作者 | 李冬梅、核子可乐
The Linux Foundation has announced a new version of the Redis Open Source Alternative
The Linux Foundation has just announced the release candidate for Valkey 7.2.5-rc1, with growing support for Valkey as an open-source alternative to Redis' in-memory NoSQL data store.
Valkey 7.2.5-rc1 Project Address: https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
Since March 21, when Redis announced a change to the open source license, several Redis forks have emerged in the community, such as Redict, Valkey, etc. Previously, none of these branches had a clear direction of development. If a developer wants to use Redis in a new project, it can be difficult to know which option is more meaningful in the current environment.
Valkey's debut is different from other branches because it is backed by many of the core developers of the Redis project, and has successfully launched its first compatible release candidate after being incorporated by the Linux Foundation, which will allow existing Redis users to easily migrate to Valkey without having to make backward incompatible API changes.
Currently, the project has formed a technical leadership committee made up of several former Redis contributors, and hundreds of community members have expressed their willingness to support Valkey. In addition, the project is supported by many cloud vendors and leading technology companies, including Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, Chainguard, Heroku, Huawei, Percona, and Verizon, as well as existing partners AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc, and a growing core of maintainers and contributors.
The Linux Foundation says that since the Redis project was founded in 2009, thousands of open source developers have contributed significantly to its growth and success. To continue to improve this important technology and allow for unrestricted project distribution, the community created Valkey, an open-source, high-performance key-value store. Valkey 7.2.5-rc1 is now available to the community, and the team is also working on an upcoming major release, Valkey 8.0, which will include new features such as more robust socket migration and memory efficiency improvements. The Valkey 8.0 release is expected to be available by the end of 2024.
Valkey will follow an open governance model, remain community-driven, and welcome all users and contributors.
"Valkey was built by long-time Redis contributors and maintainers, and keeping the project in the hands of a foundation rather than a single company means that Valkey will be community-driven and there will be no accidental license changes that would undermine trust and violate the principles of open source competition," Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Linux Foundation, said on March 27.
What is Valkey and why did it come from?
So, what exactly is Valkey, why did it come about, and why did it move away from Redis to Linux? It all started with last month's abrupt change in open source licenses by Redis commercializers.
On March 21, 2024, Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis, the company behind Redis, announced that the license type of the project will be changed from the original BSD open source license to RSAL v2 and SSPL v1 dual licenses.
Redis said the license change is primarily to protect Redis' commercial interests and prevent cloud vendors from leveraging open source versions to support commercial Redis SaaS services. This kind of behavior is not uncommon in the market, and vendors such as Confluence, MongoDB, and Elastic have previously made similar license changes to their open source projects to protect their interests. However, Redis's move has sparked the anger of many developers, one of the main reasons being the large number of external contributors in the Redis community. This unilateral change to the license is seen as a betrayal of the community and, more importantly, of the contributors.
As a result, longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson decided to start her own portal and started the project called Valkey in her own GitHub account.
Olson said that after the news broke, many current Redis maintainers quickly decided to leave Redis in favor of Valkey. "When the news came out, everybody said, 'Okay, we're not going to contribute to this new license,' so when I talked to everybody, 'Hey, I've got a project that will keep these old friends together,'" she said, "and almost everybody said, 'yes, I'm going to join right away.'" ”
Valkey, the private channel of Redis, has five core maintainers, three of whom are from Redis, and the other two are Olson from AWS and Zhao Zhao from Alibaba Cloud.
Are cloud vendors really prostituting open source communities for nothing?
So, who is deeply involved in the Redis community's project contributions? Let's cite an analysis of the X-lab open source platform to elaborate on this.
The figure below shows the distribution of the contributions of the top 10 OpenRank developers in Redis since 2020. As you can see, there is a clear trend of diversity in the Redis community. The contribution share of Redis's internal developers has been declining from nearly 80% in 2020 to less than 40% by the first quarter of 2024. At the same time, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Ericsson and many other enterprises have been deeply involved in the Redis community contribution for many years, and their contribution proportion is increasing year by year.
Image source: https://open-digger.x-lab.info/en/blog/redis-analysis
At the end of June 2020, Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo announced in a blog post that he was stepping down from maintaining the Redis community and handing over the responsibility to Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Agra, who were working at Redis Labs at the time. At the same time, the duo also published a blog post saying that they would launch a new community governance model and work with Itamar Haber to form the core development team of the Redis community. The following month, Madelyn Olson from Amazon Web Services and Zhao Zhao from Alibaba Cloud joined the core development team, and the entire lineup remained stable until the recent Redis license change.
In addition to the six core developers mentioned above, Zhu Binbin, who has been involved in the Redis community for a long time, was recruited into the Tencent Cloud Database Product Department. And in addition to Zhao Zhao, Alibaba Cloud has three other developers who appear in the top 10 contributors list over the years. Overall, at present, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud, Google, Tencent Cloud and other cloud vendors have harmed a total of 20 developers who have made positive contributions to the Redis community for a long time. From this point of view, cloud vendors are not just "prostitutes" and have no support and investment in the Redis community, as the Redis commercialization company has complained, which is also in stark contrast to the general view of "cloud vendors have been prostituting open source communities for a long time" in the IT industry.
With so many cloud vendor contributors involved, Madelyn Olson of Amazon Web Services immediately launched a Redis fork called Valkey after Redis announced its license change, with plans to place the new project under the Linux Foundation's hosting. Google and Ericsson have also made it clear that they support the growth of the Valkey community.
Developers from other cloud vendors have also decided to move to the Valkey community with little hesitation, as the new licensing terms for Redis directly exclude cloud vendors from continuing to contribute to the Redis community. It seems that Redis clearly does not want the cloud forces to continue to be deeply involved in the subsequent development of the community. According to the feedback of many domestic contributors, within a week, the permissions of the GitHub redis-committers team were revoked, and the repo write permissions and issue/PR management permissions of external committers were also removed. Today, they have essentially the same permissions in Redis projects as regular users.
Zhao Zhao from Alibaba Cloud said, "In addition to participating in the specific contributions of the Redis community, we also gave back to the community the fixes and improvements accumulated in cloud products, such as functionality, performance, stability, and observability. With the rich user base of cloud products, we have been delivering a large number of real user needs to the upstream community. We believe that this is our responsibility, and we firmly believe that Redis is a thriving open source community that we can maintain and strive for for for a long time. ”
According to the data, among the top 10 contributors to Redis in 2024, except for two from Redis, the remaining seven are now engaged in the development of the Valkey project. This marks the fact that the Valkey project has actually established a new community and is up and running, and that the Redis project will continue to be independently developed and maintained by Redis developers.
Image source: https://open-digger.x-lab.info/en/blog/redis-analysis
Starting from the macro data, the Redis community's OpenRank collaboration influence has remained around 80 for the last six months, and just ten days after Valkey was open-sourced in March, its OpenRank has soared to around 40, nearly half of the Redis project. In terms of the number of developers participating in the community, Redis has maintained a monthly scale of about 100 people for a long time. After the license change in March, a large number of developers began to participate in Redis community discussions, which quickly doubled to 220 participants. Also ten days after Valkey was open sourced, the number of participants reached 146, which even overshadowed Redis's regular level of participation.
This would not have been possible without the tremendous support of Valkey's core contributors and leading institutions.
Madelyn Olson, former Redis maintainer, Valkey co-creator, and AWS Principal Engineer, said, "I've been working on open source Redis for six years, four of which were part of the core team that drove Redis open source up to version 7.2. I care a lot about open source software and want to continue to contribute. By forming Valkey, contributors can get back to our work and continue to contribute to the vibrant open source community. ”
Zhao Zhao, a former Redis core team member, Valkey maintainer, and Alibaba Cloud software engineer, said, "Over the past seven years, I've made a lot of friends in the Redis community, and we all share a deep passion for Redis. As a core team member, I constantly contribute code to the community, including many key features on our platform, and that's what open source is all about. Now that we've launched Valkey to continue this work, we're committed to keeping the open source ethos, making the community better, and providing a great experience for users and developers. ”
Dr. Feifei Li, Head of Alibaba Cloud's Database Product Business Unit, said, "We are very pleased to witness the launch of the new Valkey community and to see many Redis community contributors gathering in Valkey. Alibaba Cloud has been contributing to the Redis project since 2017 and is committed to promoting the better development of the Redis community. Going forward, we look forward to further support and contribution to the Valkey project in an open, sustainable environment like the Linux Foundation, and for Valkey to become a dynamic project and thrive." ”
To be sure, the split in the Redis community seems irreversible. With the donation of the Valkey project to the Linux Foundation, it is believed that more open source developers will participate in Valkey's contribution and development work in the future.
The Redis open source project is not the result of a Redis commercialization company
While accepting the support of the majority of developers and institutions, open source projects also feed a wider range of people with the principle of openness and sharing, which is a kind of co-prosperity and symbiosis relationship, but it has changed its appearance due to many complex purposes.
Valkey was also founded because of the outrage caused by the Redis commercial company's unilateral change of license, and this is not the only business that has been confused.
This starts with the history of the Redis open source project.
The Redis project was the brainchild of Italian developer Salvatore "Antirez" Sanfilippo released in 2009. The dramatic turn came in 2013, when a small hosted Redis service called Garantia Data tried to rename the business "RedisDB." After being resisted by Antirez, they abandoned the attempt. Ofer Bengal, then CEO of Garantia Data, once responded:
"We were going to change our company name to RedisDB and even acquire a redisdb.com domain specifically for this purpose, but we decided to stay with Garantia Data due to the request of Salvatore Sanfillipo, the founder of the Redis project. ”
A few months later, in 2014, Graantia Data changed its name to Redis Labs.
This is the second time in the past three months that the company has said it wants to change its name. Last fall, Garantia had intended to change its name to RedisDB, but after opposition from the open-source Redis community, the company abandoned the attempt and continued to keep the GHarantia name. And this time, the company took that step and officially changed its name to Redis Labs. ”
In 2015, Redis Labs and Garantia recruited Antirez to become an official sponsor of the Redis open source project. Before exiting the project in 2020, Antirez decided to transfer Redis' intellectual and trademark rights to Garantia. That's why Garantia now has the legal right to relicense the project.
Garantia's name usurpation program was finally completed in 2021 and was immediately renamed "Redis". Since then, they have been deliberately ignoring or even obscuring the history of the company, formerly known as Garantia Data.
To put it simply, Garantia is not the main innovation driver for the Redis open source project (don't be fooled by the number of lines of code you contribute). Like other open source projects, Redis is the product of hard work by community members under the strict guidance of a core team, and is not the product of Garantia as a company.
Garantia isn't even the main driver of Redis market popularity, and that crown belongs to Amazon ElastiCache. By simplifying the deployment, scaling, replication, and monitoring of Redis, the ElastiCache service has made the Redis project accessible and accessible to more developers, and has begun to proactively adopt it at scale. Of course, ElastiCache has made great returns on this, but the monetization benefits are also a well-deserved reward for driving the mainstreaming of the technology and increasing its global brand awareness.
Just like many people today attribute the mass production and adoption of the current automobile industry to Henry Ford. But in reality, the U.S. interstate highway system, signed into law by Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, really gave these motor vehicles the expansive road system they needed to operate. With public facilities as a foundation, Detroit's automakers can easily sell cars, create a golden age of automobiles, and eventually build a huge industrial cluster with global reach.
Redis is an internal combustion engine revolution, and the popularity of fully functional cars (ElstiCache) and highway facilities (Amazon Web Services) has made it a global success. In this case of analogy, Garantia Data did not invent the car, nor did it invent the engine, nor was it even the first automaker.
Commercializing Redis has always been a challenge. Without an advanced orchestration solution, a large-scale deployment system cannot be stably maintained. And when ElastiCache introduced its first major control plane, they first demonstrated to the world the practicality of hyperscale deployments, and eventually inspired Upstash, Dragonfly, KeyDB, Aiven, Google MemoryStore, and even Garanita/Redis Labs' own hosted Redis products.
With ElastiCache pushing the limits of large-scale Redis deployments, it was only natural for the project team to deal with the real-world challenges of replication, scaling, snapshots, and more. To date, the ElastiCache team has invested more than 1,000 person-years of engineer work to develop Redis-scale applications. They are also responsible for some of the most complex and valuable improvements in Redis Core.
Eventually, this work led to the shift to a serverless cache paradigm for ElastiCache Serverless and the IT industry as a whole.
And all of this, today's Redis commercialization companies are not involved.
Write at the end
As with the underlying value proposition of the OpenRank algorithm, the world is always interconnected and affects each other, and any event affects not only itself, but also other parts of it. As mentioned in the 2023 China Open Source Annual Report, according to the survey data, the adjustment of Unity's pricing strategy in September 2023 directly led to the largest blowout of the open-source game engine godotengine after its birth. The project has been open source for more than a decade, with 80,000 stars, but in September 2023 alone, more than 10,000 new stars were added, of course, because game developers resisted Unity's decision and switched to open source.
In addition to the creation of a new fork community, Valkey, the decision to change the license for Redis has also led many developers who have long relied on key-value databases to focus on other open source projects related to Redis. The Apache Software Foundation's kvrocks is one of them. Unlike Redis's in-memory key-value database positioning, kvrocks is a disk-based key-value database. As you can see in the chart below, Kvrocks saw significant growth in all metrics in March of this year, most likely due to its status as a foundation-hosted project. In an era where companies behind open source projects can bypass established community rules and unilaterally change licenses at any time, foundation-hosted projects may bring a stronger sense of security to the developer community.
图片来源：Redis Changed Open Source License! Are Cloud Providers Really Freeloading off the Open Source Community? | OpenDigger
In the past few years, the practice of cloud vendors "prostituting" open source projects has been spurned by the majority of open source developers, but changes are quietly happening under criticism. More and more cloud vendors are aware of the importance of the community, and are willing to invest their employees and even various materials into the open source community they rely on to ensure that their cloud services can better maintain coordination and smooth development with upstream resources. An effective contribution and impact evaluation mechanism in the open source field has become a necessary prerequisite for a healthier and more efficient collaboration mechanism. In the future, it is believed that the upstream and downstream of the open source community will further strengthen collaboration and create a positive situation for all parties to win.
Original link:Unilaterally modifying the open source license also scolded the cloud vendor as a "white prostitute", who is accused of being a "robber" Redis and the cloud vendor?_Database_Li Dongmei_InfoQ Selected Articles