Not long ago, Redis was tired of being eaten alive by the hyperscalers.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were running Redis as a managed service, minting money off it while giving nothing back. Worse, they were shipping new Redis features immediately, leaving Redis Inc. with no meaningful way to differentiate, even though they were doing the hard work.
So in March 2024, Redis changed its license. No more free lunch. If you were a cloud provider, you couldn't just repackage Redis as a service without a commercial agreement.
It was a bold move. And it backfired.
The community was furious. The hyperscalers simply forked Redis. AWS backed Valkey. Microsoft and Google followed suit. Redis lost the one thing that had made it truly ubiquitous: its default status.
For a while, it looked like Redis had burned its bridges and its moat.
But then something strange happened
Today, Redis reversed course by going back to an open source license.
At first glance, it looks like an admission of defeat.
The forks worked. Redis lost.
But dig deeper, and this might actually be a win.
Why? Because the forks are already committed
Valkey and friends have moved on. Their ecosystems are locked in. Redis no longer has to worry about them vacuuming up every feature they release. The split is done, and now Redis can actually compete on product again.
Going back to open source reopens the doors to adoption, trust, and community, without handing the keys to the kingdom back to AWS.
In a way, Redis played the long game. They broke the extractive cycle, forced the hyperscalers to maintain their own forks, and then stepped back into open source with a clean slate.
So… did Redis lose?
Maybe. Maybe not. It's certainly too soon to tell, but it's possible that Redis just pulled off the cleanest license judo move we have seen in years.
Do you think that was planned all along, or is it them trying to save face? Let me know in the comments!
Cheers,
Jonas, Co-Founder at sliplane.io
Top comments (9)
Sounds like a win to me; they got rid of the parasites and maintained their FOSS status in the end.
This is false, these companies contributed a lot. For instance, the TLS feature in Redis was led by an AWS engineer.
nothing is maybe harsh, but they did take more than they give
been following this back-and-forth and honestly it's just crazy watching how fast stuff shifts. feels like sometimes shaking things up is the only way out. wonder what the next move will be.
It's definitely a loss. They changed their license last year to monetize their software across various cloud providers. Now they've reverted to an open-source license because likely they are fearing a loss of momentum.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Just the other day switched to valkey. How will community trust them if they change mind on a whim?
Also the forks are not too far off. They can probably share a lot of code. And vise-versa.
Redis still have a chance to become the main supplier because they were not too slow to go back and maybe many people did not switch yet. Time will tell.
thank you for the constructive feedback!
They lost, because now they have to compete with Valkey, they're no longer the top dog.
They also miscalculated on graphs (see falkordb for e.g)
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