expectedwrong hindsight

Valkey and the Eternal Return of the Fork

Redis went closed-source and the community did exactly what the community does.

1 min read 208 words #redis #valkey #open-source #forks #licensing
hindsight — nailed it

valkey is now the standard open-source redis alternative. AWS, google cloud, and oracle adopted it. the fork pattern held perfectly — company changes license, community takes the code and leaves. the funniest part is it never gets less funny.

Redis changed its license last month. BSL and SSPLv1 — neither of which is open source, whatever the press release said about "open" anything. Redis Ltd. needed a revenue story and this was it.

So now there's Valkey.

It's the fork, it's under the Linux Foundation, it has BSD-3, and several of the engineers who built Redis are on it. The GitHub repo exists and has commits and the whole thing took approximately no time at all.

This is the part that keeps happening and never gets less funny — a company acquires or controls an open source project, spends a decade building its brand on the community's labor, decides the community isn't a good enough business model, and then discovers that the community just leaves. Takes the code. Names it something else. Done.

Redis is still Redis until the licenses expire. After that, why would you use it? You'd be on the closed thing, paying for the thing that used to be free, while a functionally identical thing exists next to it with no strings attached.

The people who know the codebase best are not at Redis Ltd.

This will be fine for Redis Ltd. until it isn't, and then it will be very bad very fast.