But if you wanted to have influence without a big pay check, why not join Valkey? Redis, the company, in your absence has gotten a reputation as a predatory company that has attacked open source projects in other to further those goals.
I want to help Redis to find a good path forward (while I respect the work of everybody). I was sponsored by this company for ages, I know the core hackers there, and they are strong and are good people. I talked with the CEO and he is very interested in finding novel ways to play, so I rejoined Redis and not ValKey.
Honestly even if Redis public image has not been stellar recently, I know the people that work at Redis, many engineers are there since the start, and I believe they have huge design abilities and can do what is needed to make Redis more useful for the community.
What motivated me was the company idea that with the license change the attitude could change significantly towards providing as much value as possible back to Redis. So merging what is super useful and has been, so far, only available to paying customers, and so forth. Also the company is interested in changing attitude. All these things made me feel that my efforts were better spend doing some bridging work between the community and the company.
The player in this context has an outsized influence on the game, the people managing the game are using their work, and contributing more to it is effectively influencing the game in a big way.
I don't really hate or care about anyone in this game, but it's a non-trivial move in the game.
Valkey is making it possible for hyperscalers to continue appropriating open source and charging fat margins to everyone else.
In a sense, Valkey is the bad guy here.
And just look at all the support Valkey is getting from Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc. They're perpetuating the problem.
The same thing happened with Elasticsearch. Unfortunately ICs without decision-making power started lambasting the Elasticsearch leadership for attempting to fend off AWS and their ilk from absorbing all of the revenues derived from their hard work.
Open source is just a commodity feature for hyperscalers. It's time we stop giving it to them for free.
This is all about power. We're ceding it to trillion dollar companies because we've been trained that "open source" is ethical. Meanwhile, we don't question the ethics of these companies profiting off of this work while charging us absurd margins. None of the hyperscaler infra is open source.
Many of the Redis developers left to form Valkey, so that they could keep working on the Open Source project they wanted to work on. Valkey is continuing a project that was released under Open Source terms, after the original company rugpulled the Open Source project in favor of a proprietary one.
Or, in other words, Valkey is Jenkins here, and Redis is Hudson.
> Many of the Redis developers left to form Valkey
What's the point of spreading informations that are not true?
I believe there is a single person that was in Redis and works there now, at least AFAIK. And this person stopped working at Redis long time ago (and was not a core developer). So I'm not understanding who joined ValKey from Redis folks.
Everybody is working at Redis: me, Oran, Yossi, Meir, many others.
> I believe there is a single person that was in Redis and works there now, at least AFAIK. And this person stopped working at Redis long time ago (and was not a core developer).
It is probably more correct to say a bunch of Redis contributors left the Redis GitHub project and moved over to Valkey.
You can see there are a bunch of contributors listed on this page who seem to predate the fork and who have continued to contribute:
> Nearly all of them work at cloud providers so they literally just followed their income stream.
Sure. And same for Redis employees who continue to work on the Redis Github project. All my significant contributions to open source have had financial incentives as well.
I know this doesn't mean much, but I spent a lot of time outside of work helping to maintain the Redis codebase. I attended our meetings and responded to issues on vacation because I cared about the community, it was more than just a paycheck for me. I don't regret doing any of that.
as much as I dislike the hyperscalers parasitising open source...
"redis ltd" the company did not originate redis
"redis ltd" was originally "Garantia Data": a company that offered hosted redis as a service
fundamentally they are/were doing the same thing as AWS/Google: taking an existing open source product they did not originate, and selling hosting for it
they may have hired its creator (several years after he wrote it), and since then changed their name to "redis", but they're not any different to GCP/AWS
other than the complaining about others more successful business models
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/redis...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858144
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607