One of the challenges Redis labs here have is that there's very little reason for their userbase to stay loyal to them.

antirez retired from Redis development a few years ago.

From https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors it looks like activity since he left has been mostly from people who didn't overlap with him much.

Redis Labs have not shown themselves to be outstanding stewards of the project as far as I can tell. Why shouldn't people support the fork?

The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. Usually you want rebrands to be loud and well known and license changes to be silent and ignored until it's too late and people have adopted the new license. In this case, they loudly announced that they're making an unpopular change and it gave everyone the will to switch.

It's too dangerous to build a company around open source. You're trapped between AWS eating you or having to relicense and AWS eating you. Source-available from the beginning protects you from this. The problem with OSS stuff is that people are generally price-sensitive and you can't beat the platforms for this since they get the R&D for free.

It's sort of how I don't hire junior people. When others have trained them up, I can just hire them for more. The other guys have to pay to train them so they hope to get some reward for that, but switching costs are low. I can just take pre-trained guys.

And just like the pre-trained guys in this scenario, AWS can always offer a better deal. You need to moat your stuff in some way. Elastic License is ideal if you want to build a company around this. If you just want to make things for the good of mankind or whatever, you can use BSD/GPL/MIT/whatever, but you're doomed if you want to build a company around those licenses.

Elastic made it by being quick to the jump. Others have followed. The only really successful model that's different has got to be Kong and RHEL and they've both been around a while. Kong's adoption is troubled because once you get successful, using their OSS thing is better than the enterprise because their pricing tiers go up. But they seem to have good enterprise sales team. Don't know about RHEL.

But if I were starting a company around this stuff, I'd be very careful about having core tech be true OSS. Source-available yeah, but true OSS is too risky.

Saw a presentation by them at this week's Open Source Summit. Seems like a lot of the major contributors to Redis have moved over to this project. And it seems like AWS is a major supporter of it. I suspect their Elasticache Redis will soon be Elasticache Valkey.

"Rapidly", so most people don't even know the story about Redis changes and I would say 99.99 never heard about Valkey.

Redis holds such a special place in my heart. It was the definition of awesome, open-source software. It always felt like Redis was THE definition of open source. The fact that the license has changed is heart-breaking.

I think the right way to frame this situation is how Corey Quinn did in the quote at the end of the article. Redis Labs is the party that forked Redis when they changed the license. Redis Labs may own the name, but the community maintainers are carrying on the original project, just under a new name.

Hopefully this will help resume work on a better High Availability code. Where one could have a cluster of 3 ValLey servers, with a superior HA protocol.

> At the time of the fork, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope didn’t seem too worried.

I have the feeling that CEOs are mostly stupid people.

LOL, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope. Man I despise that guy. After successfully navigating the Cisco Contact Center, UC and WebEx business into oblivion, he ends up at Five9 architecting the crash and burn Zoom acquisition that failed 'successfully', and now he pops up at Redis.

Run away screaming as fast as you can.

Good. I hope Redis Labs dies a slow death for stealing the project from the community.

Comments generally covering the situation well.

The one thing I take as a bit of a potential bitter irony is that if Redis had had the level of support & contributions ValKey has, Redis Labs might have been able to keep doing what they were doing?

Seemingly a bunch of companies are happy to start paying for open source, when weeks ago many were passive consumers.

This article is just propaganda, as many others from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

[dead]

[flagged]

I was literally waiting for a primary fork to emerge. Bye Felicia (Redis)

Is there any reason I don’t just stick with redis 7.2.4 instead of trusting redict/valkey to not inject some backdoor trash? I can avoid the corporate pivot and the random fork at the same time.