In other exciting Servo-browser news, Servo and Redox OS have submitted a joint proposal to fund the porting of SpiderMonkey and WebRender to Redox: https://www.redox-os.org/news/this-month-240731/
The article specifically says it prefers not to be featured on HN at this time:
> Given its preliminary, work-in-progress status, I would appreciate it very much if you do not share this to social media, Hacker News, etc.—call it part of the contract for “working with the garage door open”. Thanks!
The ‘Redis Source Available License 2.0 (RSALv2) Agreement’ is a relatively succinct and human-readable license. Still, I really wish these non-compete licenses would come with a few examples of use cases that are definitively non-infringing, to remedy any uncertainty.
Between this non-compete clause of their license:
> You may not make the functionality of the Software or a Modified version available to third parties as a service or distribute the Software or a Modified version in a manner that makes the functionality of the Software available to third parties.
..and this clarification in their FAQ:
> A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that is derived from the Redis’ code-base and significantly overlaps the capabilities of a Redis commercial product. For example, this definition would include hosting or embedding Redis as part of a solution that is sold competitively against our commercial versions of Redis (either Redis Enterprise Software or Redis Cloud).
It’s pretty clear that any SaaS product simply using Redis as a dependency for a completely different product (e.g. Discourse) is in the clear. But it would be nice if they could spell that out as an unaffected use case.
I agree it would be good to clarify this. I have a product that does some background job processing using Sidekiq and Redis, and it seems that this would not constitute "making the software available", in particular where it says:
Making the functionality of the Software or Modified version available to third parties includes (...) offering a product or service, the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Software or Modified version (...).
Since the value is not _primarily_ derived from using Redis, I guess it's fine. I am sure the majority of projects using Redis in some way do not derive their main value from Redis.
I believe this fund is highly aligned with commercial open source software companies that want to solve real problems instead of chasing hype.
Very happy to see an update from them. After a year of radio silence I was beginning to imagine the worst, and I didn’t feel confident referring founders to them.
The post speaks of a bottleneck. When a post goes viral and a flood of applications comes in, the number of Tylers remains at one. The queue just gets unmanageably long. It's definitely not ideal, but your acquaintance shouldn't take it personally.
Ghosting can happen at any stage, even after what may feel like a good pitch.
On the other hand if they actually get back and provide feedback, in case of a no, make a note of that investor as they are probably one of the nicer one.
This is such an impressively pragmatic and generative thing to do!
tl;dr: they’re winding down one of their big oss projects (`rip`) because something more featureful came along that met their criterias. Now they can attend to other adjacent issues in their ecosystem.
This move strikes me as a very enlightened response to the emergence of uv. There’s no shortage of other problems to solve! Kudos to Prefix & co.
