I worked in a huge docs website a while back and I’ll never forget the day I saw a request from a Redis lawyer that insisted we called it:
Redis™*
*Redis is a trademark of Redis Labs
The dumb thing is they insisted the footnote be on the first webpage Redis™ was displayed, as-if I had control over the order of the pages people viewed on the website.
Since then I’ve started removing Redis as a dependency from as many projects as I can.
I think they meant to say the maintainers for redis-py, lettuce, and jedis have already relinquished control to Redis Inc. The libraries are still online, but their repositories have been moved to the official Redis organization and are "controlled" and "owned by Redis" according to an email quoted in the linked Github Issue.
I'm obviously not a lawyer, but from what I can see, a project like redis_py is way older than any trademark registration from Redis lab.
If I'm not wrong looking at the trademark, database, they have registered them recently (2018,2019, and a lot very recently 2023) in a very predatory move.
In my opinion, this usage should be considered legitimate based on prior art or something like that.
Anyway, in all case I hope that projects will not give up to this asshole move from redis lab.
Maybe it might be possible to rename the project, but also forbid redis lab to use the name of the projects it had targeted. Like a poison pill. I think that it is legitimate for them to consider that an usage of name s like redis_py by Redis would be counterfeiting of well known brand of these projects.
In the end, it might be assumed that it is the fault of Redis to have not enforced any copyright or branding on these projects for more than 10 years despite the fact that they couldn't have ignored their existence and success.
I'm even quite sure that we can find a publication of Redis lab with how-to use any of these open source projects...
Probably something up to 50$. Redis lab is not that big as a company so they might not be able to hire top notch lawyers.
But regarding the history of free software that is made of individuals fighting the overreach of predatory corporations, I will be very saddened if everyone of all these projects would give up...
Maybe the fsf or software conservancy can assist some of the projects if they were to ask it?
Is this going to become a trend? Project starts making trademark claims years after a downstream library has been using it without issue. Bit rich, given how accessible libraries can bootstrap an initial product ecosystem.
Is it ever safe to use a trademark name? Will all packages now have to be generic enough to imply the product for which they connect? It”s not a Java/AWS/Redis/Wordpress/Shopify extension, but a thingbob, which just so happens to connect to That-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
You can mention a trademark. You can't use the trademark in the name of your own product. Even in cases where you're legally OK (e.g. mentioning your product is better than <trademark>, or is made for <trademark>) they can still sue you, though it'll be much easier to win the case.
However, I'm not sure where courts would land on a name like "redis-rs". There are arguments on both sides, and I'm not sure if there's enough case law to make the legal outcome clear.
I suspect Redis is going to pull in the various popular Redis libraries under their umbrella and make them incompatible with Valkey. It seems like a defensive move against Valkey.
If I was in charge of any of these libraries, I would replace any mention of Redis with Valkey and move on.
Sure. You can do that. But the community needs a single standard. Open standard that all in-memory data stores like Redis, ValKey, DragonflyDB, KeyDB, Kvrocks will support. Otherwise you will end up in a vendor lock.
Kvrocks (under Apache foundation umbrella) is another interesting Redis-compatible alternative, this one is targeting memory and SSD/NVME storage since it is implemented on top of RocksDB. So depending on your needs it may be a more efficient choice compared to Valkey.
This serves as a lesson when naming projects -- call it something different to the core product. If you must have a package called ${name}-rs make it a wrapper around your repo.
Trademark claims are also defended by the otherwise useless PSF. Here GvR objects to someone continuing Python-2 uńder the name "python-2.8" as well as "py28". Informally, bringing in lawyers was threatened at one point:
I would love for someone to fight out these bullshit trademark claims. Are you seriously going to win against a crate author for using your business name after letting them do it for 10 years and even featuring and recommending them on your own website?
I have to thank Redis Inc. for bringing on this shitshow. I had no idea about Valkey and now I do. Corporate hats should consider the loss of general trust and negative marketing their actions produce.
And yeah, I wish FSF or some other, strong and well-funded org would be more "broken glass" and take issue with even the tiniest of legal fights over OSS.
Who is going to pay to defend? The rust author is making it clear they want no part of this legal mess. Which is going to be true for nearly any open source contributor. The only people with legal representation are going to be the VCs looking for value extraction.
Yes, that’s the problem. I understand the perspective of the maintainers but it leads to a situation where the large corporation can do illegal stuff and bully people around because it’s too much effort to fight back.
Do ctrl+f for „trademark“, there are currently 12 occurrences. Here’s what the Redis representative wrote:
> These are not my words nor the message I want to convey. In a private call, I said that it feels strange to use the brand name for a library that keeps supporting all the forks indefinitely and does not grant compatibility for the product itself. I also said that it does not make a lot of sense to pretend to rename a crate and replace it with the same software or an alternative library, thus creating confusion and frustration.
However, companies do consider protecting their trademarks where their reputation is challenged. This does not need any explanation. In my private call with Armin, I highlighted that. Of course, there is no plan to take action regarding the trademark, but to find a reasoned and agreed-upon way forward to avoid introducing another Redis Rust client library where changes, improvements, and innovation can be introduced.
So basically the point is to make thinly veiled threats of copyright enforcement to „agree to a solution“.
The Mafia also agrees with you on a payment plan after highlighting that a fire would be a shame in your establishment.
While it's difficult to compare the pettiness, this is definitely sillier than the WordPress thing as far as trademark enforcement goes.
Trademark-as-a-Weapon is becoming too common now. Are we going to be forced to use legally distinct (and confusingly different) names for all our libraries now to defend against this nonsense? Pick projects based on the brand protection posture of the licensors? What a waste of time.
Consolidation of control and brand recognition. As soon as Redis revealed their hostile intentions, forks split off. Valkey seems to be the favored one, and in my direct experience is what projects are using moving forward. If we don't intend to use Redis' commercial services we have no reason to use them given the license fuckery.
Like IBM with Redhat, they tried to overstep their position and exert undue control, so the community rejected their status as BDFL. Now IBM has Rocky and Liberty to deal with, and Redis has Valkey rapidly gaining credibility as the go-to solution. The social contract of FOSS goes both ways, and greed is righteously punished with the loss of power.
This was the obvious play when the original Garantia Data-now-Redis Labs went on their acquisition spree and subsequent buttoning up of the ecosystem via their cloud/hosted enterprise offering even before 2013 and then taking the Redis name for themselves. I believe it was only slowed down because of the community aspect pushing back against the stupid licensing changes of it, otherwise they would have gone full steam into it to get even more control. It's so sad to see a good product like that be hung out on the whims of some scummy leeches.
You can enforce by requiring an agreement, and making the terms reasonable enough that an OSS project can agree to them (this isn't entirely easy, but it's not that hard either).
Also, there's the thing where these other projects have been using the name since forever, so there's already a history of non-enforcement.
Looks like Mysqlization tragedy, the best would be when FOSS maintainers join their corporate agile sprints to meet roadmap demands, with naming rights gun aimed under table lol.
First time I hear about Valkey, it acts as MariaDB in this drama. /s
I worked in a huge docs website a while back and I’ll never forget the day I saw a request from a Redis lawyer that insisted we called it:
Redis™*
*Redis is a trademark of Redis Labs
The dumb thing is they insisted the footnote be on the first webpage Redis™ was displayed, as-if I had control over the order of the pages people viewed on the website.
Since then I’ve started removing Redis as a dependency from as many projects as I can.
Twitter essentially hasn't loaded for me since Musk took over, so: https://archive.is/c5lnW or,
> Looks like Redis is trying to take over the all the OSS Redis libraries.
> Jedis, Lettuce, and redis-py are down, they are now threatening redis-rs (link in reply).
There's no link in the post, and I don't have a link to the referenced reply, but I'm guessing the link is https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419
Use xcancel instead of archive.is and you will see the replies.
https://xcancel.com/TomHacohen/status/1861137484249252093
Damn it, thank you for the link, sir.
Can we please make this SNS disappear?
What does it mean by "redis-py" is down? It's still on Pypi?
I think they meant to say the maintainers for redis-py, lettuce, and jedis have already relinquished control to Redis Inc. The libraries are still online, but their repositories have been moved to the official Redis organization and are "controlled" and "owned by Redis" according to an email quoted in the linked Github Issue.
Thanks, that makes more sense of the "down" thing.
I'm obviously not a lawyer, but from what I can see, a project like redis_py is way older than any trademark registration from Redis lab.
If I'm not wrong looking at the trademark, database, they have registered them recently (2018,2019, and a lot very recently 2023) in a very predatory move.
In my opinion, this usage should be considered legitimate based on prior art or something like that.
Anyway, in all case I hope that projects will not give up to this asshole move from redis lab.
Maybe it might be possible to rename the project, but also forbid redis lab to use the name of the projects it had targeted. Like a poison pill. I think that it is legitimate for them to consider that an usage of name s like redis_py by Redis would be counterfeiting of well known brand of these projects. In the end, it might be assumed that it is the fault of Redis to have not enforced any copyright or branding on these projects for more than 10 years despite the fact that they couldn't have ignored their existence and success.
I'm even quite sure that we can find a publication of Redis lab with how-to use any of these open source projects...
> Anyway, in all case I hope that projects will not give up to this asshole move from redis lab.
How much are you willing to pay to finance their attorneys?
Probably something up to 50$. Redis lab is not that big as a company so they might not be able to hire top notch lawyers.
But regarding the history of free software that is made of individuals fighting the overreach of predatory corporations, I will be very saddened if everyone of all these projects would give up...
Maybe the fsf or software conservancy can assist some of the projects if they were to ask it?
Is this going to become a trend? Project starts making trademark claims years after a downstream library has been using it without issue. Bit rich, given how accessible libraries can bootstrap an initial product ecosystem.
Is it ever safe to use a trademark name? Will all packages now have to be generic enough to imply the product for which they connect? It”s not a Java/AWS/Redis/Wordpress/Shopify extension, but a thingbob, which just so happens to connect to That-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
You can mention a trademark. You can't use the trademark in the name of your own product. Even in cases where you're legally OK (e.g. mentioning your product is better than <trademark>, or is made for <trademark>) they can still sue you, though it'll be much easier to win the case.
This is called nominative fair use. But Redis's own guidelines for nominative fair use acknowledge that there are cases where you can "use the trademark in the name of your own product": https://redis-doc-test.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/trade...
>you may only name it "XYZ for Redis™"
However, I'm not sure where courts would land on a name like "redis-rs". There are arguments on both sides, and I'm not sure if there's enough case law to make the legal outcome clear.
I suspect Redis is going to pull in the various popular Redis libraries under their umbrella and make them incompatible with Valkey. It seems like a defensive move against Valkey.
If I was in charge of any of these libraries, I would replace any mention of Redis with Valkey and move on.
Sure. You can do that. But the community needs a single standard. Open standard that all in-memory data stores like Redis, ValKey, DragonflyDB, KeyDB, Kvrocks will support. Otherwise you will end up in a vendor lock.
And what prevents valkey devs from maintaining their compatibility layer to accommodate those changes?
I switched to Valkey, and not looking back. It's actively maintained and compatible with Redis so far.
Kvrocks (under Apache foundation umbrella) is another interesting Redis-compatible alternative, this one is targeting memory and SSD/NVME storage since it is implemented on top of RocksDB. So depending on your needs it may be a more efficient choice compared to Valkey.
This serves as a lesson when naming projects -- call it something different to the core product. If you must have a package called ${name}-rs make it a wrapper around your repo.
When I started using Redis, Redis was a true open source project. There was no company yet.
suffix the language name plus name would give us redis-py.
Which in turn would create the filename redis_py.py
Which would immediately raise the question why not a dot.
redis.py
> There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.
Lawyers won't allow any of those. It has to be something like Client for Redis™ in Python™.
Trademarks don’t (usually) cover file names and function names. See for example the classic GNU Emacs tetris.el debacle…
You can’t do that and expect it to be used. When someone needs a redis client library they search for ‘redis’ not ‘thingamabob’.
Lots of projects do it. I look at starts and update frequencies. My toml parser is called taplo, for example.
Since search isn't limited to names, but includes description, they will still find it
Trademark claims are also defended by the otherwise useless PSF. Here GvR objects to someone continuing Python-2 uńder the name "python-2.8" as well as "py28". Informally, bringing in lawyers was threatened at one point:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47
The project was renamed to "tauthon".
I would love for someone to fight out these bullshit trademark claims. Are you seriously going to win against a crate author for using your business name after letting them do it for 10 years and even featuring and recommending them on your own website?
(Referencing https://github.com/redis-rs/redis-rs/issues/1419 )
I have to thank Redis Inc. for bringing on this shitshow. I had no idea about Valkey and now I do. Corporate hats should consider the loss of general trust and negative marketing their actions produce.
And yeah, I wish FSF or some other, strong and well-funded org would be more "broken glass" and take issue with even the tiniest of legal fights over OSS.
Who is going to pay to defend? The rust author is making it clear they want no part of this legal mess. Which is going to be true for nearly any open source contributor. The only people with legal representation are going to be the VCs looking for value extraction.
Yes, that’s the problem. I understand the perspective of the maintainers but it leads to a situation where the large corporation can do illegal stuff and bully people around because it’s too much effort to fight back.
That's basically our entire society...
Hey welcome to the legal system!
That issue looks reasonable, there isnt anything about trademarks there, why bring it up?
It looks to be about providing support to paying users of Redis in a library that doesn't have much goals.
And they offered to pay for it to do it.
Do ctrl+f for „trademark“, there are currently 12 occurrences. Here’s what the Redis representative wrote:
> These are not my words nor the message I want to convey. In a private call, I said that it feels strange to use the brand name for a library that keeps supporting all the forks indefinitely and does not grant compatibility for the product itself. I also said that it does not make a lot of sense to pretend to rename a crate and replace it with the same software or an alternative library, thus creating confusion and frustration. However, companies do consider protecting their trademarks where their reputation is challenged. This does not need any explanation. In my private call with Armin, I highlighted that. Of course, there is no plan to take action regarding the trademark, but to find a reasoned and agreed-upon way forward to avoid introducing another Redis Rust client library where changes, improvements, and innovation can be introduced.
So basically the point is to make thinly veiled threats of copyright enforcement to „agree to a solution“.
The Mafia also agrees with you on a payment plan after highlighting that a fire would be a shame in your establishment.
This looks a lot like the wordpress issue… i think the oss wars of the 2020s will be fought around trademarks?
One more reason to move to valkey i guess.
While it's difficult to compare the pettiness, this is definitely sillier than the WordPress thing as far as trademark enforcement goes.
Trademark-as-a-Weapon is becoming too common now. Are we going to be forced to use legally distinct (and confusingly different) names for all our libraries now to defend against this nonsense? Pick projects based on the brand protection posture of the licensors? What a waste of time.
At least they offered to buy it.
Is that any different from someone offering to buy a browser extension to add malware?
Yeah, if they don’t add malware. I doubt redis will add malware to specifically their rust client.
OSS authors can add malware too.
the library would most likely remain OSS even after the take over
Sic transit gloria mundi
What are they hoping to get out of it? Wouldn't this just inconvenience their own users?
Consolidation of control and brand recognition. As soon as Redis revealed their hostile intentions, forks split off. Valkey seems to be the favored one, and in my direct experience is what projects are using moving forward. If we don't intend to use Redis' commercial services we have no reason to use them given the license fuckery.
Like IBM with Redhat, they tried to overstep their position and exert undue control, so the community rejected their status as BDFL. Now IBM has Rocky and Liberty to deal with, and Redis has Valkey rapidly gaining credibility as the go-to solution. The social contract of FOSS goes both ways, and greed is righteously punished with the loss of power.
This was the obvious play when the original Garantia Data-now-Redis Labs went on their acquisition spree and subsequent buttoning up of the ecosystem via their cloud/hosted enterprise offering even before 2013 and then taking the Redis name for themselves. I believe it was only slowed down because of the community aspect pushing back against the stupid licensing changes of it, otherwise they would have gone full steam into it to get even more control. It's so sad to see a good product like that be hung out on the whims of some scummy leeches.
I’m sure most of it is trademark preservation. Trademarks are enforce it or lose it.
You can enforce by requiring an agreement, and making the terms reasonable enough that an OSS project can agree to them (this isn't entirely easy, but it's not that hard either).
Also, there's the thing where these other projects have been using the name since forever, so there's already a history of non-enforcement.
Looks like Mysqlization tragedy, the best would be when FOSS maintainers join their corporate agile sprints to meet roadmap demands, with naming rights gun aimed under table lol. First time I hear about Valkey, it acts as MariaDB in this drama. /s