LWN: Comments on "Redis is no longer free software"

Redis is no longer free software

sammythesnake — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 21:07:31 +0000

Three ways the AGPL has difficulty achieving its goal:

1) It requires $BIGCORP release the code for their entire operation as AGPL software, so they won't use AGPL software.

2) It doesn't apply require the release of anything behind a paper thin veneer of SaaS interface, so it's not meaningfully different from the "normal" GPL.

3) (This is the biggie, OMHO) It's really not clear whether #1 or#2 (or something in between) is really the case. The wording in the AGPL terms leaves plenty of scope for reasonable disagreement about what it even means. Even identifying the relevant jurisdiction is non-trivial, let alone finding out what ruling might come out of any court action. A quick Google doesn't reveal any suggestion of test cases to learn from...

3½) Is the AGPL's requirement of AGPL-licensed release of code absent distribution (in the copyright law sense - the AGPL uses the term "convey"), even enforceable at all? Again, I don't think this has been tested, but I imagine it would have tough time in the courts, to say the least(!)

Even if none of the above punctures the AGPL, any sufficiently mean spirited $BIGCORP could arrange for their modifications to be be made by a suitable distinct $PUPPETCORP, licenced under the AGPL but only made available to $BIGCORP, who would then not fall into the category of using a "modified" (by them) version, and would have no requirement to release any code at all (section 13 of the AGPL only applies to *modified* versions as I read it)

Honestly, I think the *idea* of the AGPL is not only perfectly valid, but laudable - a software author ought to be able (if they so desire) to provide code under terms that keep it big-F "Free" to end-users as well as recipients,, but I'm not sure there's any way to achieve this under current copyright or contact law. What I am pretty confident of, though, is that the AGPL is not such a way...

Redis is no longer free software

sammythesnake — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 14:11:42 +0000

While I'm not especially a fan of the "permissive licence" approach in general, I don't think this is really a fair characterisation of anything.

The code is still as available at it ever was, the only thing that's changed is that the Redis *project* has decided to no longer distribute it (or their future modifications) with a licence under the BSD terms.

It's *almost* exactly equivalent to somebody else forking the codebase under a different name and with a new licence regime, which anyone is free to do (and probably have done) within the terms of the BSD which really aren't very onerous.

The only difference is which project gets to use the name "Redis" / associated logos / domain name / infrastructure. The immediate appearance of multiple forks demonstrates that this isn't a *major* impediment, though they have yet to gain much mindshare for the new name(s)

The name is a matter of Trademarks rather than Copyright, and therefore outside the purview of most Open Source / Free Software licences - including the BSD style ones. There certainly are some licences that include trademark verbiage, but it's generally redundant, doing nothing more than reiterating that using somebody else's registered trademark isn't allowed.

Redis is no longer free software

zdzichu — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:45:41 +0000

It is too soon to know if any of those forks will be maintained.

Redis is no longer free software

rnestler — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:57:50 +0000

There is a fork currently called placeholder-kv: https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv

Redis is no longer free software

frankie — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:01:58 +0000

Another fork is now Redict.

Redis is no longer free software

jmalcolm — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 01:34:03 +0000

What do you mean?

Redis is no longer free software

cerebus — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 15:51:13 +0000

It's funny how news like this, absent anything compelling about the software's new form or features, can really put one off of wanting to touch it. I was just considering trying out Redis in place of where we use RabbitMQ, but now I fear getting invested in a potentially expensive ecosystem, withering due to being locked down, and rife with drama.

Redis is no longer free software

NYKevin — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 02:28:03 +0000

It is difficult to make specific statements about what might or might not matter. There are at least a good ~200 jurisdictions in the world that may have an opinion on the matter, but I'm not aware of any relevant litigation, statutes, or case law (which does not mean they don't exist!), so the best I can do is make educated guesses.

My gut says that you can probably get some kind of damages out of a permissive license if you're the copyright holder, even if you're not the person attributed. It's hard to say how those damages should be calculated, and different jurisdictions will have different formulas. Here are some formulas that I could imagine being used:

* Determine the market cost of producing the software from scratch (i.e. "hire [n] software engineers for [k] [weeks/months], and pay them market salaries"). Possibly apply some multiplier or discount to it (which is probably going to be a highly arbitrary number in either case).
* Determine the market cost of advertising equivalent to the attribution. (No, I don't know how they would figure out what kind of advertising is equivalent; probably they would ask both sides to submit proposals and the judge would choose between them or come up with a middle ground.)
* Attribution (to someone other than you) is worthless, so you are only entitled to nominal damages (i.e. not very much).
* Attribution is priceless and/or easy, so you are entitled to specific performance (or some reasonable approximation) even though the license doesn't call for it explicitly.
* In some jurisdictions, authors benefit from a separate legal regime called "moral rights," which specifically protects attribution, and that would have its own system of remedies. However, this theory would make the previous version infringing (since you are not attributed there either), and I'm not sure you want to open that can of worms. Note that in most jurisdictions, moral rights are either difficult or impossible to waive, and it is almost never possible to waive them implicitly (i.e. without the license having very specific legal language explicitly referring to moral rights). On the other hand, some jurisdictions have no (or very limited) moral rights.

Redis is no longer free software

geofft — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 23:55:55 +0000

Since you seem to know things about things - does it matter that the copyright statements in question were "Copyright (C) 2009 Salvatore Sanfilippo <antirez at gmail dot com>" and not the name of the contributor whose rights are being infringed? Is it harder to claim that you were harmed if it wasn't your name in the removed permission statement anyway? (Assume it was GPL or even SSPL or something if it makes the potential infringement case more real.)

Redis’ License is BSD and will remain BSD (2018)

himi — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 22:33:39 +0000

Ooh, a quick scroll through that thread and I found this: https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13157#issuecomment-20... - a contribution where the copyright is explicitly held by the contributor's employer, Red Hat. Also a bunch of comments about contributions from AWS, Alibaba . . .

For all that the BSD licence is pretty hard to violate, it looks like this might be one case where it ends up having some serious force behind it. At the very least a lot more work to make doubly sure that every i has been dotted and t crossed, and possibly more.

Redis is no longer free software

khim — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 19:12:38 +0000

> They've added a new REDISCONTRIBUTIONS.txt to comply with the BSD-3-Clause requirements.

Except that new file doesn't tell which file is licensed from whom and on which terms. The whole point of BSD license is that one sentence: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Which means they did the only thing that Salvatore Sanfilippo (and others) haven't given them the right to do.

And if you include the fact that they clearly have done that to ensure that Salvatore Sanfilippo (and others) wouldn't be able to do anything in the future… it would be interesting to see what will happen, I guess.

Redis is no longer free software

dvdeug — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 16:33:52 +0000

That's a massive oversimplification. GCC and the Objective C frontend is an older case where the GPL caused the Objective C frontend to be available to everyone. Linux, which became a very large cake, has had decent returns from commercial users; BSD seems to have had relatively little, with the exception of some end-of-life stuff tossed out. Even then, e.g. AdvFS (from BSD-based OSF/1) was released as GPL-2, not BSD, for use with Linux.

Working with giants like AWS and Azure is hard; they have every intent on being compatible with Redis only so long as they have to. They want you locked into Amazon Elasticache or Azure's version. Can a BSD version keep even a tiny slice of cake against that? I'd suspect Redis is going to drift into oblivion as open source users drop it and AWS & friends ignore or duplicate any changes.

Redis is no longer free software

jrtc27 — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 16:05:22 +0000

No they haven't. They've added a new REDISCONTRIBUTIONS.txt to comply with the BSD-3-Clause requirements.

Redis is no longer free software

vmpn — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 14:50:32 +0000

What did you move to if you don't mind me asking?

Redis is no longer free software

bluca — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:44:10 +0000

We did not have "an open and interoperable web" before EME, we had Silverlight that didn't work on Linux, and Flash that sometimes worked after endless tinkering completely out of reach of non-tech-savvy users.
Thanks to the EME standard interface, and thanks to corporations that maintain builds of the implementation that work, things that people actually want to use nowadays "just work" on Linux too. We are so much better off now than we were before, and it's not even close.

Would it be even better without DRM? Of course, but a strongly worded blog post from a height of 0.0x% of market share is not going to make that happen, because we live in a capitalist society and that's just not how capitalism works.

Pick your battles.

Redis is no longer free software

cloehle — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:32:06 +0000

>you mean the trademark?
Yup, sorry, what an unfortunate mistake :/

Redis is no longer free software

mjg59 — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 09:18:06 +0000

This is terrible thread drift, but:

A frequent defense of Richard Stallman is the work he did in the 80s to make free software a reality. If your argument with respect to Tim Berners-Lee is that we should feel free to criticise people based on their current behaviour with no regard to what they achieved in the past, are you fine with criticism of RMS that ignores everything he achieved in previous decades?

Redis’ License is BSD and will remain BSD (2018)

joib — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 07:54:27 +0000

> If the licence does not grant explicit permission to relicence (and BSD does not grant permission) then you can't.

Indeed. You can grab some popcorn and check the comments on the relicensing PR: https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/13157

Redis is no longer free software

NYKevin — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 07:49:01 +0000

> This could get interesting. There's already two copyright owners in that pull request pointing out the violation of *their* license terms, and BSD is just like GPLv2 in that it has no amnesty clause for “oopsie, we screwed up” — violating it is a rights-terminating suicide option that falls back to statutory copyright infringement, which can only be undone by an explicit re-granting from every actual rightsholder.

This is perhaps slightly misleading:

* GPLv2 has a clause which explicitly terminates the license if you violate it, and contains no provision for automatic reinstatement upon cure. So by the strict terms of the license, any violation can only be cured with the consent of the licensor. Depending on jurisdiction and the facts of the case, a court might decide that this is unreasonable and apply equitable principles or the local equivalent, but if not, then the license is terminated and the infringing party is required to cease using the software. Some jurisdictions have previously ruled that GPLv2 can only be enforced through contract law and not through copyright law (usually because those systems prefer to limit "infringement" to cases where there was never any valid license at all), but that doesn't necessarily make a difference in terms of what the court ends up ordering.
* BSD-3 (and most other versions of BSD) says that permission is granted "provided that the [...] conditions are met." This is much more vague, but at the same time, it is fairly conventional as contracts go. The conditions are a form of consideration, and when a party fails to meet them, they are in breach of contract. Unfortunately, this clause is an excellent example of why software engineers should not be in the business of evaluating licenses: It probably does not imply termination, at least in common law countries, because those countries have a theory of contract law which promotes "efficient breach" (the idea that, in some cases, everyone would be better off if one party could breach the contract and pay off the other party's damages, rather than having to abide by the strict letter of the contract). If you don't explicitly specify termination or otherwise require specific performance as a remedy, then courts may be reluctant to order it as a matter of public policy, and instead try to work out how much money your counterparty should pay you for the privilege of removing the attribution (read: how much money you personally lost from not having your name/license attributed properly).

The practical reality, however, is that no BSD case is going anywhere near a court of law anytime soon, because it is so much easier for a company to settle a permissive license case (settlement is basically "put the plaintiff's name etc. in a menu that nobody looks at, and maybe pay them some money to go away") than a GPL case (settlement probably involves publishing code that you never intended to be public, may also involve auditing and other stuff the SFC likes to ask for in their settlements).

Redis is no longer free software

IanKelling — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 07:32:05 +0000

Excuse me, I shouldn't have wrote the shill bit. I wasn't thinking as I normally would.

Redis is no longer free software

LtWorf — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 07:08:40 +0000

It has never once worked for me.

Firefox downloads the proprietary thing, and then it doesn't work.

That's it.

.mkv files on the other hand work very reliably.

Redis is no longer free software

Cyberax — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 06:52:31 +0000

> This feature is bowing down to the profit interests of corporations rather than the interests of an open and interoperable web

It allows corporations to provide an open and interoperable DRM that doesn't require intrusive measures or custom applications.

But it's bad because it allows people to watch TV without intrusive measures or custom applications.

Got it.

Redis is no longer free software

LtWorf — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 06:40:13 +0000

> But that was never Redis' model. Redis LTD was a commercial company from the beginning. They later hired the original open source developers.

AFAIK the original developer hasn't worked ther for a few years. I don't know when they have parted ways and I don't know why that happened.

Redis is no longer free software

donbarry — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 05:37:00 +0000

This feature is bowing down to the profit interests of corporations rather than the interests of an open and interoperable web, the entire original justification for which Berners-Lee I was justly celebrated before Berners-Lee II sold out.

"It's easier to capitulate before corporate interests." Well, maybe in the short term. That EME hasn't gobbled up more of the web *yet* is no justification for its existence.

I've never installed it. I've certainly never subscribed to one of the delivery services that would use it. I can't say I've ever missed it, and I also sleep well at night.

Redis is no longer free software

timrichardson — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 03:50:59 +0000

It is partly the model, and partly the context, I think. There are definitely sustainable open source projects. I would be surprised if you could predict their success from the exact model or licence, but I am quite confident that you could predict their success quite well from the context. By definition, a sustainable open source project has a broad base of unrelated contributors, so any model that doesn't support that won't work but I am not sure about the causal relationship. Models that encourage many developers and reduce the power of individuals or for-profit entities may simply be the outcome of sustainable projects that had no grand ideas about models.

As to why sustainable open source projects exist at large scale with commercial, for-profit contributors: the answer is pretty simple. It makes financial sense for them to contribute: if the software does not have a lot of added value (such as an in-memory database that your end users have never heard of) why pay $100 of developer time to reimplement it when all you need to is to pay $1 to fix a bug or $10 to add a new feature? When lots of contributors make the same decision, you have a sustainable open source project, although it's hard to see this making any one very rich. From the point of view of the Redis investors, they can't be worse off going proprietary, so why not?

Redis might turn out to be pretty generic and it might not be worth very much to people like me, who use it. You can run Windows servers in AWS, but who does? But I guess for the investors there is not much else to try, now that they have learnt that you can't beat AWS at hosting.

Redis is no longer free software

timrichardson — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 03:13:19 +0000

A project where the added value of the entity paying for it is the software is not sustainable for open source. That's ok.

The business case for open source exists when it is much cheaper to make an open source contribution of 1% than paying to reimplement the 99% just to then pay for the 1% extra (which could even be a bug fix). This is pretty common for infrastructure where you don't even care if a competitor uses your contribution. It can definitely be sustainable. Once you have paid a developer to submit that bug fix so you can keep using the open source database, you are a little bit more committed than before, because now if you decide to reimplement, you also have to reimplement your improvements. Ironically, you kind of get locked in to open source. This is the definition of sustainable.

You'd think a key-value in memory database is pretty much the definition of this sort of project. I use Redis, but I don't contribute. But I assume it has external contributors, and a lot now depends on what they choose to do. As for the investors of Redis, it seems like a risk. They could now lose control and see an open source project start to implement some of their added value, non free components.

Redis’ License is BSD and will remain BSD (2018)

timrichardson — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 03:02:08 +0000

The claim is true, it is just that all the BSD versions of Redis are now historical. The comment in 2018 was careful not to claim that all future version of Redis would be BSD, only that the future BSD versions would be BSD, which is a comment without substance because they couldn't be otherwise.

Redis is no longer free software

dvdeug — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 02:55:51 +0000

I don't use a feature is not an argument for a feature to not exist. If you don't want to use Netflix, that's your choice. The feature makes it easier for certain people who do want to use Netflix to use Netflix.

Redis is no longer free software

timrichardson — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 02:51:26 +0000

A CLA doesn't have to allow unlimited licensing, and since Redis didn't have a CLA anyway, your point is misdirected. Instead, blame the BSD licence.

Redis is no longer free software

IanKelling — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 01:30:40 +0000

> You seem to imply that the alternative to EME was no DRM. That is false. The alternative was having to reboot into Windows to watch Netflix.

> Already forgot about how much fun it was when the only way to consume media online was Flash, or Silverlight? THAT was the alternative.

I have a teenager who watches youtube with no EME and doesn't give a shit about netflix. I've lived the majority of my life when netflix.com didn't exist. People without TVs existed, and people without EME exist and are thriving. How does it feel to be/act like a shill? https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/cancel-netflix-if-you...

Redis is no longer free software

IanKelling — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 01:16:42 +0000

+1, no to tbow.

Redis is no longer free software

pabs — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 01:10:30 +0000

> Freedom includes private improvements to software that are never given back to the public.
> Copyleft licenses remove that particular freedom to encourage the growth of the other freedoms.

This is incorrect, copyleft licenses only require giving to your users, not back to the upstream project or the public in general. You can certainly keep improvements private if you don't have any users or your users aren't technical enough to use or request the source or publish it anywhere.

Redis is no longer free software

roc — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:46:34 +0000

This!

Also, the oppose-EME-at-all-costs people predicted that it would inevitably lead to DRM for all Web content. It's been nearly 10 years and there's no sign of that.

Redis is no longer free software

Cyberax — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 23:55:00 +0000

Why is EME bad? It's an option for people who want it. You're totally free to ignore it.

Redis is no longer free software

Wol — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 23:19:27 +0000

> Inevitably, if the software is less-exploitable by private entities, it will be less-adopted by them. This is another tension, between private exploitation and forcing public benefit through the legal system.

And it's not a zero sum game. Do you want a small slice of a large cake, or a large slice of a small cake? The problem with trying to force public benefit is you are then likely to have pretty much all of a very small cake. Go the other way, and your small slice is likely to be much larger than the small cake.

Cheers,
Wol

Redis is no longer free software

bluca — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 22:33:05 +0000

You seem to imply that the alternative to EME was no DRM. That is false. The alternative was having to reboot into Windows to watch Netflix. Is DRM bullshit? Yes. But it's not going away because some greybeards on their 0.x% of market share don't have it, so I'd rather have a well-defined common API in the browsers for it, instead of proprietary shitshows that were there before. Already forgot about how much fun it was when the only way to consume media online was Flash, or Silverlight? THAT was the alternative. Thanks, but I'll take EME and widevine any day of the week over Silverlight.

Redis is no longer free software

raven667 — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:55:26 +0000

This is the fundamental thing, companies, universities, small consultancies and consortiums, pooling resources to maintain shared infrastructure works for FOSS but there are only a few firms that make billions from it, maybe only Redhat, and injecting VC funds into a project leads to eventual enshitification when they want their 10x return on the investment at some point. I would also say that the features added by VC funding tend not to be sustainable and useful for the community but are often an attempt to corner and monopolize a market for the eventual imposition of rents, or the features are only attractive to other organizations trying to monopolize and to scale to billions of users when a much simpler and less complex software could have done the job sustainably using far fewer resources and with far less effort.

I see the threads between the push for SPAs and React and Kubernetes, containers and micro services, large clustered nosql databases, graphql and API-first design and funding from VCs with zwro-interest-rate money to throw around, crowding out simpler and more sustainable application development. How many apps which need layers of proxies, caching and clustering could just be a Django CRUD app on a server if they weren't trying to scale, and weren't taking and infrastructure inefficient way of doing so.

Redis is no longer free software

donbarry — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:41:41 +0000

Let's not continue to use Berners-Lee as a model of ethical behavior. His overriding of an immense groundswell of popular opposition to capitulate to the big media companies and ram through Encrypted Media Extensions as an official part of the W3C standard turned the corner of his being a servant of the community to his being a puppet of business interests.

Honor him for what he was, but not for what he is, which only deserves contempt.

Redis is no longer free software

flussence — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:35:27 +0000

This could get interesting. There's already two copyright owners in that pull request pointing out the violation of *their* license terms, and BSD is just like GPLv2 in that it has no amnesty clause for “oopsie, we screwed up” — violating it is a rights-terminating suicide option that falls back to statutory copyright infringement, which can only be undone by an explicit re-granting from every actual rightsholder.

The company had better pray nobody they've wronged here feels inspired by Patrick McHardy…

Redis is no longer free software

atai — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 20:36:06 +0000

> that cannot be named as a Redis project as they own the copyright.

you mean the trademark?