Why AWS Supports Valkey

It&#x27;s interesting how Redis&#x27;s decision is often defended while AWS and other &#x27;big corps&#x27; are criticized. Let&#x27;s not forget that Redis was a collaborative effort built on the contributions of many, including those funded by big corporations: gcc&#x2F;compilers, kernel, editors, VMs, etc. If the Redis authors, who were part of this collaborative ecosystem, decided to change their approach, it&#x27;s their prerogative. However, it&#x27;s worth noting that many others were left with a sense of dissatisfaction after the license change.<p>The same is true for ES, Mongo, and Grafana (to name a few). If you want to use a restrictive license, start your project with it, period. Don&#x27;t bait people by giving something for free and then making all sorts of excuses later.<p>IMHO, small companies and developers ultimately lose here. ES and Mongo still use and rely on AWS for their managed offerings. OpenSearch (mainly pushed by AWS) is vibrant and very alive. Redis will be ditched by distros and die a slow death, and (probably) Valkey will be in the next distro major versions. But we (small companies and devs) now have to spend time migrating and moving things around without any additional value.

I think this is how finally we get the big cloud providers to maintain the open source projects. AWS now supports OpenSearch (ElasticSearch), OpenTofu (Terraform), and ValKey (Redis). They also provide the Corretto builds of the JDK.<p>Overall if an OSS project becomes a significant part of cloud workloads, the cloud providers will pony up to keep that project going.

It&#x27;s hard to quantify, but I think Amazon would have to be in the top contenders for most value gotten from open source software

The irony here is that this AWS post is correct content-wise, but has nothing to do with AWS itself, they are just in it for the money.<p>The same article would apply to Terraform (and OpenTofu as the fork now), which was a much more clear &quot;community doesn&#x27;t want this&quot; case. There were a few companies that provided a bit of hosted terraform services, but it was hardly at any significant scale. Yet the same thing happened: community doesn&#x27;t want a restrictive license.

I would be far more sympathetic to these sspl corporations if they subjected themselves to those same license terms. But instead they play this some animals are more equal than others game.

Big bad Redis Inc. won&#x27;t let us host their software as a service anymore! Good thing AWS(champions of open-source software) are here to help!<p>Seriously though, very duplicitous framing by AWS. Ignoring the clear existential threat to Redis&#x27;s business if they allow other managed offerings to undercut their own.

It seems recent years give us a lot of licenses (for core infra software) and now for LLMs. They all say in very legalese basically: these top 5-10 tech companies will not compete fairly with us, thus they are banned from using the software. The rest are welcome to use everything.<p>I wonder if US monopoly regulation actually starts to work well, which I see some signs of happening, will all this license revert back to fully open source?

We really need to investigate the implications of monopoly power mixed with open source. That really wasn&#x27;t contemplated originally.

Sorry, I loose respect for those defending Amazon. Terrible behavior towards their workers, push against consumer protection, and anticompetitive antics like price-fixing highlight their deplorable behavior. They only way I do business with them is taking their money and not giving them a penny.<p>Their Walk Out technology original statements and working reality show they find with grifting to prop up their image.<p>Here is good example of economics. How much is a $25 Amazon gift card worth? Some it many be $25 and others it is $0, and in-between for people looking to off load their gift card for pennies on the dollar.

Was Redis Labs founded by Redis developers? I looked at its corporate history and was a bit confused (eg antirez seemed to be a consultant for them)

They talk about OpenTofu, are they going to do cdktf for opentofu then?

Absolutely hilarious and ironic for AWS to say they support an Apache project fork of Redis when it was their hosting Redis and ostensibly not paying Redis or somehow working with them to do it causing RedisLabs to do what only they can and go closed to be able to sell their own hosted services providing Redis. How else would they compete with AWS?

“To save a buck”. Didn’t even need to read the article :)<p>Free Software is the only way

I&#x27;m sorry, I just hate this foul language. Amazon claims that &quot;Redis broke with the community that helped it grow and left them stranded&quot; whereas the sole reason for the license change was Amazon itself who takes open source projects and gives its creators nothing in exchange. They will bend over backwards and create their own forks like OpenSearch rather than collaborate with the creators. And at the end, they will stab the creators with passive and active-aggressive accusations like these.