Redis is open source again

Valkey vs Redis: Adoption and Direction

• Many expect Valkey to remain strong despite Redis’ AGPL move: major clouds (AWS, GCP, Heroku, Aiven) and several distros have already switched, often transparently to users.
• Some report big production migrations to Valkey (for cost, performance, memory) and don’t plan to return; others never switched from Redis because the SSPL change didn’t affect their use.
• There’s sharp disagreement on Valkey usage: one side claims “statistically nobody” uses it; others cite AWS customer stories, automatic provider migrations, distro defaults, and Shodan counts showing Redis still dominates but Valkey is growing from a small base.
• Technically, Valkey is seen as an active fork with performance work, new hash table, RDMA, and multi-threading; some Redis 8 features reportedly came from Valkey code.

Licensing: AGPL vs SSPL vs BSD

• SSPL is widely viewed in the thread as non–open source and effectively impossible for cloud providers to comply with.
• AGPL is praised by some as genuinely free software and a way to close the SaaS “loophole,” and criticized by others as “cancer” or too vague for corporate legal teams.
• Several note many companies blanket‑ban AGPL, which may push conservative orgs toward Valkey’s BSD license or commercial Redis licenses.
• A recurring theme: BSD/MIT enabled the “rug pull”; some argue copyleft plus no CLA (Linux-style) is the only way to make relicensing hard.

Trust, CLAs, and “Rug Pull” Memory

• Many say the original license change permanently damaged trust; returning with AGPL is “better, but too late” and doesn’t prevent another change because Redis still uses a CLA.
• Others counter that old BSD versions and forks (Valkey, Redict, etc.) remain, so the ecosystem can always fork again if needed.
• There’s debate over whether contributors should have expected relicensing from a permissive + CLA setup, and whether outrage is better aimed at hyperscalers or at companies like Redis/Elastic.

Cloud Providers and Open Source Business Models

• Strong tension around hyperscalers: some see them as “strip‑mining” OSS while contributing little; others point to substantial past Redis contributions from Tencent, AWS, Alibaba, etc.
• Several outline the recurring pattern: OSS DB → big adoption → cloud-hosted revenue captured by clouds → source-available license → community forks.
• Proposed answers include AGPL, “fair source” / anti-hyperscaler clauses, or starting with non‑OSI licenses from day one; others insist this stops being FOSS and should not be called “open source.”

Distros, Ecosystem, and Technical Features

• Major distros replacing redis with Valkey without changing the command name sparked debate: some welcome a drop‑in FLOSS replacement; others see it as breaking expectations and tooling.
• Redis advocates emphasize Redis 8–era features not (yet) in Valkey—vector sets, new probabilistic data structures, hash-field expiries—and argue future differentiation will be about design and innovation more than license.
• Overall sentiment: technically, both Redis and Valkey are strong; strategically, many new projects now default to Valkey, while long‑time Redis users are split between “it never affected us” and “we’ve moved and won’t go back.”