Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:first four words of the summary (Score 1) 34

I have a slightly different view of this history. Instead of: "The history here is that this project was very popular on cloud providers (e.g. AWS calls their offering "Elasticache") and the original authors got pissy that they were being cut out of whatever money was being paid for using their free software. So they changed the license and here we are.", I would say: "... and the original investors got pissy that they were being cut out of whatever money was being paid for using the free software in which they invested, although 70% of it was written by others. So they changed the license, they disbanded the Core Team after the original developer left, and here we are."

Redis was not written by Redis Ltd (the company). It was originally written and released more than 15 years ago by Salvatore Sanfilippo (a.k.a. antirez) who was soon joined by a community of developers who loved this open source in-memory database and started contributing to it. The project was sponsored by VMWare/Pivotal for a while, but in 2015 it was bought by a company that had renamed itself Redis Labs (originally Garantia Data). Under the new ownership, Redis continued being open source but in 2018 some optional modules were converted to the proprietary SSPL license. This caused some controversy but the company promised that the core of Redis would always remain free and open source. This worked for a few years and this even survived the departure of the original developer. The Redis project continued being developed by a community led by a Core Team of developers coming from various companies (the main ones being Madelyn Olson from AWS and Zhao Zhao from Alibaba Cloud).

But last year, things changed even more. The company that had renamed itself again from Redis Labs to Redis Ltd decided to break their 2018 promise and announced that they would release the next version of Redis under a proprietary license. They also decided to disband the Core Team and take complete control over the core of Redis. The former members of the Core Team left the Redis project and moved to the fork that eventually became Valkey. According to Madelyn Olson, 70% of the Redis code was written by people outside Redis Ltd, so this story is rather different from some other projects in which the original developers wanted to stop the evil cloud hyperscalers who were profiting from their code without giving anything back. In the case of Redis, some of the core code was actually written by people paid by those could companies and only a minority of the code was written by Redis Ltd.

Comment Re:Modern security products seem to increase... (Score 2) 30

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

The whole world has realized that they need to start air-gapping databases

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

Submission + - Samba gets funding from the German Sovereign Tech Fund.

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that
supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital
infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source
ecosystem.

The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB
over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a
robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is
expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.

All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running [4]
and gitlab MRs will appear soon!

https://samba.plus/blog/detail...

https://www.sovereigntechfund....

Comment Re:Definnitely killed my motivation (Score 1) 184

I'm 50, in UI, and feeling similar.
I don't mind agile per se (but it's difficult to come in on a very established project - so many decisions were made, and you don't even have the full context to judge them properly. It's like learning a new language, basic fluency is hard won)

What I do mind is how much flavor of the month there has been - a lot of complexity and difficulty in following code path for very theoretical gains . Any redux project smells so much like 2019, it's sad.

Comment Re:FB is not like Seinfeld (Score 1) 8

So like 20+ years ago, Wired declared "free wins".
I think people - after being nickel and literally dimed by 10-cents-per-SMS - were rightfully shy of "pay per transaction", because thy weren't sure what their usage would look like and that shit adds up.

So two decades later we have this sad fork in the road, two main paths:
* "free", but shitty with ads or other ways they figured out how to commoditize your attention
* subscription, where they can keep collecting rent no matter how little you use it.
( with "pay per usage" the third way less traveled)

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 1) 104

The upstream Linux kernel doesn't differentiate between security bugs and "normal" bug fixes. So the new kernel.org CNA just assigns CVE's to all fixes. They don't score them.

Look at the numbers from the whitepaper:

"In March 2024 there were 270 new CVEs created for the stable Linux kernel. So far in April 2024 there are 342 new CVEs:"

Comment Re:Yeah (Score 1) 104

Yes ! That's exactly the point. Trying to curate and select patches for a "frozen" kernel fails due to the firehose of fixes going in upstream.

And in the kernel many of these could be security bugs. No one is doing evaluation on that, there are simply too many fixes in such a complex code base to check.

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 1) 104

You're missing something.

New bugs are discovered upstream, but the vendor kernel maintainers either aren't tracking, or are being discouraged from putting these back into the "frozen" kernel.

We even discovered one case where a RHEL maintainer fixed a bug upstream, but then neglected to apply it to the vulnerable vendor kernel. So it isn't like they didn't know about the bug. Maybe they just didn't check the vendor kernel was vulnerable.

I'm guessing management policy discouraged such things. It's easier to just ignore such bugs if customer haven't noticed.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT

Working...