Uh, this article is so strangely written. The real thing that happened is https://codeberg.org/redict/redict — a fork of Redis by Drew DeVault under LGPL v3.
I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it.
> I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it.
The old development community is regrouping under https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv. As of right now we don't intend to change the license, we just want a more balanced governance that prevents a corporate entity to make this type of choice. We are currently planning a five person governance, with everyone coming from a different company. (We would love some independent maintainers, but there weren't any at the time
the article isn't strange at all, it's pointing out that there are two projects based on the last-good-release-of-redis source code:
1. redict, maintained by drew de vault, which takes the stance that redis is finished software, works well, and just needs its existing feature set maintained and bug fixed
2. redis, maintained by redis labs, which seems to be experimenting with generative ai for the sake of adding features, and which practically needs to stay on the feature churn treadmill so that they can keep trying to extract a profit from it
the author's (quite reasonable) position is that regardless of who gets to use the name "redis", the product that people know and love is going to live on as drew's branch of the fork, not redis labs'.
The article ignores that the two previous core team members that didn’t work for Redis Ltd, along with other active contributors, are gathering around a different project. They just don’t have a name yet.
But why is that a "quite reasonable" position? To me, it's the opposite: extremely unreasonable, bordering on ridiculous and over-dramatic. Consider:
* This position conflates a license to use a product with the product itself. That's not how intellectual property works!
* The blog post author is unilaterally speaking on behalf of a community, but it isn't clear that the author has ever contributed to Redis (has he?) or is a major part of the Redis community (is he?). I understand that he is a very accomplished coder and have heard many positive things about Zig, but where's the relation to Redis?
* Ditto for Drew (maintainer of the fork in question), has he ever contributed to Redis or is he a major part of the Redis community?
fwiw some people said this same thing about MySQL vs MariaDB, claiming (absolutely incorrectly) that Oracle's MySQL is the "fork". In that case, it wasn't a license change (MySQL is still GPL), but rather people that just didn't like the change in ownership. So it seems people will just invent mental gymnastics to justify this "X is really just a fork of X" when they don't like a decision by the intellectual property owner.
In the MySQL/MariaDB case, the people saying this "MySQL is actually the fork now" were largely not terribly visible members of the community. And the Linux distributions who mapped the "mysql" package onto "mariadb" created a giant mess, since MySQL has remained more popular than MariaDB, and the two are absolutely not compatible with each other.
Anyway, if you don't like Redis Ltd or what they've done here, that is fine and understandable! But it doesn't mean you can unilaterally declare that their product is a fork of itself, and the "real" project lives on elsewhere, and expect most people to go along with this as if it is a reasonable position.
you're right, it's not really reasonable to say redict is the only valid fork, especially since other people have pointed out that some of the original redis devs have their own fork. i had the impression there was more community behind drew's fork then there actually is.
The license choice is interesting here - this means if there are many committers and there is no requirements like CLA it becomes impossible to change the license and have proprietary forks without all contributors agreements.
I agree though I would rather see them choose to stick to BSD and work on creating community of vendors (rather than Redis Labs monopoly) perhaps some purely Open Source, others proprietary.
To me, the article presents an alternate narrative that (in my opinion) rightly calls out relicensing of F/OSS as the actual fork since it’s being done in a (usually) hostile manner against the wishes of the community that lifted it to be relevant in the first place.
I think the crack at Drew is (maybe) fair given the explanation of redemption, but also unnecessary. Drew’s hardline software freedom advocacy is the relevant information to the story. His promise of redict’s safe harbor is backed up by his profound stewardship of other projects.
Redis is the original project and it continues, even if the licence change is a bad move. Redict is a brand new fork, currently at the “rename everything” stage. It may or may not succeed at being the “new Redis”. The people behind “old Redis” probably consider this title misleading and possibly defaming their project. Many people may decide to create other forks (I expect OpenRedis from Amazon any second now).
For many people, Redis is an open-source in-memory data store. Redict is closer both in spirit and in legal usability to the Redis people have been using for many years compared to whatever got the Redis trademark now.
If I do an `apt-get upgrade`, I don't expect to schedule calls with lawyers. I imagine most repos will switch to either this one or some other "renamed" projects, with the package name "redis" pointing to one of those.
I don’t think I’m happy with the licence choice here (it should stay BSD-3-Clause). At least the primary repository isn’t on sourcehut, people might actually contribute to it.