Redis bets big on an open source return

Today, Redis makes a dramatic return to its open source roots, offering Redis 8 under the AGPLv3 license. The shift follows a similar move by Elastic in August 2024 and completes the company’s somewhat circuitous licensing path. In both cases, I suspect that neither company ever really wanted to leave open source. The irony is that the very thing that most threatened to hurt their businesses actually helped them: forking.

Redis’ license change “achieved our goal,” writes Redis CEO Rowan Trollope. “AWS and Google now maintain their own forks.” How is this a good thing? Because, Trollope told me in an interview, “We’re on a level playing field now; we get to compete on product.” With AWS and Google focused on developing the Valkey fork of Redis (Microsoft has partnered with Redis), Redis can focus on shipping the best possible product. Trollope is enthusiastic about the prospect: “Who’s going to ship the best stuff? We have the creator [Salvatore Sanfilippo] of Redis behind us, alongside the team who built it. We’re already seeing that pay off in things like vector sets, a new native data type for Redis that Salvatore developed. I’ll bet on that team any time.”

In other words, changing licenses may not have been intended to spur the clouds to fork Redis (or Elasticsearch), but it may end up being the best thing for everyone involved, including customers.

Forking is good for you

I recently wrote about the success of OpenTofu (a fork of HashiCorp’s Terraform), and OpenSearch (a fork of Elastic’s Elasticsearch). I’ve yet to write about Valkey, but there would be plenty of good things to say, given former Redis maintainer (and AWS engineer) Madelyn Olson’s involvement and its growing community. In the past year, it has garnered nearly 20,000 GitHub stars, over 750 forks, and more than 5 million Docker pulls. Despite the success of these forks, or perhaps because of them, Elastic, Redis, and HashiCorp are thriving.

Huh?

Redis’ license changes and, by extension, the Valkey fork, Trollope tells me, “[haven’t] had any effect on our business.” Indeed, he says, “We’ve had record growth since we switched the license.” Though this seems superficially counterintuitive, it’s actually common sense: The more the clouds have focused on the forks, the clearer the product differentiation for Redis (and Elastic and HashiCorp). “We accomplished what we set out to do, which is for cloud providers to stop profiting off our innovation without giving anything back,” Trollope notes.

Not everyone agrees with this, nor do they need to. RedMonk cofounder James Governor suggests such license changes amount to treating open source like a “short-term tactic” for marketing and distribution purposes, rather than a long-term software development methodology. Trollope disagrees. Although he acknowledges the move to AGPLv3 will help the company “retrench ourselves in the community in order to build back any trust we might have lost,” he’s emphatic that “there’s no one better to carry the mantle for open source Redis than the team that built it.”

Governor and others might suggest that a foundation, not a company, would be a better steward for an open source project, and they’d find plenty of case studies to support their argument: Linux, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, etc. Still, there are strong counterexamples of companies (Oracle managing MySQL) or individuals (OBS) who build great open source products without the benefit of community contributions. Personally, I love the foundation approach, but open source succeeds in part because of its diversity (in licensing, governance structures, etc.).

Developers can choose

Having options is the point, right? Open source is always about choice. In a previous interview Trollope told me that “what [developers] really care about is capability: Does this thing offer something unique and differentiated … that I need in my application?” With the rise of Valkey, developers have an increasingly interesting choice to make. Valkey’s developers describe it as a “high-performance key/value data store that supports a variety of workloads such as caching [and] message queues.” Redis, by contrast, describes itself as a “real-time data platform,” positioning itself within the emerging AI tech stack. The Valkey community seems less focused on AI, at least for now, preferring instead to drive significant improvements in scalability and memory efficiency, things that improve Valkey’s core reliability and performance for cloud deployments.

This is a feature, not a bug. Different developers (and their respective employers) want different things. The Valkey community will build a great product, and Redis will build a great product. Both open source. Everyone wins.

Would Trollope have preferred a smoother path to this point? Of course. “We…didn’t meet the open source community—and our community—where they are. I wish we had done better.” Fortunately, “that’s something that Salvatore has helped with a lot,” both giving us “a credible voice in the open source community” while also being “an incredible advocate for the company.” Oh, and he’s also an exceptional engineer: Sanfilippo is responsible for introducing Redis’ first new data type in years (vector sets). He’s a behind-the-scenes heavy influence on the thinking that led the company back to an open source license, which has meant they can now fold in features from the Redis Stack modules (search, JSON, Bloom filters, etc.) to unify their internal development processes while creating a one-stop, real-time data platform.

“We think [changing to AGPLv3 is] the right thing to do for our users, and it’s the right strategic direction for the company,” says Trollope. It should ensure an even better Redis, while the Valkey fork, steered by an increasingly diverse array of contributors from Alibaba, Google, Ericsson, Huawei, Tencent, AWS, and others, promises to give developers a strong alternative. Neither Redis nor Valkey are guaranteed success. Both bring strengths and weaknesses. Developers (and their enterprise employers) will ultimately decide, but at least they now have a clear choice between two great alternatives.