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Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

What are they hoping to get out of it? Wouldn't this just inconvenience their own users?

Consolidation of control and brand recognition. As soon as Redis revealed their hostile intentions, forks split off. Valkey seems to be the favored one, and in my direct experience is what projects are using moving forward. If we don't intend to use Redis' commercial services we have no reason to use them given the license fuckery.

Like IBM with Redhat, they tried to overstep their position and exert undue control, so the community rejected their status as BDFL. Now IBM has Rocky and Liberty to deal with, and Redis has Valkey rapidly gaining credibility as the go-to solution. The social contract of FOSS goes both ways, and greed is righteously punished with the loss of power.

This was the obvious play when the original Garantia Data-now-Redis Labs went on their acquisition spree and subsequent buttoning up of the ecosystem via their cloud/hosted enterprise offering even before 2013 and then taking the Redis name for themselves. I believe it was only slowed down because of the community aspect pushing back against the stupid licensing changes of it, otherwise they would have gone full steam into it to get even more control. It's so sad to see a good product like that be hung out on the whims of some scummy leeches.

I’m sure most of it is trademark preservation. Trademarks are enforce it or lose it.

You can enforce by requiring an agreement, and making the terms reasonable enough that an OSS project can agree to them (this isn't entirely easy, but it's not that hard either).

Also, there's the thing where these other projects have been using the name since forever, so there's already a history of non-enforcement.

The best time to start enforcing their trademark (from a legal perspective) was ten years ago. The second best time is now. Negotiating many agreements with many OSS projects is a lot of legal work which they may not want to pay for. And none of this undermines my original point that their primary motivation is probably just trademark preservation. That they did a poor job previously doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to do better now, and that they could use less aggressive methods doesn’t mean they aren’t primarily focused on trademark preservation. It’s the simple explanation. Occam’s razor.

You mean the trademark that wasn't filed until 2018[0]?

That is part of it....these projects are older than the trademark, by quite a bit.

[0]: https://trademarks.justia.com/878/05/redis-87805452.html

I don’t know why you think you are dunking on me here, I’m not saying they are right, just what their likely motive is.

It wasn't intended as a dunk. Was just trying to add a bit more context to the situation.

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