I'm curious whether the community will trust Redis-the-company again after this, or if they'll choose to stick with Valkey. The other concern is at least some big company legal departments are wary of AGPL software, which makes Valkey, still BSD, more attractive to them.

Edit: Regardless, thank you and the rest of the folks inside Redis for pushing to bring this back to OSS!

I am thinking the same that going to AGPL may actually push more people to Valkey.

Although I haven't checked if ValKey any substantial development since the fork.

Yeah, there has been a lot of stuff like performance [1] and efficiency improvements [2]. A lot of the contributors, that didn't work for Redis labs but worked on Redis OSS before the fork, moved to Valkey and they continued to contribute.

[1] https://valkey.io/blog/unlock-one-million-rps-part2/ [2] https://valkey.io/blog/new-hash-table/

I very much doubt that anyone will stick with valkey after the PaaS providers switch back to just offering Redis proper.

Why would PaaS providers switch back to offering Redis? They've clearly all already invested a lot in Valkey (AWS, GCP, Heroku).

AWS, GCP, surely are invested: they paid for ValKey, they forked to avoid to avoid doing revenue sharing with Redis in any way :D IMHO it's a matter of what the community does, and it, in turn, this depends on how well we are able to develop Redis.

It's not just licensing and hyper-scalers, it's also a matter of development quality and direction. For instance, now in Redis you can find substantial more stuff not available in ValKey, including hash items expires, Vector Sets that are very useful for a number of things, the probabilistic data structures just introduced with Redis 8, and so forth.

I contributed a minor (but imho still neat :p) improvement to Redis under its original license, and personally moved to using redict when the unexpected license change to SSPL was announced - and I was feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase. (Had they switched to AGPL right away, I'd have been perfectly fine with that change from a moral perspective, ftr.)

I have a great deal of respect for antirez and recgnize him as a kind and benevolent member of the FOSS community, but no matter what Redis, Inc. announced or does, they have lost my trust for good, and I will continue to use Redis forks for as long as they exist.

Our company made the switch over to Valkey, and we've invested hundreds of engineering hours into it already. I don't see us switching back at this point especially when it's clear Redis could easily pull the bait-and-switch again.

Your company invested hundreds of engineering hours switching from Redis to a clean fork of Redis?

I can easily see this for a midsize company.

While it's likely an easy process to drop in valkey, creating the new instances, migrating apps to those new instances, and making sure there's not some hidden regression (even though it's "drop in") all takes time.

At a minimum, 1 or 2 hours per app optimistically.

My company has hundreds of apps (hurray microservices). That's where "hundreds of hours" seems pretty reasonable to me.

how does it take hundreds of hours to swap out a back end when you're using a trivial protocol like redis?

did you switch out the client or something? maybe the problem is not using pluggable adapters? is your business logic coupled to the particular database client API? oof.

I know the cluster clients are different (been there, done that) but hundreds of hours, seriously? or was that just hyperbole?

What? Isn't Valkey a "drop in" replacement? I switched a couple of deployment, it "just worked" but maybe I'm just too simple.

One of the big things I love about Redis is that it’s become this tool for me to learn new techniques and explore data. Like, the new vector sets feature has let me really explore dense vectors and custom search and taxonomy mapping and all sorts of areas that seemed like a high barrier to entry for me, but now I’m just streaming stuff into llama.cpp with an embedding model and storing it in Redis and being able to do mappings between different data sets super efficiently.

A big part of that is API design - I can’t think of another system that is as well thought out as the Redis API - it’s deceptively simple and because of that I didn’t have to wait for client libraries to incorporate the new Redis features - they just work cause they all speak RESP and I can just send raw commands.

All of this is to say that I was really happy to hear Antirez was back working on Redis and it’s paying off in more ways than I could have imagined. People can use valkey or whatever they want as an alternative - but I like Redis because it’s always pushing forward and letting me explore new things that otherwise wouldn’t feel as “at my fingertips” as it does in Redis.

This doesn't solve anything, Redis has proved that it is willing to do a rug pull, and how much they are willing to hurt the community when they do (taking over client libraries, etc). I don't see a reason to go back from valkey. Again and again, Redis Labs has been the worst thing about Redis, I'm glad we now have an other option.

It's a bold strategy, let's see if it works out for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HVejEB5uVk

A bit more info from CEO: https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/

Sounds like SSPL did not yield the desired outcome.

Glad AGPL is an option now.

After what Mullenweg has pulled, in the era of Blogging CEOs I have to be cynical.

Valkey.

Similar move to Elasticsearch, tacking on AGPL with their existing source available licenses. [1]

The products (commercialized open source) that are often chosen by and championed by developers as opposed to executives see the harm that a bait and switch has on their popularity. With their competitors being more permissive, I don't see many devs moving back unless Valkey loses significant feature parity.

[1] https://ir.elastic.co/news/news-details/2024/Elastic-Announc...

No thanks, going to stick with Valkey for all future projects.

During this time I believe a lot of alternatives (mostly protocol compatible to redis so they would be drop in replacements) came into light.

Has there been a consensus on one? Is there a winner?

I love redis and will probably keep using it. Just curious.

Valkey has replaced redis in a few distros

It is a fork of the latest oss release right? I thought some completely new implementations were introduced.

Also PaaS like Heroku adopted Valkey as a drop-in replacement for Redis.

Of course it's the AGPL, which is essentially the SSPL in practice.

Except that it’s actually open source.

In word, but not in deed. I'll say it over and over again: COSS startups don't adopt the AGPL because they want to prioritize user freedom, they adopt it as a means of defense.

Sure, but the damage is done already, and it's AGPL too.

Good luck to them, everyone is moving to Valkey, especially with its major backing and already better performance.

Redis should step up and fund an independent foundation now and encourage Valkey to contribute where relevant.

Some code under a 3 clause BSD and some under AGPLv3 could be interesting.

AGPL is cancer. Valkey already exists, people already switched, it's already landed in a bunch of distros. I don't see anyone moving back, especially when Valkey has some big corporate support.

And for my personal usage, Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

AGPL is cancer[0] in exactly the same way GPL is cancer, in that it's intentionally designed to *BE* cancer (or, congenital at least).

If you modify GPL code you are expected to open source the changes, AGPL adapts that to the networked world, if you modify AGPL code to serve something, you should open source those changes too, otherwise you're violating the original spirit of GPL which was designed in a time that was not as perpetually internet (and SaaS) driven as today.

If you want a true free license, BSD or MIT have you covered, but then you shouldn't expect corporations to give back.

A good example of what happens if companies don't give back is Linux VS the various BSD's. BSD is a lot more popular in appliances than you might otherwise believe but the popularity is starting to wane as Linux (despite GPL) has improved so much with companies giving back that the "free license" BSD is no longer being seen as good enough in some cases. People do not tend to give back to the BSD's.

[0]: https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2014/01/17/gpl-living-with-canc...

> Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.

Databases could always do what redis did. Redis doesn't bring functionality to the table, it brings speed. If database caching, pub/sub, and streams are good enough for your use case, there was never a reason to pay for an extra instance just to stand up redis.

I'm guessing valkey will be dead now?

why? The investment into it has already been done, and quite a few places will be happier with its license still. I think enough has happened/too much time passed that its not a given everyone will just quietly move back to Redis.