Redis: another license turnaround – from now on the open source AGPL applies
After one and a half years of proprietary marketing, Redis 8 has been given an open source license again. The database also supports new data types.
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Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis, has announced in his blog that he will be offering an additional open source license for the Redis database in the future: The AGPL 3 (Affero General Public License), which is recognized by the Open Source Initiative.
Trollope justifies the move by stating that the switch to the non-open source Server Side Public License (SSPLv1) in March 2024 has now served its purpose: Hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform maintain their forks of Redis.
Many open source projects struggle with the hyperscalers' superiority, as Trollope laments: "How can you maintain innovation and investment in OSS projects when cloud providers rake in the profits and control the infrastructure without making adequate contributions to the projects they exploit?" On the other hand, proprietary licenses cause trouble in the community A current example is NATS – which often reacts with forks. Redict immediately forked from Redis in March 2024.
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One contributor writes on Hacker News, for example, "I felt cheated as a contributor to a real FOSS codebase". But there is also understanding for the hyperscalers' defense: "Open source was successful because it created a common public infrastructure. But the hyperscalers have turned it into an extraction infrastructure: exploiting the code, not maintaining it."
New data types and functions
As part of the license change, the Redis CEO announced several other changes: The key-value database will accept vectors as data types in the future. From the commercial offshoot Redis Stack (SSPL license), the open source version will receive additional types such as JSON, time series or probabilities. The Stack query engine and performance improvements have also been added.
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