drewdevault

I think you're missing the reciprocal nature of the arrangement here. Since you seem to assert that it's acceptable to release software under a proprietary license (and I agree with you, most of the time), you must believe that the authors of a work have a right to distribute it under whatever terms they like. So: is it appropriate for someone to say "I am willing to offer my labor to this collaborative project, and release the source code for free, and allow people to build from my work, under the condition that they extend the same rights back to everyone else"? It's much more generous than what proprietary software offers, after all.

Why is copyleft subject to more scrutiny than proprietary software for you? You suggest that permissive licenses are better because they allow permissive derivatives of the software, which suggests that permissive derivatives are good. But copyleft derivatives are... not good? Copyleft offers more freedoms than proprietary software.

Moreover, this line of reasoning completely disregards the social contract. Many people worked on, used, popularized Redis under the presumption that they were participating in a collaborative effort from which all participants would benefit, only -- surprise -- now the trademark holder has changed the terms so that only they benefit from a product of which, by objective measures, 80% was made by the community.

Governments, businesses, they're all just institutions and I see no reason not to use them as illustrative examples.

The MIT maximally enables exploitation; copyleft maximally enables freedom. From the point of a proprietary fork of a permissively licensed project onwards, users of the proprietary fork enjoy fewer freedoms than before. You are advocating for freedoms for the few (business owners making proprietary forks of free software for profit) at the expense of the freedom of many (everyone else).

Redict would also be possible if Redis used a copyleft license. The space for Redict to exist is not afforded to us because of the use of a permissive license in some way that Redict denies to anyone else through the use of a copyleft license.

I don't think that's true. It's only true if freedom == freedom from obligation, which is a naive view of freedom. But if freedom == guarantees of rights, then Redict is more free. This is how freedoms actually work in practice: freedom of the press is guaranteed by restricting the government from censorship, workers rights are guaranteed by restricting the freedom of businesses to exploit them, etc. In practice all freedoms require someone to give something up. Even with permissive licenses, you are giving up the sole right to your IP and the sole to commercialize your software.

A hypothetical license that said "no forks allowed" would not be an open source license. If Redis used the LGPL we could still fork it, we'd just have to use the LGPL for our fork; likewise anyone can fork Redict so long as they use the LGPL for their fork.*

* Technically you do have more options than this with the LGPL but this is a layman's explanation.

This is a common misconception and source of fear/uncertainty/doubt regarding copyleft licenses. It's true that, the stronger the copyleft license, the more obligations it imposes on companies, and the AGPL is perhaps the most onerous of all and thus the least attractive to businesses. But, copyleft exists on a spectrum, and there are thousands of big-ticket FOSS projects that tens of thousands of businesses depend on and make use of that have a copyleft license. Linux itself is GPL, and pretty much everyone depends on it.

The license for Redict is one of the weaker copyleft licenses and should not pose any onerous compliance obligations on the most common commercial use-cases for Redict.

> Copyleft is a string. The default would be complete permissiveness.

I have answered a similar line of questioning before.

Arguing strongly for permissive licenses is arguing for a kind of passive freedom which presents as freedom from obligations. Copyleft is the sort of active freedom which presents as a guarantee of rights.

Yes, I realize I worded this poorly. I emphasized this point because this is what makes it non-free/not meet the Open Source Definition; you cannot retain exclusive right to commercialization. But I realize that was not actually something the parent commenter was asking about.

Codeberg was chosen over other candidates because it has a workflow similar to GitHub, to ease the transition for the existing community. In my opinion, we're going through a big shake-up anyway and there's no better time than now to consider changes like this. We did discuss moving it to GitHub or another platform entirely, but as a community we decided to stay on Codeberg.

Changing the license was an absolutely essential requirement, and this is a crucial time to evaluate and commit to that change. As far as we're concerned, not being copyleft was a bug that was exploited by Redis Ltd, and a fork which doesn't fix that bug isn't addressing the underlying problem.

>So I'm clear though - if I wrote a SAAS product tomorrow that under the covers used Redis, I'm OK, but if I spun up a bunch of servers and offered managed Redis as a product, I would need to pay?

That's the pitch of the license, essentially, but in practice the SSPL is an utter nightmare to comply with (to the point of being deliberate) and it mainly exists to put a veneer of open source on a proprietary product. In actual practice you really just cannot offer Redis as a service unless you are Redis Ltd, which is the actual point of the license in the end.

They exist to serve the bottom line, and if the bottom line is best served by evaluating and approving the LGPL license (a trivial task, as it is broadly understood and the compliance requirements are negligible for most users), then that's what they will do. And in any case, no one is categorically opposed to the LGPL. Unless you think that no one is using Linux in industry, given that it uses a stronger license (GPL), which is patently absurd.

It's worth noting that the Linux Foundation is a commercial consortium and the companies behind Valkey contribute over $1M to its annual budget.

Redict is binary compatible with Redis Modules, including RedisJSON, out of the box, so you can keep using it no problem.

Note the careful use of private modifications as not requiring disclosure of the source code. You only have to include source in the very specific situation of building Redict and providing it in compiled form to customers directly. Like, if you give someone the ELF file. If you run it on their behalf as a cloud service or something you have no obligation to provide source, which is the most common commercial use-case of Redis.

LGPL is a very well understood license, even in the EU, and is already in use for many projects that are widely depended on commercially. Consider ffmpeg as one prominent example, which is used by virtually all multimedia software in the industry. It is very easy to comply with the LGPL, and your legal department works for you, not the other way around.

Substantial portions of Redis were written by AWS and Google. People are upset because Redis is a collaborative project with many people working on it and Redis Ltd wants the sole right to commercialize the work of an entire community.

LWN has a good overview:

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966631/8bc9d155d4e2afb3/

Redis Ltd is only responsible for about 20% of the work.

LGPL is a pretty weak copyleft license and was chosen specifically because it is amenable to almost all present-day commercial use-cases for Redis. You don't have to publish your changes to Redict in most situations, commercial or not. Check out the FAQ here:

https://redict.io/docs/license/

It depends on a lot of factors. Generally people provision infrastructure according to its expected usage, and to overprovision is wasteful.

Hey, this is really not how it went down and I'm kind of upset that it's being read this way.

The premise of Redict is to create a fork which is driven by a grassroots community rather than a commercial interest, and which is safe from this kind of rug-pull in the future and to press back against this broader trend of rug pulls by commercial vendors of free software. I invited collaborators from the start at every level, going out of my way not to instill Redict as a hostile takeover but as a community-led effort to create a future for Redis which is protected by copyleft. I talked with the people behind Valkey from the start of Redict and extended them a role in shaping everything from the direction and governance and infrastructure and tooling from day one, provided that we could find common ground on the license. Hell, @madolson, the primary force behind Valkey, signed up for a Codeberg account so that she could be made an admin on the Redict repository before placeholderkv even existed. She was removed only when it became clear that she was committed to her own fork and it didn't seem prudent to us to give admin rights to someone who wasn't contributing.

Redict was not refusing to collaborate or meet in the middle. The raison d'etre of Redict was to be a copyleft home for the Redis codebase, and if we could have found agreement on that then every other detail was always clearly indicated as subject to consensus and we proactively reached out to build that consensus, but were refused by madolson and the commercial interests that wanted to be in charge of their own fork rather than participate in a grassroots project.

Even the consensus they wanted on the license choice was, in the end, the consensus of the four commercial vendors. We tried to find a way of participating in this consensus-making process, but it wasn't made for us. Calls we made in public to use a copyleft license were met with resounding support on GitHub, to no avail.

Don't mistake four commercial vendors and the Linux Foundation for a community. I wish them the best of luck, and acknowledge that a corporate-led home for Redis is probably what some people are looking for. That said, I'm not okay with this narrative that Redict was not cooperating with the community, because it's just factually wrong and hurtful to boot.

Yes, we agreed amongst ourselves (Redict) that the right approach was to focus on long-term maintenance and reliability.

What are your concerns with LGPL?

The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.

Google isn't trying to sell you their internal systems. This is a bullshit AI hype bubble advert masquerading as an academic paper. Bet you 10 bucks it doesn't get through peer review (or isn't even submitted for peer review).

Ah, yes, the free market is the unquestionable discussion-ending answer to all things good and moral in life. All pleasure in life shall be allocated to the highest bidder, and that shall be good and just according to the inalienable principles of Social Darwinism.

Here's the latest spec, with the "draft" watermark removed just for you:

https://files.catbox.moe/fesgvi.pdf

Its absence on the website is collateral damage from the SourceHut outage a couple of weeks ago which I have not gotten around to fixing yet.

Abortion rights is big one.

Rather than address these points line-by-line, there is a bigger issue at play: a difference in understanding (or opinion?) over what the Overton window is. This is particularly evident in that you cite Europe as 9.3% of the world as relevant to defining it.

The Overton window mainly classifies the kind of ideas that are "politically acceptable" on the stage for which it's defined, using terms ranging from "unthinkable" to "radical" to "popular" to "policy". On the world stage, I would argue that the most left-leaning of European countries define the left end of the window (given that they have enacted left policies), and the most right-leaning countries (e.g. Singapore) define the right end of the window. It's not a matter of proportion.

That said, I agree that the global window is rapidly shifting right, as in your example of France.

Okay, point-by-point:

> Military

I agree that the military does not neatly fit into a spectrum which applies well on the global window of left/right. Reaching instead for political philosophy rather than political practice, I think it's better to introduce the 2-dimensional political compass to understand this rather than relying on the 1-dimensional left/right spectrum: war is more favored by authoritarian politics (which is to say politics that value authority, rather than necessarily repressive regimes, which are totalitarian). I would also say that authoritarianism tends to be more popular on the right, though the Soviet Union offers a clear counter-example. This issue is messy indeed. But, generally speaking, I think that American leftists (as a distinct group from liberals or Democrats) are not in favor of war, whereas everyone right of and including Democrats are generally pro-military and weakly or strongly in favor of American imperialism.

> Social justice

"Social justice" is ill-defined here, and I don't really think Democrats push for it. A positive "social justice", as I understand it, might, for instance, consider reparations, which I don't think any contemporary Democrats have pushed for. Democrats adopt a more equality-oriented (not equity-oriented, which I would argue is more aligned with what "social justice" calls for) approach to social issues, outside of certain matters like ostensible support for affirmative action.

But, I don't think this is the thread to define and argue over whatever "social justice" means. You can send me an email if you want to clear that up.

I'm not sure the overton window applies too much to economic policy in the US at this point; it's essentially hardline liberal capitalism in the Democrats, and liberal captalism with a kleptocracic chaser in the Republican party. Like I said, the entire US political system is united in its unquestioning faith in liberal capitalist economics, the window is very narrow. Democrats will make overtures towards unions, but will never step up to support them when it comes to policy.

As for social policy, it is heading to the right, gaining momentum in the years leading to Trump and making steady gains since. I would characterize the social overton window in the US as the Democrats nailing the left end of the window the wall and Republicans systemically dragging the right end further and further right.

Aye, center-right in terms of economics, more center (or even center-left) in terms of social policy. Pushing it to the right, consider Democrats on war and the military industrial complex. And, ultimately, I would say that the unifying policy of the Democrats is to preserve the status quo in all matters: social and economic. And the status quo in the US leans right as far as the global stage is concerned. And don't forget about Europe when establishing your list of countries to define a global overton window.

There are no "moderate" nor "progressive" parties. There's just Democrats and Republicans, which in a global context are respectively center/center-right and right. In a US context, both terms are more likely to refer to Democrats, and definitely not to Republicans. There are some other parties but they are of next-to-no consequence in US politics.

It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so.

In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not.

Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right.

Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.

This is not consistent with the law.

The GDPR does not allow for paying to opt-out.