The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Another one bites the dust (News)

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Redis' re-licensing prompts forks like Drew DeVault's Redict, Matthew Miller thinks we need more community built software, Paul Gross makes the case that DuckDB is the new jq, Anton Zhiyanov shares how he makes a living as a developer despite being "pretty dumb" & Baldur Bjarnason chimes in on the state of the web developer job market.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, March 25th, 2024. There's a nerdy pro tip floating through the series of tubes that you should append before colon 2023 to your Google searches. This excludes all of the AI generated content, excludes all of the AI generated trash that's been indexed by our computing overlord of late. But that's amateur hour. True pros append after colon 2024 to our searches.

Do you want to know who wins the upcoming election? Give it a go. Okay, let's get into the news. Redis adopts dual source available licensing. Another open source project bites the dust. Here's their explainer. Quote, the success of Redis has created a unique set of challenges.

Redis has been sponsoring the bulk of development alongside a dynamic community of developers eager to contribute. However, the majority of Redis' commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers who commoditize Redis' investment and its open-source community. Despite efforts to support a community-led governance model and our desire to maintain the BSD license, delivering multiple software distributions simultaneously across open source, source available, and commercial software

optimized for different on-premises and cloud platforms is at odds with our ability to drive Redis successfully into the future. End quote. When this news first dropped last Wednesday, I quipped, gentlemen, start your forks. Drew DeVault must have been listening. I mean, probably not, but you know, in spirit, because he announced Reddict. Drew writes, quote, like many of you, I was disappointed when I learned that Redis was changing to a non-free licensing model. This is a betrayal of the free software community, but perhaps not an entirely surprising one. Forks are likely to start appearing in the coming days, and today,

I would like to offer Reddict to you as a possible future home for your needs, and present its trade-offs as compared to other forks you're likely to be choosing from soon. In short, Reddict is an independent, non-commercial fork of Redis OSS 7.2.4.2. It is based on the BSD 3 clause source code of Redis OSS, and all changes from this point onward are licensed under the lesser GNU General Public License, LGPL 3.0 only. End quote. Interestingly, Microsoft also announced Garnet, a Redis client-compatible cash store, just two days prior to the Redis relicensing. Fortuitous timing, or did they know something? We need community-built software.

In the wake of this latest open-source rug pull, Matthew Miller, Fedora Project leader at Red Hat, made a great point on Mast Macedon that I think is worth quoting in full. Quote, the Redist thing underscores a key point. Open source is not enough. We need community-built software. Free and open source licenses are just one aspect of that. If a company requires you to assign copyright, or equivalent relicensing rights, in an asymmetrical way, they will inevitably, eventually, decide to take that option once they want to cash in on the goodwill you've end quote. This sparked a quality discussion, which you can follow in the replies to his post. It's linked up in our companion newsletter. It's now time for Sponsored News.

PostCon 24 is the event for API enthusiasts. Postman's annual user conference pops off April 30th to May 1st in San Francisco, and they're going all out to ensure this is the must-attend event of the year. You'll level up your skills with hands-on workshops. You'll hear from experts on how they bring APIs into the future. You'll be the first to know about new Postman features. You will help shape the future of Postman by meeting with product leaders.

You'll network and connect with tech leaders from OpenAI, Heroku, and more. And to top it all off, they're throwing an absolutely amazing after party. You'll meet at SF's tallest sky bar for cocktails, dinner, and 360 degree views of the city and the bay. Then stroll to nearby August Hall to enjoy drinks, a private bowling alley,

and a live performance by multi-platinum recording artist T-Pain. How cool is that? Register now using the link in the show notes before it's too late and have a blast at PostCon. Thank you to Postman for sponsoring Changelog News. DuckDB as the new JQ. Paul Gross makes the case that DuckDB, which is like a SQLite geared towards data applications, because it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table is better than JQ for exploring documents. I tend to agree that SQL is easier to reason about than JQ's search

syntax, which I use just infrequently enough to have to ask ChatGPT every single time. I'm a programmer and I'm stupid. Anton Zianov has been getting paid to code for 15 years despite being, in his own words, pretty dumb. Quote, I haven't been diagnosed with any specific medical condition, but my mental capacity is very limited. I find even easier leak code problems challenging. Reading about a basic consensus algorithm makes my head explode. I can't really follow complex dependencies in a code base. I can't really follow complex dependencies in a code base. I can't learn a fancy language like Rust. I tried, but honestly, it's too much. I hate microservices and modern front ends because there are so many moving parts, I can't keep track of them all.

End quote. So what does he do about it? Here's where things get interesting. Quote, I use the simplest mainstream language available, Go, and very basic Python. I write simple, though sometimes verbose, code that is easy to understand and maintain. I avoid deep abstractions and always choose composition over inheritance or mixins. I only use generics when absolutely necessary. I prefer flat data structures whenever possible. End quote. He goes on and on, but you get the drift.

Anton keeps things incredibly simple. But wait, and on, but you get the drift. Anton keeps things incredibly simple. But wait, that's not dumb. That's smart. Which means he's dismantled his own premise, which might be dumb. I don't know. I need a break. The one about the web developer job market. Balder Bjarnason chimes in on our collective sense of impending job doom from the perspective of web devs. Quote, we have the worst job environment for tech in over two decades, and that's with the AI bubble in full force.

If that bubble pops hard before the job market recovers, the repercussions to the tech industry will likely eclipse the dot-com crash. End quote. Don't sugarcoat it, Balder. Shoot it to a straight. Here's more on how web media is in free fall, and that's bad for web devs too.

Quote, web media is a major employer, both directly and indirectly, of web developers. If a big part of the web media industry is collapsing, then that's an entire sector that isn't hiring any of the developers laid off by Google, Microsoft, or the rest. And the people they aren't hiring will still be on the job market competing with everybody else who wouldn't have even applied to work in web media.

This would be bad on its own if it weren't for the fact that search engine traffic is declining as well. LLM-enabled spam sites are flooding the search engine results, which drives down traffic to web media sites in general. End quote. It's mostly more bad news from here. This one sums up his stance. Quote, it's reasonable to expect that the job market is unlikely to ever fully bounce back due to the collapse of web media alone. It's also reasonable to expect that the job market might take another sharp turn to the worse because the AI bubble will run its course eventually. It doesn't matter whether it's a genuine innovation or an overblown yarn ball of dysfunction and wishful thinking. Bubbles end

eventually. Both finding a job and hiring for web development will likely only get harder. End quote. There is a section called, so what should I do, that I recommend all web developers at least take a look at. One sentiment that I will heartily echo here, this is probably as good a time as any to start a business. That is the news for now, but scan this week's companion changelog newsletter for an additional 12 links to cool new tools I found for your toolbox. Stay tuned to the changelog. Our third installment of It Depends ships out later this week. The topic this time, whether it's better for software devs to specialize or generalize. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.