Also, Redis is being opened sourced via the AGPL, whereas Valkey is BSD licensed (like Redis used to be). They are both officially open source licenses, but BSD is much, much more permissive.
A very real consequence of picking that particular license by Redis Inc. is that it is completely unacceptable to users of Valkey like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. That's probably intentional by Redis Inc. But it also means Valkey is going to continue to exist because its users simply require a more permissive license that allows them to run their cloud based products.
It will be interesting to see where the developer community goes but these forks have a way of becoming permanent. If you look at the Valkey Github, you'll see a lot of activity. Lots of contributors contributing lots of changes. All signs of a healthy open source community. And as the article shows, there have been some non trivial changes made to the code base that, at least temporarily, give it a bit of a lead in terms of performance. That indicates to me that there is a momentum of people maintaining it that seem to know what they are doing.
It will be interesting to see if Redis Inc. will be able to keep up/recover from this. My impression is that the community around that shrunk to basically employees of Redis Inc. when they closed source and that the rest of the community jumped ship to Valkey. Maybe some of them will go back now that they switched to AGPL. But I think Valkey is where the cloud sponsored money and action is. And there is of course more than a bit of broken trust here as well. And while AGPL is open source, I think signing agreements to give Redis Inc. the permission to re-license your contributions as they want is not something any serious open source contributor would consider.
Good question and one that bears repeating. Because if you desire the aspect of free software or open source that is a level playing field, where no vendor has any special status or secret sauce, which in turn is what enables vendors to submit new features to a multi vendor codebase instead of maintaining private branches.
We learned this from X11 and the Unix wars, and history repeats itself in the countless free-core-but-proprietary-enterprise-features projects that never really expand beyond their parent corporation.
This is why trillion dollar corporations must not have special rules and the playing field must be even to any use, despite how unintuitive it may feel. Someone tried to codify it early as the first of the four software freedoms (the keyword being "anyone").
> Why is it completely unacceptable that those trillion dollar corporations (...)
The Redis licensing rug pull affects the whole community, not just strawmen villains. Random weekend warriors who occasionally spin up a container might not care. Anyone who trusted a FLOSS project to play a key role in their company's infrastructure will unavoidable have risk mitigation meetings where the name Redis is brought up.
Those corporations are direct competitors of Redis Inc. in the "managed Redis in the cloud" space. Would Redis be willing to sell licenses to them? Would they be reasonably priced?
Totally agree! If you don’t want AWS turning your project into a paid service without giving you a dime, you’ve got to pick a license that stops that. BSD doesn’t cut it!
> It's simple: supporting a business without getting paid sucks ass.
The second a project excludes commercial work they get 100x my attention.
This stance is interesting to me because it reminds me of psychological experiments about utility versus fairness.
I'd like to ask you a question in that spirit.
If you could choose one of the following, which would you choose?
1. Noncommercial users gain 3× on some comprehensive metric of useful software with the source available (imagine the metric includes code quality, features, hardware support, choice, etc.), but businesses gain 10×
2. Noncommercial users gain 2×, and businesses gain 2×
3. Noncommercial users gain 1.1×, and businesses gain nothing
4. Noncommercial users gain nothing, and businesses gain nothing
5. Noncommercial users lose 3×, but businesses lose 10×
Edit: Added option 3 and renumbered the options after.
The AGPL doesn't require any payment, and its not hard to comply with. The hyperscalers are already publishing their Valkey code, they could do the same for Redis easily.
Your attention as in "your work/contribution" or just "your use"? Because if it's "your work" they'll make you sign a CLA anyway so they can sell it on and you don't get paid.
