news
Redis Goes AGPL
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Simon Willison ☛ Redis is open source again
That's a whole bunch of new things that weren't previously part of Redis core.
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The Register UK ☛ Redis 'returns' to open source with AGPL license
Other projects including Grafana and Elastic have similarly adopted the AGPL.
The licensing shift coincided with the return of Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, who built the performant key-value database from 2019 under an open source model.
"The headline is Redis as open source again," Trollope said.
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Antirez ☛ Redis is open source again
I understand that the core of our work is to improve Redis, to continue building a good system, useful, simple, able to change with the requirements of the software stack. Yet, returning back to an open source license is the basis for such efforts to be coherent with the Redis project, to be accepted by the user base, and to contribute to a human collective effort that is larger than any single company. So, honestly, while I can’t take credit for the license switch, I hope I contributed a little bit to it, because today I’m happy. I’m happy that Redis is open source software again, under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.
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Redis ☛ Redis is now available under the the OSI-approved AGPLv3 open source license.
With guidance from Salvatore, our CTO, Benjamin Renaud, and our core developers, we have made some key decisions to improve Redis going forward:
1. Adding the OSI-approved AGPL as an additional licensing option for Redis, starting with Redis 8 (available now);
LWN:
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Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license (Redis blog)
After a somewhat tumultuous switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL) in March 2024, Redis has backtracked and is now offering Redis under the Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) starting with Redis 8, CEO Rowan Trollope announced. The change back to an open-source license was led by Redis creator Salvatore "antirez" Sanfillipo, who also contributed the new Vector Sets feature for the release.
Linuxiac:
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Welcome Back to the Open-Source Family, Redis
Long story short: Redis hit the scene in 2009 as an open-source project offering a free, in-memory key-value data store. It was so well-designed that over the next 15 years, it became the go-to solution for just about any software that needs that kind of functionality.
That brings us to 2024, when a single decision sent shockwaves through the open-source community. Redis chose to change its licensing model, switching to RSALv2 and SSPLv1. The goal was to prevent large cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and others from offering Redis as a service without contributing to its development.
However, as you can expect, this move effectively meant Redis could no longer be considered truly open source.
Microsoft-sponsored "news" site:
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Redis Is Open Source Again
But changing the license was only what Trollope called “medium successful.” When I talked to him last year, he expected that Amazon and others would launch a fork, which is exactly what happened with Valkey.
“Over the fullness of time, these will no longer be the same product,” Trollope said. “Right now, it’s effectively a year old. We’re launching Redis 8. So the divergence point really starts now.”
Analysis by FOSS Force:
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Should You Trust Redis’s Rebaptism Into the Holy Open Source Spirit?
Be sure to take the included poll after you read this delve into Redis and the wishy-washy world that has become the company's relationship with open-source.
Microsoft Redmonk:
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OSS: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
In October of 2018, MongoDB relicensed its previously open source database to a new source available license of its own creation. Up until that point, the license governing the project had been the AGPL, an OSI approved open source license that took the copyleft provisions of the GPL and extended them into applications hosted on networks.
In simple terms, where the GPL’s reciprocal provisions included software packaged and distributed in binary fashion, they did not apply to modified GPL projects hosted and made available over networks. If you wanted to distribute a new version of the Linux kernel, for example, you were required to make those changes available under the same terms. If you hosted applications on the internet running on a modified Linux kernel, however, you did not.
The AGPL was explicitly designed to close this so-called loophole. Historically, however, usage of the license has been rare relative to other open source licenses of both the copyleft and permissive varieties. This was in part because large internet companies strictly forbade its usage for fear of running afoul of the extended protections./blockquote>