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Open Source Databases

Redis Returns To Open Source After Year-Long Proprietary Detour (thenewstack.io) 24

Posted by msmash from the course-correction dept.
Redis, the popular in-memory data store, has returned to open source licensing with Redis 8 now available under the AGPL v3 license. The move reverses last year's controversial shift to proprietary licensing schemes (RSALv2 and SSPLv1) that aimed to force major cloud providers to pay for offering Redis as a managed service.

The decision follows significant market pressure, including AWS, Google, and Oracle backing the Valkey fork, which gained momentum in the open source community.

Redis believes the AGPL license provides sufficient protection from cloud providers while satisfying open source requirements. Redis 8 will incorporate vector sets and integrate previously separate Redis Stack features including JSON, Time Series, and probabilistic data support.
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Redis Returns To Open Source After Year-Long Proprietary Detour More

Redis Returns To Open Source After Year-Long Proprietary Detour

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  • Sorry (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They're completely dead to me.
  • For me, the AGPL is even less usable license than the proprietary licenses.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by azrazalea ( 10185271 )
      Yeah, many companies will just reject any use of AGPL software out of hand. The good news is unless you're offering redis access to your customers, the general interpretation of the AGPL would mean that even if you add a plugin or something to redis you don't have to distribute the source. It also is pretty well established that having a service you rely on behind the scenes and don't modify definitely doesn't violate the license if you don't release your source. So I get the reluctance, especially from b

    • Your comment is on par with a comment only stating stating "I hate it," because you provide no rationale for your assertion. I mean, this site isn't all about you, so why would we care what your personal feelings are if you fail to include anything else?

    • Why? Most people will make no modifications to redis. It is almost always used unmodified.

      • If you use the unmodified redis library in your app running on your server... Then your app becomes AGPL as far as i understand. AGPL is based on GPL, not LGPL so there is no linker exception.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          If you use the unmodified redis library in your app running on your server... Then your app becomes AGPL as far as i understand. AGPL is based on GPL, not LGPL so there is no linker exception.

          OK, good, you know what the LGPL is. The license stops between the library and anything and everything that links to it.

          The AGPL is the same type of deal but the license stops between it and its API.

          So if you use the unmodified redis software, it is physically impossible to access it in any other way except the unmodified API.
          So by definition your app license is 100% unaffected.

          To do as you claim and have your app license be forced upon you as AGPL, you would be required to modify redis, remove the API, do

        • It's a server. It speaks a simple human-readable protocol [readthedocs.io]. I run it in Docker and use it for Drupal, where it speeds up cache performance a whole lot. It's not poisonous, as it's not part of your project. It's just used by it.

    • I call it assh*le GPL. I understand they are trying to keep the big cloud companies from basically stealing their work, but I am fairly certain they could come up with some licence which says, "If you make more than 1 billion in revenue, you can't use this without getting a commercial, license..."

      This is something which kept me away from Ada as a language. Most of the libraries are gpl or worse. Even Ada itself has some weird licensing which is like, "It's like GPL but only more confusing. We promise tha

      • This is something which kept me away from Ada as a language. Most of the libraries are gpl or worse. Even Ada itself has some weird licensing which is like, "It's like GPL but only more confusing. We promise that our lawyers won't haul you into court because we are so nice, and our lawyers only eat kittens on weekends."

        Last I checked, GNAT was GPL, and its standard library had the same linking exception as libgcc and libstdc++ [gnu.org]. This means you may link the library with proprietary software so long as you don't modify the compiler to introduce a mix of FSF-owned code and GPL-incompatible code.

  • Too late (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CommunityMember ( 6662188 ) on Friday May 02, 2025 @01:15PM (#65347671)

    While it is good that they realized the hole in the foot was self inflicted, they will never walk quite right ever again.

    The large customers that Redis wanted to pay them more forked the project, and are now having their engineers (who were substantial contributors to the Redis code base previously) work on that fork instead, and have introduced a number of noticeable improvements to that code that matter to those large customers (odds are they had been using variants of those improvements internally, but now are sharing). The mindshare is now with the valkey fork, not Redis.

    Redis continues to hint at an IPO real soon now. I don't think their valuation is going to be what they hoped for just a few years ago.

    • Maybe, maybe not. The Elastic debacle showed that a company can continue to operate after course correcting and in some cases even claw back into the market they attempted to fuck over. AWS even now offers Elasticsearch again along side Opensearch and the company continues to exist.

  • You took your ball and went home. The FOSS community forked you.

    You're forked. Bye bye.

  • Trust the guy that just broke your nose (Score:5, Funny)

    by ebunga ( 95613 ) on Friday May 02, 2025 @01:23PM (#65347693)

    Here's some flowers. Please take me back, baby. Won't happen again, I promise.

  • There's no issues staying with Valkey, and no benefit to returning to Redis even with their hurriedly added new features.

  • Too late, we already switched to Valkey

  • I've already moved on. Maybe I'll come back when my current solution tries to go closed source.

  • My thoughts, they used to make money, tried to close it, found that people lost confidence in their proprietary sales and now need to get people back after all that AI investment.

    Wouldn't trust them to not pull the rug again in the future.

  • I have gone to more than one redis presentation. They were arrogant pr*cks. Usually, when I go to presentations given by many tech companies, they are jovial, friendly, and have great handouts. They will throw a high value licence out to the audience sort of thing, and maybe some kind of credit to their service with some heft.

    The redis people left me with a real sour taste in my mouth. They just bragged about service uptimes, which made me very nervous as they have no safety net underneath if something g

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