I remember when antirez announced that he was leaving redis in the hands of the community. Didn't expect it to take such a blatantly commercial turn, but guess it shouldn't be surprising in retrospect.

Are there any meaningful or developing alternatives to Redis that are truly free?

> Are there any meaningful or developing alternatives to Redis that are truly free?

And how are those alternatives to be funded?

I am not claiming that there should be such an alternative, merely querying the existence of such.

In the same vein I'm merely querying the funding of such.

Snark aside, I'm not aware of _any_ open source projects which are developed through altruism and not backed by full time sponsors from companies. Redis is no exception. It's still available as a complete open source offering, for free. Suggesting the maintainers have compromised the project because they're looking for a method to sustain development on a project that is depended on by many many developers is unhelpful, and naive.

Altruism vs. sponsorship is a false dichotomy.

sourcehut (https://sr.ht) is a good counterexample. It funds itself and is completely open source.

Anyway, I am not suggesting that the project has been compromised just because it has been commercialized. I don't do all my development in open source and don't expect anyone else to do so either.

> Altruism vs. sponsorship is a false dichotomy.

You've dismissed my comment without giving any backing to it. What Sourcehut are doing is the same as Redis. They provide the core product at [0], which is completely open source, and redis labs [1] provides a hosted offering with support.

It's also on a totally different scale. With all due respect to sr.ht, it's a much more niche offering than redis, with far less demands.

[0] https://redis.io/ [1] https://redislabs.com/

The difference between sourcehut and redis is in the governance structure and in my perceived predictability of their roadmaps.

The governing committee of sourcehut is a single person - ddevault. He clearly states his motivations and intentions regarding sourcehut in his regular updates. It is easy to predict the direction in which sourcehut will be developed over the next year.

The article we are commenting on states that the governing committee of Redis consists of representatives from Redis Labs, AWS, and Alibaba. Their agendas are not as transparent as ddevault's and mark a potentially significant departure from antirez's plans for redis.

Most importantly, as a member of a team that is just setting up a redis instance, I naturally wonder what the alternatives are so that we can properly evaluate them. Because we are a small team and strapped for cash, we would prefer to evaluate free (as in freedom) options. This is what led to my original question.

Coming in late, but sr.ht also differs from RedisLabs in the sense that sr.ht is 100% FLOSS, no strings attached - and RedisLabs publishes a lot of source-available (i.e. nonfree) software.

Dolphin Emulator is open-source, devoid of corporate funding to my knowledge, and does not sell premium builds to my knowledge. I don't think any of the developers can live off their work on Dolphin. However many other emulators do sell premium builds, and I'm not aware of many other open source projects that haven't sold out.

Dolphin's a great example actually, thank you! I think you're right that nobody could live off of Dolphin. I know one of the "active names" has regularly stated that it's a hobby for them. I do wonder how they fund services like https://dolphin.ci/#/ - it's got to be someones passion. But clearly, funded by altruism, a very well deserved exception to my statement.

Free beer != Free speech

The comment I replied clearly indicated they weren't happy with the commercial turn of Redis after antirez left. Redis is still free as in speech (and also, beer).

I do stand corrected

Appreciated, upvoted you for being so understanding. It's easy to lose context in these threads often!