Redis Relicensing¶
Year: 2024
Lesson: You can take the license back. You can't take the ecosystem back.
What Happened¶
In March 2024, Redis Ltd. announced they were changing the license for Redis from BSD-3-Clause to a dual license: RSALv2 (Redis Source Available License) and SSPL.1
I've stopped being surprised. The pattern is locked in. The question isn't whether this can happen to a project, but when.
Neither is open source. After more than 15 years as one of the most permissively licensed infrastructure projects, Redis was no longer open source.
The stated reason was, by now, familiar: cloud providers were offering Redis as a service without contributing back or compensating Redis Ltd.
That state of affairs lasted fourteen months. Redis is open source again — and that turns out to be the most interesting part of the story, for reasons nobody planned.
The Immediate Response¶
Valkey¶
AWS, Google, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap announced Valkey—a fork of the last BSD-licensed Redis, to be hosted at the Linux Foundation.4 Within days, the project had major corporate backing and a path to independence.
The playbook from OpenSearch and OpenTofu was executed again, even faster.
Redict¶
A separate fork, Redict, launched under the LGPL. It aimed for stronger copyleft protection while remaining open source—a different philosophical choice than Valkey's permissive approach.
Linux distribution responses¶
Fedora replaced Redis with Valkey entirely starting with Fedora 41. The valkey-compat package handles config and data migration transparently. Debian and others followed. The distribution machinery didn't just discuss it — it moved.
The Current State¶
Two years later, this isn't a licensing dispute anymore. It's an ecosystem split.
Redis came back¶
On May 1, 2025, Redis added the AGPLv3 — an OSI-approved license — as an option starting with Redis 8.2 By any definition that matters, Redis is open source again.
The announcement is worth reading for what it concedes. CEO Rowan Trollope wrote that the SSPL move "achieved our goal—AWS and Google now maintain their own fork—but the change hurt our relationship with the Redis community." And on the license itself: "SSPL is not truly open source because the Open Source Initiative clarified it lacks the requisites to be an OSI-approved license."
Read those two sentences together. The relicensing worked exactly as designed — it drove the hyperscalers off — and the company decided the price was too high. The second sentence concedes the precise point Redis had spent a year arguing about.
Salvatore Sanfilippo — antirez, who wrote Redis in the first place — had rejoined the company in November 2024, and the AGPL decision was made with his guidance. The Redis Stack features that had been split into a separately licensed distribution came home into core Redis 8 under the AGPL.
Redis 8 now offers three licenses: RSALv2, SSPLv1, and AGPLv3. You choose.
Two projects, genuinely diverging¶
Redis 8 went big — and the AGPL release is the same release. Eight new data structures — vector sets for AI workloads, JSON, time series, five probabilistic structures including Bloom filters. New hash field operations (HGETEX, HSETEX, HGETDEL) for combined get-and-expire in a single call. Over 30 performance improvements, up to 87% faster on some commands.5 Redis is betting on becoming a broader data platform, not just a cache.
Valkey 9 went deep. Atomic slot migrations that fix long-standing cluster reliability issues. Multi-database support in cluster mode — something Redis never shipped. Scaling to 2,000 nodes and over a billion requests per second. And critically, official BSD-licensed modules for JSON, Bloom filters, and vector search (the Valkey Bundle), directly competing with Redis's proprietary module ecosystem.6
They're still about 90% compatible at the command level. But the projects are making different bets, and the gap is widening.
The cloud providers chose¶
AWS ElastiCache and Google Memorystore both switched to Valkey as their default. Valkey serverless pricing runs 33% lower than other engines on ElastiCache. Over 50 companies now participate in the Valkey project — up from the original handful.7
The EOL squeeze¶
Redis Software 7.2 — the last version available under BSD — reached end of life on February 28, 2026.8 Organizations that stayed on 7.2 to avoid the license change are now running unsupported software. Their options: accept the new license, migrate to Valkey (which committed to supporting its 7.2 fork through April 2027), or run unpatched. The clock that started ticking in March 2024 has run out.
The reversal didn't reverse anything¶
Redis did the thing everyone said would fix it. It adopted an OSI-approved license, brought the original author back, and folded its proprietary modules into the open core.
Valkey is still the default on AWS ElastiCache and Google Memorystore. Fedora still ships Valkey. The fork still has its own roadmap, its own contributors, and a foundation that can't relicense it.3
Part of that is the AGPL itself. Plenty of corporate legal departments treat network copyleft as disqualifying on sight, so "open source again" did not translate to "adoptable again" for a meaningful share of the companies that had already left. Redis traded a license nobody would call open source for one many enterprises won't touch.
But mostly it's that the switching cost was already paid. Distributions repackaged. Clouds re-defaulted. Migration guides got written, tested, and blogged. Compatibility shims shipped. None of that work undoes itself when a license changes, because none of it was about the license — it was about the defaults, and the defaults had moved.
Why This Matters¶
The pattern is now undeniable¶
| Project | Year | Old License | New License | Fork |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MongoDB | 2018 | AGPL | SSPL | (various) |
| Elasticsearch | 2021 | Apache 2.0 | SSPL/Elastic (AGPL added 2024) | OpenSearch |
| Terraform | 2023 | MPL | BSL | OpenTofu |
| Redis | 2024 | BSD | RSALv2/SSPL (AGPL added 2025) | Valkey |
This is no longer surprising. It's expected.
Fork response time keeps shrinking¶
MongoDB's community response took months to coalesce. Elasticsearch's fork (OpenSearch) emerged in weeks. OpenTofu launched in weeks. Valkey was announced within days of Redis's relicensing.
The infrastructure for forking major projects now exists. The playbook is established. Companies and foundations are ready to act.
The BSD license didn't protect anyone¶
Redis was BSD-licensed—as permissive as possible. It didn't prevent the relicensing. Permissive licensing means the current code is free, but says nothing about future versions.
Only governance protects against relicensing, not license choice.
Redis Ltd's Position¶
Redis Ltd argued:
- They need sustainable economics to continue developing Redis
- Cloud providers benefit disproportionately from their work
- The source is still available; most users are unaffected
- Only commercial Redis-as-a-Service competitors are restricted
These arguments are reasonable. They're also the same arguments every other relicensing company has made.
The Community Perspective¶
Long-time Redis users felt betrayed:
- They contributed to, evangelized, and built on a BSD-licensed project
- Their contributions are now under a license they didn't choose
- The project they trusted changed the rules
Some users don't care—they use managed Redis services anyway, or their use case isn't affected. But the developers who built the Redis ecosystem feel differently.
The Lessons¶
If it can happen to Redis, it can happen to anything¶
Redis was the example of permissive open source success. Widely used, simply licensed, well-maintained. If Redis can relicense, no single-company project is safe.
Fork infrastructure is mature¶
The combination of: - Git (code is trivially forkable) - Linux Foundation (instant governance and legitimacy) - Corporate sponsors (funding and engineering) - Cloud providers (operational expertise and motivation)
...means that forking is now a reliable response to relicensing.
We're in a new equilibrium¶
The old model: company releases open source, builds business, everyone benefits.
The new model: company releases open source, cloud providers capture value, company relicenses, community forks, two projects compete.
This isn't a crisis anymore. It's how things work now.
The last open source version always EOLs¶
Redis 7.2's end-of-life created a forcing function. Organizations that thought they could sit on the last BSD version indefinitely learned that "last open source version" has a shelf life. Valkey extended that runway — but only because a well-funded fork existed. Not every relicensed project will be lucky enough to get one.
The license was never the moat¶
This is the lesson Redis paid for on everyone else's behalf.
A license change is reversible. Redis proved it — fourteen months, one blog post, done. What isn't reversible is everything that happened because of the license change: the package maintainer who picked a new default, the cloud provider who re-pointed its managed service, the platform team that wrote the migration runbook and closed the ticket.
Companies relicense believing the license is the asset they're protecting. It isn't. The asset is being the obvious choice — the thing that gets installed when nobody is thinking hard about it. Relicensing spends that position to protect revenue, and you cannot buy the position back at the price you sold it for.
If you're weighing a relicense: the community you're worried about losing is not the thing you should be worried about losing. Watch the defaults.
What To Do About It¶
When adopting: - Assume single-company projects might relicense - Check if a foundation fork exists or is likely - Have migration plans for critical dependencies (see my software building guide for more on evaluating dependency risks)
When building: - If you want to prevent relicensing, use foundation governance from the start - If you might need to relicense later, be transparent about it early - Understand that trust, once lost, doesn't return
When contributing: - Understand what rights your contributions grant - Consider whether the project's governance protects your interests - Foundation projects have stronger contributor protections
Redis won't be the last. But it's now the most complete example we have of the whole arc: open source success, corporate capture, community fork, ecosystem split, slow divergence — and then the part nobody had seen before, where the company changes its mind, does everything right, and finds that the door it walked out of doesn't open from the outside.