Redis has reverted to open-source with Redis 8 now available under an AGPL licence – just a year after it controversially ditched its BSD licence and triggering the community to create a fork, Valkey, that is now thriving. 

Redis in March 2024 changed the licence for its ubiquitous in-memory, NoSQL data store – instead adopting the significantly more restrictive SSPL licence; following in the wake of Elastic, MongoDB and Hashicorp.

Its decision to revert to open-souce comes as Redis fork Valkey (backed by AWS, Google, and Oracle among others and now a Linux Foundation-governed project) continues to gain steam, with 20.7k stars on GitHub and over 700 contributors from a broad range of enterprises. 

Redis returns to open-source

Redis CEO Rowan Trollope wrote today:

“In November of 2024 Salvatore Sanfillipo decided to rejoin Redis as a developer evangelist. Collaborating with Salvatore on new capabilities, company strategy and community engagement has been a true privilege that has made a major impact that will pay dividends into the future.

With guidance from Salvatore, our CTO, Benjamin Renaud, and our core developers, we have made some key decisions to improve Redis going forward:

  1. “Adding the OSI-approved AGPL as an additional licensing option for Redis, starting with Redis 8 (available now);
  2. “Introducing vector sets—the first new data type in years—created by Salvatore;
  3. “Integrating Redis Stack technologies, including JSON, Time Series, probabilistic data types, Redis Query Engine and more into core Redis 8 under AGPL
  4. “Delivering over 30 performance improvements with up to 87% faster commands and 2x throughput; and
  5. “Improving community engagement, particularly with client ecosystem contributions.”

Whilst many welcomed the move, Redis has burned a lot of bridges with the open-source community and may struggle to repair them. 

Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK, told The Stack: “When it comes to welcoming prodigal children back to the open source community we are becoming weary.  Redis is one of the biggest culprits in undermining open source’s fundamental free flow of value, with repeated shifts away from open source licensing.  They instigated the creation of the Commons Clause - an add-on restriction on commercial usage created by lawyer Heather Meeker. It was absolutely vilified by the open source contributing community and adding it stopped open source being open source. 

“Redis had to back down.”

“Then it shifted away from open source again and moved to their own licence and the Server Side Public License (also drafted by Meeker). Now, they are apparently back and we wonder how long for. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose. Redis’ actions have caused a lot of disruption…” 

"Practical limitations of AGPL"

As Vadim Tkachenko, founder of Percona told us: “While the adoption of AGPL represents movement in the right direction, it's important to recognize the practical limitations of this license choice. Many organizations maintain explicit policies against using AGPL-licensed software due to its restrictive terms on code reuse and distribution. 

“The primary purpose of AGPL appears to be creating barriers for public cloud providers, which likely guarantees that  major sponsors like Amazon and Google will continue to support Valkey. For Redis, this appears to be largely a marketing maneuver to appease their user base… As a Linux Foundation-backed initiative, Valkey is establishing its distinct identity guided by community priorities rather than single-company interests. 

“This community-first approach enables performance enhancements and feature development to be incorporated directly into the open source project. Importantly, Valkey maintains the highly permissive and community-friendly BSD license. The repeated back-and-forth license changes we've seen from Redis significantly erode enterprise trust and create substantial uncertainty for organizations attempting to build long-term technology strategies,” he added:

“ Each license shift forces enterprises to reevaluate their technology stack, assess compliance risks, and potentially rework their architecture—all costly and disruptive…”

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