| ▲ | inigyou 7 hours ago |
| As a reminder, Redis was widely replaced by its non-vibe-coded fork Valkey. |
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| ▲ | godtoldmetodoit 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think that's a very unfair characterization. The Valkey fork happened due to licensing changes in Redis in early 2024. |
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| ▲ | logicprog 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you have any evidence for Valkey "widely replacing" Redis, instead of just rapidly gaining adoption as well? Additionally, it's important to clarify that the replacement was 100% over licensing issues — iirc predating the vibe coding entirely — not the use of AI to code, and that furthermore, no one has to my knowledge pointed to any flaws in the Redis codebase even correlated with AI use. So this is a disingenuous framing. |
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| ▲ | inigyou 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 100% of the employers I worked for since the time of Valkey had replaced Redis with Valkey. | | |
| ▲ | gen2brain 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 100% of the employers I worked for (one employee) never did that switch. The license did not affect us; we had nothing to do with AWS and the like, so we just continued using Redis like before. We already had our RPM builds, so whatever course distros took, we did not even care to look. | |
| ▲ | Tade0 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To be honest until today I thought Kafka was the popular go-to Redis replacement, as almost none of my employers used Redis for its original, intended purpose, namely being an in-memory key-value store. What they really wanted was RabbitMQ. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Kafka does a completely different thing than Redis. | | |
| ▲ | Tade0 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed. Doesn't change the fact that people have been using Redis where they could well have used Kafka. Hell, I did that in a previous project. |
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| ▲ | dominotw 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i am currently working on this exact migration at my company. aws also kind of pushes valkey so ppl seem to choose the default. | | |
| ▲ | antirez 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, it costs less, and AWS is in a dominant position. Users here are playing the side of the bully since they don't care about what is right and wrong with the hyperscalers. "BSD is better than AGPL!" And give money to the wrong side of the history. Nor that I expected anything better, the single person has a given sensibility, the mass, as a whole, do whatever is in a given moment convenient or believed to be more pure (license wise). However thanks to that, you will see how little progresses we will have (and we are having) in the space of open source system software with very open licenses. Developers of software mostly are not happy to bring OSS to the success to see them used by hyperscalers to capture all the value. However I did it again, with DwarfStart, to release code under the BSD license: even in the current situation, I think it is better to give back than to have a personal gain, but this is a position that very little folks can afford to take. However: this conversation is completely out of topic but people instead of talking about AI and code, which is a tabu, will move the conversation to personal attacks and shit like that. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wish you'd chosen a "non free" fair source or open core license from the start. Amazon has stolen enormous wealth from you and your collaborators. People cheer for the hyperscalers even though AWS and GCP are not at all open source themselves, charge absurd margin, and do everything in their power to lock you in. It's really unfortunate. Thank you for Redis. Hopefully AI gives them extra competition. There doesn't seem to be a moat for them yet apart from distribution. Hopefully that holds. The world needs competition and less concentration of power. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In order to really leverage a nonfree (proprietary) or more-free (AGPL/SSPL) license you have to have a substantial thing to protect. If you try to protect something trivial, your competition will just implement it themselves, unless your price is low enough to make that not worth it. Redis is relatively trivial, it is a REmote DIctionary Service. Amazon could have written their own Redis quite easily. They didn't, because the idea is sufficiently non-obvious, but ideas are protected by patents, not copyright. Even RMS recommended using LGPL in some cases to maximize overall freedom by not making your competitors copy it. In the case of Redis, GPL probably would've maximised freedom (but not revenue) as Amazon still could've used it and released any changes they made. Valkey has diverged from Redis, gaining features like vector search and multithreading. | |
| ▲ | antirez 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thanks, I believe that as a whole choosing the BSD created a more positive effect, so I'm happy with that. It is just that it is really unfair to read a comment where people use ValKey to accuse you of AI slop :D It means that our community, and this site itself, is at this point really low quality. This will in turn discourage the many great folks that are here. A replacement is needed. But TLDR, I would release Redis again with the BSD license if I could go back in time. |
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| ▲ | antirez 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you understand Redis and ValKey have mostly overlapping code bases? And of that intersection, a big part of the code was written by myself by hand. So no, that's not the case. Also as I wrote in the blog post, Redis is currently not using AI if not as AI-assisted coding. Of course I'm not writing this reply for you, since I believe if you write a comment like that, you are part of that HN slice that makes this site at this point a slop place (no need for AI for very low quality), but for others that may find this information useful. |
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| ▲ | echelon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| As a reminder, Amazon and Google pillaged the Redis project and took all the profits of themselves. OSI purity is hyperscaler brainwashing. They don't want to pay you. They want to take your labor. Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars off of Redis while the original authors and the company formed around it have gotten none of that. The best licenses for new database projects are fair source and open core. Tell the hyperscalers, "fuck you, pay me". Fuck valkey. Fuck Amazon. Fuck Google. They're fucking thieves. And they'll lay you off the second they get the chance. |
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| ▲ | rpdillon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't find this argument compelling because you're selectively applying logic. Okay, so you don't like AWS or Google. Fine. What about the thousands of other hosting companies that use Linux, Apache, Nginx, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl for their offerings? Are Yunohost and Dreamhost evil for using Postgres and not open-sourcing their orchestration layer? The precise reason I build my sites on top of Linux and Apache and Postgres is because I can switch hosts at any time. But what you're advocating for is being completely locked in to the hosting service that is controlled by the company that happened to have authored the database. I would never use a product from a company that had that attitude because I would be completely beholden to them. I get your frustration that AWS and Google make it hard for database vendors to release their work under a truly open source license. But what you're advocating for would destroy a huge amount of the value of self-hosting and open-source. | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This isn't true, I don't think. For example, Instagram was built on Django, but I don't believe the Django founders magically got money because their totally free to use OSS was used in the way it was licenced. If you don't want people to use your software and make money, then don't release it with a licence that explicitly says you may make money from this software. What was stolen? | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | There used to be a social contract that you got free code if you behaved nicely with it. Then companies realised social contracts were worthless (not just in open source) and stopped following them and only followed legal contracts. |
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| ▲ | dominotw 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > took all the profits of themselves. some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too. You must be joking. Until the whole of AWS and GCP are open source, they're taking absurd margins on your business and locking you in. | | |
| ▲ | dominotw 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | not sure i follow, thats the whole cloud hosting model. yeah you can self host to avoid that but thats a whole another tangent. If you are already locked in then whats the benfit of choosing redis from a pointy haired boss prespective. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Amazon and Google are pouring resources into reducing the fitness of the Redis project, pilfering insane revenues, yet not once has either offered to open source their own core platforms. They're attacking another company that is powerless to defend itself. And the community cheers it on. How kind of them to ensure valkey remains "open" so you can continue to purchase it through their hyperscaler product. They'll get their margins through your other usage and they won't pass that along to the Redis project. They'll be keeping that for themselves. Sucking the oxygen out of the room while they metastasize into every area of the economy they can grow into. Dumping on healthy markets like an invasive species. Then they buy up the shells of once healthy companies, lay off the workers, outsource the labor. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | They're doing exactly the same thing to Valkey that they're doing to Redis, it's just more legal. Somehow Valkey is more successful because of it. |
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