in the future.
My theory is Redis is trying to take control over all popular libraries that interface with it so it can break protocol level compatibility to force vendor lock-in
That would push everyone to valkey. They want to add proprietary features supported only by their server and client. That's the extend part of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
8/10 uses of redis I have encountered in the world were people using it as a slower memcached.
1/10 are using it as a hope-for-the-best "queue" instead of rabbitmq, which is bullet-proof.
The last 1/10 actually use it as a novel "database" but every one of those instances also has mysql or postgres, rendering it completely redundant.
Redis itself was, for a while, a massive open security hole when the above people would put it on the open internet, where it would to quite useful to hackers as a free lua program runner.
Isn't it good for building and querying custom indexes? Doing that with mysql or postgres is very difficult or impossible depending on hosting solution.
Or would you still prefer to build on top of memcached?
> Thanks everybody for the feedback. Speaking on behalf of Redis Inc., we want to find a way to collaborate to best support the community and our customers. The objective is to ensure predictable releases for a Rust client library, manage issues and escalations promptly, as well as support the best we have to offer without forking the library and competing with the client library project. After discussing this with @nihohit in this thread and based on the whole conversation, we want to work together. We have already identified initial areas from which we could start.
> We have no issues keeping the project name as it is without a transition to Redis. We also have no problems with continuing to call this library "redis-rs". There is no intention to claim ownership of the client library's name, source code, or the crate’s package registry.
If we take the maintainer by his word (and I don't see why we shouldn't) then this was very necessary drama that caused Redis Inc to back off.
> the other client library owners dealt with the company without blowing up
A lot of the other client libraries are already under the control of Redis Inc. The Python client, one of the popular Java clients, the Go client and the nodejs package all live in the Redis Inc Github organization.
> Comments are all reasonable and there was no reason for the drama in the first place...
As the author of that issue I'm assuming if there was drama, then it was up to me. However I did not intend on causing one, but to discuss this issue with active maintainers of the crate as well as to understand to which degree valkey support is needed by users for the crate.
That this has created a discourse that goes beyond that was not intended.
> That this has created a discourse that goes beyond that was not intended.
I think the thing started off fine and reasonable, but if you go down the comments it takes a turn towards cynical and antagonistic where people are assuming the worst. Which is basically the point of my comment, rust related things seems to have these weird blow ups.
Some quotes
> Redis team has the required Rust proficiency, nor that they actually care about maintaining this crate
> Concepts of a plan eh?
> Of course they don't have a list of missing features, it's not about features. It's about taking control of a ecosystem that's collasping under them because of widly percieved-as shady license rug pulling.
In bold too
> What you care about is your customers, not the community or any contributors.
Then there's headlines like
> Redis Inc seeks control over Rust Redis-rs library, talk of trademark concerns
Its overall inflammatory, when the intention from the emails shown seem fine and the goals seem clear.
Unfortunately ever since the relicensing the situation in the Redis community is loaded. I have seen discussions in other repositories around Valkey and the discourse is not much different.
I have no need for Redis in my life. There is nothing unique it provides in 2024, and they have no special sauce I would consider getting hooked-on (locked into).
I am trying to remember why their software became considered ubiquitous for caching and sessions, and I reckon many a framework is busy rectifying this choice, as we speak.
The real value of open source code is that it should be able to be fully decoupled from trademarks. Much like OpenTofu, we shouldn't be caring too much about what private entities are trying to do to disrupt the community. Fork the code, change the names, and move forward together.
We don't need this noise. The code is already written and published. Consider the 'brand recognition' of such exciting tooling as:
Redis Ltd. probably parent of Redis Inc. owns the trademark. It isn't complicated, they can go around and ask people to change the names of their stuff away from Redis.
Is this in bad form? What does the guy have to do to convince you that he has to rename the library? It's tough cookies, but if he renames it, and the Redis Ltd. people fork the library and put the fork on crates.io under the redis name, that's what happens. The way it works just isn't whoever gets the name on crates.io first, irrespective of copyright.
I'd think that if the situation were reversed - Random Guy On GitHub Complains About Distasteful Actor Taking Over His Trademark - you'd root for the guy no?
redis-rs has been around since 2013, so before redis inc. was called anything related to redis (the were called Garantia data) or they hired the redis creator (in 2015) or bought the redis trademark (in 2018).
That might not be legally relevant but it is certainly ethically relevant.
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