Bowing to market pressures, data platform vendor Redis, has opted to return to a more fully open source model and use the AGPL v3 and SSPL licenses, though it’s not clear yet if the shift will fully win the favor of the larger developer community.
The company has shifted its open source strategy over the last year in an effort to stay true to its open source credo, while also remaining commercially competitive. In 2024, Redis stopped using the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) open source license, which is widely well-regarded by developers.
The change, explained Redis CEO Rowan Trollope, was because large cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud were taking advantage of the open source approach to deploy Redis-developed code without contributing back to the projects. As he wrote in a blog post, “how do you keep innovating and investing in OSS projects when cloud providers reap the profits and control the infrastructure without proportional contributions back to the projects that they exploit?”
To maneuver around this problem, Redis chose to use the SSPL open source license. However the shift proved quite unpopular among the Redis developer community because the license is not seen as truly open. In response, they launched their own version of the project, called Valkey, which proved to be a major success.
Their version of this in-memory NoSQL data store became so popular that, according to a research report from open source consultancy Percona, “Valkey, a new fully open source option, has quickly become a top choice for those looking to maintain flexibility and control without the costs and vendor lock-in of Redis.” The report noted that 70% of Redis users were considering alternatives. Some big vendors—with large customer bases—adopted the new version, including Oracle, AWS and Google.
Trollope, seeing the tide change, acknowledged that Redis’s license change has “hurt our relationship with the Redis community. SSPL is not truly open source because the Open Source Initiative clarified it lacks the requisites to be an OSI-approved license.”
As Trollope tells it, the impetus for a new direction came when Salvatore Sanfillipo rejoined the company as a developer evangelist in late 2024. The original developer of Redis, Sanfillipo—widely known as a brilliant coder—had left Redis in 2020. As he returned, he urged Redis to use the ASPLv3 license as a way to show good faith with the developer community.
In a blog post titled “Redis is open source again,” Sanfillipo wrote that “I tried to give more strength to the ongoing pro-AGPL license side. My feeling was that the SSPL, in practical terms, failed to be accepted by the community. The OSI wouldn’t accept it, nor would the software community regard the SSPL as an open license.”Adopting the AGPL, he said, would be a positive move, and he noted that, “I’m happy that Redis is open source software again, under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.”
However, some community members feels that the ASPLv3 along with the SSPL license does not sufficiently support the open source credo.
Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona, wrote in his blog that “It’s no longer surprising when a corporate-owned open source project abruptly shifts to a more restrictive ‘source-available’ license, such as SSPL or BSL.” As for ASPL, he told The Register that “AGPL is like halfway: it’s probably the most restrictive, popular open source license out there. Obviously, that is a better approach for customers who would want to stay with Redis.” Additionally, he said that AGPL would be too restrictive for some projects.
Yet Redis, for its part, is continuing to develop its product line. CEO Trollope noted that Redis will now include vector sets, “the first new data type in years,” which was developed by Sanfillipo. Also, the company is integrating Redis Stack features, ranging from probabilistic data types to Redis Query Engine, into Redis 8. The company claims that the newest Redis version delivers over 30 performance improvements with up to 87% faster commands and 2x throughput.
