from Hacker News

Redis Inc seeks control over future of Rust redis-rs client library

by sandwell on 11/27/24, 2:58 PM with 65 comments

  • by voidfunc on 11/27/24, 3:25 PM

    I have yet to hear a single positive story about this Redis Inc... it's like a giant company full of only assholes. Story after story is just "wow, these people all suck"

  • by gpm on 11/27/24, 4:15 PM

    Seems like this was resolved with Redis Inc backing off prior to the HN post. From @mortensi roughly 4 hours prior to the post: https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecommen...

    > Thanks everybody for the feedback. Speaking on behalf of Redis Inc., we want to find a way to collaborate to best support the community and our customers. The objective is to ensure predictable releases for a Rust client library, manage issues and escalations promptly, as well as support the best we have to offer without forking the library and competing with the client library project. After discussing this with @nihohit in this thread and based on the whole conversation, we want to work together. We have already identified initial areas from which we could start.

    > We have no issues keeping the project name as it is without a transition to Redis. We also have no problems with continuing to call this library "redis-rs". There is no intention to claim ownership of the client library's name, source code, or the crate’s package registry.

  • by svieira on 11/27/24, 4:26 PM

    https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419#issuecommen... - looks to be mostly resolved at this point, with Redis Inc. simply going to step up its contributions to the open-source version without taking control.

    Thank you antirez, mitsuhiko, and mortensi for working to resolve this amicably!

  • by liveoneggs on 11/27/24, 3:44 PM

    8/10 uses of redis I have encountered in the world were people using it as a slower memcached.

    1/10 are using it as a hope-for-the-best "queue" instead of rabbitmq, which is bullet-proof.

    The last 1/10 actually use it as a novel "database" but every one of those instances also has mysql or postgres, rendering it completely redundant.

    Redis itself was, for a while, a massive open security hole when the above people would put it on the open internet, where it would to quite useful to hackers as a free lua program runner.

  • by greenavocado on 11/27/24, 3:40 PM

    My theory is Redis is trying to take control over all popular libraries that interface with it so it can break protocol level compatibility to force vendor lock-in

  • by terminalbraid on 11/27/24, 3:43 PM

    > "companies do consider protecting their trademarks where their reputation is challenged"

    That's rich considering how they've been actively destroying their reputation by themselves.

  • by jsploit on 11/27/24, 3:35 PM

  • by kstrauser on 11/27/24, 3:32 PM

    Alright gang, from now on, all community projects are named Sider.

  • by PeterZaitsev on 11/28/24, 5:52 PM

    Lets face it Redis Inc owns Redis trademark, same as it owned Redis software copyright and we should expect it will enforce it.

    The community took steps launching several Redis alternatives, including Valkey - the next step would be also to get rid of trademark in the connectors

    As there are number of vendors offering Redis compatible databases those days I think the best approach would be to come up with vendor neutral name for Redis protocol and when Redis, Valkey, DragonflyDB etc could be listed as supported products.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 11/27/24, 4:08 PM

    Related:

    Redis is trying to take over the all of the OSS Redis libraries

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42239607

  • by aurumque on 11/27/24, 4:50 PM

    The real value of open source code is that it should be able to be fully decoupled from trademarks. Much like OpenTofu, we shouldn't be caring too much about what private entities are trying to do to disrupt the community. Fork the code, change the names, and move forward together.

    We don't need this noise. The code is already written and published. Consider the 'brand recognition' of such exciting tooling as:

    * fzf * tmux * ripgrep * exiftool * fdupes * etc.

  • by probablybetter on 11/27/24, 5:14 PM

    I have no need for Redis in my life. There is nothing unique it provides in 2024, and they have no special sauce I would consider getting hooked-on (locked into).

    I am trying to remember why their software became considered ubiquitous for caching and sessions, and I reckon many a framework is busy rectifying this choice, as we speak.

  • by pokstad on 11/27/24, 4:00 PM

    Valkey

  • by doctorpangloss on 11/27/24, 4:41 PM

    Redis Ltd. probably parent of Redis Inc. owns the trademark. It isn't complicated, they can go around and ask people to change the names of their stuff away from Redis.

    Is this in bad form? What does the guy have to do to convince you that he has to rename the library? It's tough cookies, but if he renames it, and the Redis Ltd. people fork the library and put the fork on crates.io under the redis name, that's what happens. The way it works just isn't whoever gets the name on crates.io first, irrespective of copyright.

    I'd think that if the situation were reversed - Random Guy On GitHub Complains About Distasteful Actor Taking Over His Trademark - you'd root for the guy no?