Valkey Taking Over Redis and Open Source Funding

Robert:
Hello everyone and welcome to another Open Talk On Open Source. I’m Robert Jacobi and I’m thrilled to have Courtney Robertson with me. Hey Courtney, how are you?

Courtney:
I am good. It has sure been a busy week, but I’m glad to be here thinking about all things open source again with you. Robert, how’s your been

Robert:
Weekend? I was just thinking open source. I was thinking knives, spoons, and of course forks and we’ll get some of that. Just as a reminder for all our listeners, these are coming fast and furious every two weeks and we’re trying to keep ’em tight. Talk about topics of the day. I think we have a couple of good ones for this week. What have you been seeing out there, Courtney?

Courtney:
Oh, I’ve been watching a lot of my friends outside the WordPress space go off to some open source events lately, and I’m thinking, gosh, I can’t wait until I can go again next year. This year it just came to quickly close to a lot of camps I have coming up, starting with Buffalo pretty soon for the WordPress folks. So at the time of this recording, there are a lot of different conferences that I see happening, but before I dig into what those are or what they mean, I wanted to sort of get an idea about what other open source related events that you pay attention to.

Robert:
Great question. And you might not necessarily think of, I mean, there’s one that comes completely to mind. Of course, you might not think of it as an open source, but so much open source is happening there. So CloudFest in Germany just happened, seems like ages ago, but really just a few weeks ago. And CloudFest USA is coming up at the beginning of June actually. It’s sort of the first week of June in Austin, Texas, and there’s a ton of WordPress stuff going on, so that counts as open source. AlmaLinux has been there for a number of years at both CloudFest Germany and CloudFest US.

Courtney:
For a quick caveat there, if we’ve got listeners that are maybe new to the rest of open source. Can you tell us, you said AlmaLinux. So Linux comes in flavors we’ll say. And last week or last recording I mentioned one that I had experience with, which was Red Hat, and that was a long time ago that I had experience with that, but AlmaLinux is also a flavor of Linux. Is that one meant for personal computers or is that one meant for maybe servers?

Robert:
So I guess flavors. I love calling ’em flavors like a bag, like a box of popsicles. But back in the day we used to call ’em distributions or distros. So AlmaLinux is much more focused on the enterprise and probably its closest analog would be Redhead Enterprise, if you’ll see the acronym anywhere, RHEL. So Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So it’s not necessarily something you’re going to load up on your desktop. Of course you can because Linux and you can throw on whatever kind of desktop you like or just work from the command line like us Super geeks. But so that’s obviously an open source project and is at CloudFest. I guess I should have even said what CloudFest really is about, they focus on the internet as a whole, and a lot of that means the infrastructure. So you’ll actually have hardware companies, software companies, SaaS providers, WordPress folk, the whole kit and caboodle of kind of what we do every day. Another team that’s typically, at least at CloudFest Germany is CMS Garden, which represents a number of open source content management systems. So we’ve already talked about WordPress, but you’ll have Joomla, you’ll have Drupal, you’ll have flavors, I’m going to say flavors this time that you may have never heard of that may be more popular in one region than another. So that is probably the biggest open source tangential conference I would say I attend on an annual basis. You got one you were at last year and you’re missing this year.

Courtney:
I know. So there’s a couple that are on my radar. I have yet to get to CloudFest. I really want to go to the hackathon at CloudFest. I’m hoping next year that it is space-wise for those of us that have family with Littles, it’s not a good idea to be constantly on the road or in a plane. So I’m hoping to get to CloudFest if it is further apart from camp schedule time. But that to say I last year attended Open Source Summit and I had hopes of going to all things open, but again, I’m all about work-life balance and prioritizing family. So I did not make it to All Things Open, which is a US-based open source event that is actually rather open source and how the event even comes together. It is not backed by any necessary one larger open source project or enterprise event.

So that’s a good one to check out if you happen to be in the Mid-Atlantic through the Southern Atlantic parts of the US now. Open Source Summit took place last year in Vancouver and it was my first experience of Canada. I lived in Pennsylvania. If people know on the maps where that is, I’ve never been to the Canadian side of the falls. Niagara Falls, that would be, even though I was in the vicinity last year for WordCamp, Buffalo didn’t so much as make it to Canada unless I decided to go all the way across our big large continent and get amazing views of the English Bay, which was directly behind our venue and it was delightful being at this venue. It’s the one that has this pixelated dolphin statue outside that you might’ve seen on, or maybe it’s a killer whale, you might’ve seen it on the Olympics and things like that.

They use this venue for all of their media rooms. The event is put on by the Lenux Foundation each year. It changes its location as well. They get the biggest of the big for vendor areas, for areas for their talks. I mean the convention centers that they rent out are massive and it still feels like a fairly intimate event because inside of Open Source Summit, which is put on by the Linux Foundation, but not all people speaking or represented there are necessarily Linux Foundation organizations. Now those organizations will have tracks within it. So for instance, I spent a good bit of time in the open js track at the start of last year’s open source summit, and that’s the JavaScript Foundation. Got to know some of the primary maintainers of NPM, which was delightful, as well as their executive director. I also participated in the Chaos Community.

If you know me, you might think how appropriate, but no Chaos in this case stands for Community Health Analytics Open source software. And this is an entire piece of, it is an open source project that uses the Linux Foundation for their foundation hosting purposes. And that means that they have different processes and procedures for governance than other projects may have. Theirs happens to align with the way that Linux Foundation works, and that provides them some benefits and coverage as an organization. So the Chaos Group had a specific track before the event began. It was like a prequel day instead of a contributor day. There were additional options for more tracks, but it was a very small and intimate group of people that were there. I want to say there were probably 50 people maybe in that particular track before the main event got going. And so this organization serves to understand the health and analytics of other open source projects.

For me, this was amazing and eyeopening to think that there is an open source project that is dedicated to making standards around event accessibility. And the Linux Foundation makes all of their events go through a survey that the Chaos Group has before and after the events to ensure that folks have processed the checklist of how accessible is your event, how diverse is your event, dah, dah, dah. And at the end, that event will get a badge for the completion of that form. So there’s an incentive to do this, and this group has already thought of so many things. So I looked at it and thought, wow, we could learn a lot over here in the WordPress space and maybe make use of some of these materials instead of us reinventing the wheel, let’s focus on WordPress and what we know in our community, but let’s look to other community organizations that have already sort of thought through some of these things.

There were other amazing tracks going on there. Web Assembly had a specific track. There are ones around security. I learned about a lot of the open source program offices. If you look at enterprise level companies, they have what’s called an OSPO, an open source program office, and they have a director of those. And so that person is responsible for reviewing. For instance, I met Nithya Ruff who oversees the AWS Open Source program office. So all of the open source tooling technology Dev Rel, that goes with Amazon. I met the speaker that was present there for a couple of sessions and even had a small intimate table q and a time with her. So while this conference is massive, it’s also, there are lots of opportunities where it feels quite small because of the way that it’s structured like a camp, like a WordCamp with a couple tracks running inside of a larger event that’s going on. So it is just amazing and I really hope next year that it lines up a little bit better on my travel schedule so that I can sure that I’ll be there.

Robert:
And as we’re recording this year, it is going on right now as we speak, this year’s edition of Open Source Summit and obviously a million different types of open source spoke attending. But even just looking at the featured keynotes, we have Google, Microsoft, Verizon, some of the AWS, the biggest commercial companies we can think of on the internet. This

Courtney:
Is a bit like a WordCamp in that they have different flagship events. So there is an open source summit, north America, Europe, and then for Asia, they pretty much just followed open source, summit, Japan, kind of the way that America calls. There WordCampUS, but in Japan, you get the automotive industry a lot being represented, which is really cool. And you think, wow, what is going on in open source In the automotive industry? I heard from some of the top executives of open source related to how they’re implementing open source technology. Layers of it are inside of the technology in your car that any of the computerized bits of your car, but also it’s on the moon

Robert:
Also. It’s on the moon. And last I checked, if we’re talking astronomy again, WordPress runs nasa, so woo.

Courtney:
Yeah, NASA through and through is leveraging a lot of open source technology, a lot of the machinery that we deploy to check out what’s happening on the moon on other devices, on their way to Mars devices on the ground of Mars, it’s open source that’s running the machines that are there, which is pretty cool.

Robert:
Really cool. There’s a bit of a buzz on the Twitterverse and other social medias of something that really just happened, well happened maybe about a week and a half ago, but now is in full swing. We’re going to talk caching technology all of a sudden.

Courtney:
Right? So I will be the first to admit, I do not maintain where some of the caching technology is on my account. I know how to be a web dev. I am not a DevOps person. DevOps are the folks that often are dealing with the server technology. That’s not me. But I do understand that I’ve seen these things mentioned in my hosting plans. I’ve seen when I go digging into things a little bit, oh yes, there it is. It’s Redis. So recently Redis decided to switch its license. And what I’ve seen coming out of open source Summit is a lot of folks are a buzz with what are we doing now, similar to Nginx having a different issue, but also getting forked about a month earlier than Redis was. So in Reds’ case, it went roughly the way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux did where, oh, we were open source.

We had all of these open source contributors up. Now we’re taking it back and our license has shifted. So again, not a lawyer, not a DevOps engineer, but for the plain speak of this, I will say that folks are not pleased that Redis took all of their things and switched out the license to it. And as such, there was a fork, meaning let’s take what’s here and go a different direction with that. And the new thing that a lot of people are shifting towards is called Valkey, V-A-L-K-E-Y. So if you’ve dealt with any server caching technologies, you may be wondering, what is my host going to do about this or that? And what I can say is that where I work, we’re evaluating what’s going on in Nginx. It’s a wait and see. And in the Red Hat enterprise Linux space, we’re looking at what other stable enterprise versions of Linux we might be interested in shifting towards.

However, Redis seems to be throughout the community, and this is not a speaking on behalf of GoDaddy, this is where I am employed, by the way, Redis, it seems that people are acting much more quickly and conveniently with open source summit going on. What we see is that a lot of the major enterprises are really starting to shift right over into supporting Valkey. And first out of the gate we saw with that was the Linux Foundation itself. Interestingly, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux decided to, he was offered to be the keynote speaker for this one. So we see that that is in fact happening. But other backers that we’re seeing to what’s going on in Valkey is Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle Hui Ericsson. Wow, I haven’t seen that in a while. It looks like Snapchat’s logos in the list that I’m reviewing. Heroku, Verizon, Alibaba Cloud Perona, which I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced, and a few others that, again, some names that I don’t personally know, but they’re all rallying for support around going on with Valkey Oracle as well. And so I would look to see Valkey being adopted pretty quickly, and people will probably be shifting over to that as soon as they can due to the license switch.

Robert:
There are a couple of forks, Valkey right now being the most talked about, but there’s also, as we furiously Google searched Redict, R-E-D-I-C-T, and I think a couple of others that are doing the fork, which is really cool about open source. I’m kind of chuckling when you talked about AWS being a supporter of Valkey because they’re kind of known for taking open source projects, bring them in-house, and then making them non-functional for migration to other projects. So if you’re sitting on an AWS database stack, it’s not the same as any place else. And we’ve seen this before in the WordPress community when MySQL MariaDB, well, Maria being a fork of MySQL. So to the point of open talk on open source, it’s really good that this stuff is open source because it allows people to still own that software that they’re reliant upon and not be surprised with weird hiccups. I mentioned Joomla earlier about the CMS garden and CloudFest. Joomla literally came about because it used to be part of an open source project, Mambo that had the same kind of issue. That was, the code was sort of taken back in. Joomla was a fork of mambo, and no one remembers Mambo.

Courtney:
I vaguely remember Mambo. I remember seeing it as one of my calculus or the other quick installer options that are out there. It was in that list for a while. It stayed in that list. Well, after WordPress finally made the list, I remember having to manually configure WordPress with my fancy five minute installs, setting up my own databases. So it was easier to spin up the databases once upon a time that it was to put the CMS in as well.

Robert:
So I guess for people on Redis, and let’s just, I guess bounce it back and forth, is this a crisis? Is this just the way of open source and we need to learn how to roll the punches and choose new names? Every few years

Courtney:
I’m seeing fork picking up more, I would say in the past half a year in noteworthy areas compared to previous. And I don’t think it’s because I pay that much more attention. I’ve paid a good bit of attention to open source broadly for a few years now, intentionally learning about the rest of what open source is impacting me, going upstream a little bit from my little WordPress interface, which is still quite a lot of open source technology. But going further down, digging through all of this, I’ve seen a lot more forking going on. I think it’s going to stabilize again. But I think what we’re also seeing is people becoming, I think, a bit more aware around the need to fund open source. And so when you see Red Hat ticking back in house but also then you see places like Redis dealing with what they’re dealing with, there is a struggle I think, at a corporate scale level when you are a corporation that is the primary driver of an open source project.

And I don’t mean this in the way that automatic contributes to WordPress. I mean this in the way that it is up to an enterprise agency to decide the license of an open source project. That piece of it is, I think the business case for things. They’ve got to justify their business value because they have people to pay. They’ve got shareholders involved, they’ve got customers depending on them. I don’t think that we’re seeing a massive shift to going proprietary for all levels of this, but I do think that the sustainability of open source is absolutely crucial at this point in time. Down to yesterday, a friend of mine that is in the Netflix space works on a lot of the node js. There’s a Netflix space. Yeah, yeah. So Netflix and what are they doing with open source? Oh, they’re using a lot of node js.

And so in this, I saw him putting a call out for R, any organizations supporting the individual contributor who is not benefiting from having an employer laptop with security settings on there. So for instance, my employer provides me a laptop, and I’ve got lots of the security settings that my employer has, as well as some additional outboard two FA two-factor authentication, like a Yuba key. And so little devices that just everything about the settings and configuration to the external devices, what’s going on in the individual contributor space for individuals who are maintaining a project that is highly dependent upon how are they being sustained as well? Because we see recently about X, what is it xy, the XY exploit, and how that was feared to be lots of things. And thankfully we were able to put a stop to it before it got really mass deployed and infected everything.

But that was a state actor behind it. So forks are becoming an issue. Looking at the security of things is becoming an issue. Sustainability is ramping up. I feel that mostly this is just a magnification or amplification of what’s always existed throughout open source, which is how do we govern something? How do we ensure that those that have financial stakes in the game are adequately contributing and those that are making it available and being dependent upon are adequately compensated and that their needs are taken care of. So folks that are maintaining some of these things, I think that they should be able to get the funding to get to the conferences and events where people are talking about the thing that they’re using. They should have the protection that an employer would provide if they need healthcare coverage or laptops or all of these other things. And now multiply that on a scale where an enterprise is making heavy use of it and a corporation is backing that. And how do we trace all of that? I think coming up in a few episodes, we’ll start looking at how companies trace all of the open source technology and what’s going on in that industry, but really we’re just amplifying everything that we already know. I

Robert:
Think we’re going to start needing to get lawyers on some of these calls because it gets so deep in the weeds of stuff. Yeah. I’m curious, and I have my opinion on the matter, but I’ll let you jump in first. I wonder if Redis will actually still support ky to your point of having open independent or even automatic does with contributors that are paid for.

Courtney:
Yeah, so I will say that I know automatic also contributes to the PHP Foundation and to P-H-P-C-S, which is where folks like Juliet are. If you’re in PHP and or WordPress, you may have heard of Juliet. The PHP coding standards is not part of the PHP foundation, but it is a way of checking the code, not just in WordPress, but many projects depend upon this to ensure that the code quality of what’s being written adheres to specific standards. So we don’t break the web.

Robert:
At least someone else can read it. My favorite tabs versus spaces argument.

Courtney:
Oh yes. And internationalization is skipping. And yes. So with all of that to say, I think when it comes to what’s going on in Redis, the people that are backing Redis still, it’s going to depend upon how much Valkey and other forks impact them. I think that we might see that they might continue with Redis to fit their own needs, even if the market’s not there. But also, if they lose lots of expected money, then maybe they’ll be forced into a position. And now they are no longer the primary company that owns the license of the project. Well,

Robert:
They still kind of do, right? Well, the fork is a fork, but …

Courtney:
Not in the fork. They can’t mess with the license of a fork. So

Robert:
In my mind, it would make immense sense to put their weight behind an open source version just so they can, of course, continue to take advantage of the open source project, which any private company on the internet does. And I’ll put out a call to Redis right here that says, you should do this and continue maintaining the project at an open source level, because Redis, more and more is seen as a higher end product. And yeah, you can still make money off of that. Don’t worry about it, but contribute back to the open source project.

Courtney:
Ideal world versus practical needs is always a struggle.

Robert:
I think there’s a big middle space in the Venn diagram of both, especially for Redis in this case, to keep our open talks quick and easy and light. I think we can just tell folks that may the fork be with you and see you guys in a couple of weeks.

Courtney:
See you later.