Redis, the high-performance in-memory data store, has made a dramatic U-turn by returning to open source under the AGPLv3 license. This follows a turbulent 14-month-long detour into more restrictive licensing, for which it received a lot of flak from the developer community.
The return to open source coincides with the release of Redis 8, which is now available under the same AGPLv3 licence. It is claimed to be the most powerful version of the software to date with support for AI stack, JSON, search, and vector database, focusing on AI applications.
Redis 8 offers up to 87% lower latency, twice the throughput, and up to 16 times more query processing power compared to earlier versions.
This move, announced on May 1, aims to win back the trust of developers who abandoned the project in protest and to salvage Redis’ reputation after what many in the community saw as a betrayal of open source principles.
In March 2024, Redis took the decision to abandon the permissive BSD license in favour of the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and its own Redis Source Available License (RSALv2).
Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis Labs, said in a blog that while the licensing shift succeeded in prompting “AWS and Google to maintain their own fork”, it came at a cost—hurting the company’s relationship with the Redis community.
The Strain on the Relationship is Undeniable
Redis rose to fame by combining sub-millisecond latency with versatile data structures. Its permissive licensing allowed widespread commercial use, and companies like Netflix, Snapchat, and GitHub integrated Redis deeply into their infrastructure.
But this success brought challenges. Major cloud providers, especially AWS, began offering managed Redis services, prompting Redis to feel that their open source work was being “strip-mined” without compensation.
The licenses, which prohibited cloud providers from offering Redis as a managed service without explicit permission, were seen by many as an aggressive, corporate overreach. Trollope had defended the decision at the time, arguing it was necessary. However, the developer community didn’t see it that way.
The licensing shift in 2024 was meant to address this. But instead of leveling the playing field, it fractured the Redis ecosystem. Forks began to proliferate almost overnight.
On forums like Hacker News, Reddit and X, developers condemned the change, accusing Redis of prioritising profit over community. One Hacker News user described the move as a “predatory license bomb” and said they would be migrating all workloads to forks.
Responding to the AGPLv3 return itself, another said, “They’ve lost my trust for good.” Despite the change in direction, the damage appears to be long-lasting.
Oded Poncz, co-founder of DragonflyDB, a competitor to Redis, also took a jab at Redis stating that they might change the license again.
A prominent fork, Valkey, backed by the Linux Foundation, AWS, Google, and Oracle, preserved the original BSD license and gained dozens of contributors within weeks. Several organisations started moving to Valkey, but there are still ongoing discussions about its BSD licence.
Can Redis Become the Developer Darling Again?
Despite this, developers still don’t care. For example, Arch Linux, known for being on top of everything open source, has removed Redis from its repository and replaced it with Valkey. This decision is more than just a technical one as was narrated in the blog.
Microsoft also entered the fray with Garnet, a high-performance database that implements the Redis protocol and integrates natively with Azure’s distributed systems. “You can literally embed Garnet as a library,” one Azure developer noted, highlighting its growing appeal among enterprise teams.
With Salvatore Sanfilippo, one of Redis co-founders joining the firm again in November last year as a developer evangelist, Redis seems to be becoming open source again. This has been believed to impact a lot of decisions along with the push from CTO Benjamin Renaud.
Now, Redis wants to win back the developers. However, it is much more difficult than previously anticipated.
The community’s skepticism is proving hard to shake. “This is a ‘fool me twice’ situation,” wrote one user on Hacker News. The return to AGPLv3 has not silenced criticism either. “Once you’ve migrated to a fork, there’s no business case to migrate back,” a developer said.
