• Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture - Anil Dash

    solid. very solid explainer of what’s going on and/or at risk here with “DOGE”. media needs to stop it with the cursory examination of “potentially curbing government waste” and really examine the risks this poses.

  • How a Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias — ProPublica

    once again, ProPublica is punching way above their weight. worth hunkering down for. kudos/thanks/props to the leaker and the journalist. this is what journalism is supposed to be.

  • Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

    i don’t pay much attention to databases these days but the discussion in here re: redis made interesting reading. i wonder what the implications of this forking business are for downstream projects that have leveraged redis internally? will something leaner and more responsive come out of this for embedded applications? i have a lot of learning to do re: redis use.

Redis Ltd. (the company) is on an aggressive path towards its IPO. Originally starting as Redis Labs in 2011, they switched their name to Redis Ltd. in 2021 when they acquired the Redis trademark from its creator (Salvatore Sanfilippo), who Redis Labs had bankrolled. Over the last few years, Redis Ltd. has attempted to consolidate control over the Redis landscape. The company has also tried to cast off the perception that the system is primarily used as an in-memory cache by adding support for vectors and other data models.

In March 2024, Redis Ltd. announced they were switching from the system’s original (very permissive) BSD-3 license to a dual license comprising the proprietary Redis Source Available License and MongoDB’s SSPL. The company announced this change the same day they announced the acquisition of Speedb, an open-source fork of RocksDB.

The backlash to the Redis license move was quick. The same week the license changed, two forks were announced based on the original BSD-3 code line: Valkey and Redict. Valkey started at Amazon, but engineers at Google and Oracle quickly joined. In only one week, the Valkey project clapped back at Redis Ltd. when it became part of the Linux Foundation, and several major companies shifted their development efforts to it. Redis Ltd. did not help their perception of being up to no good when they got frisky with their beloved trademark and started taking over open-source Redis extensions.

In an obvious homage to when Bushwick Bill (RIP), Scarface, and Willie D got back together in 2015, the Redis’ creator announced in December 2024 that he is in touch with the Redis Ltd. management and is looking to make a comeback to reunite the Redis community.