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Redis 8 has recently hit general availability, switching to the AGPLv3 license. A year after leaving its open source roots to challenge cloud service providers and following the birth of Valkey, Redis has rehired its creator and moved back to an open source license.

Initially released under the more permissive BSD license, Redis switched to the more restrictive and not open source SSPLv1 license in March 2024, sparking concerns in the community and triggering the successful Valkey fork. Just over a year later, the project’s direction has changed again, and Redis 8.0 is once more open source software, this time under the terms of the OSI-approved AGPLv3 license.

According to Redis’ announcement, the new major release delivers several performance improvements, including up to 87% faster commands, up to 2× higher throughput in operations per second, and up to 18% faster replication. It also introduces the beta of Vector Sets, which is discussed separately on InfoQ. Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka ‘antirez’), the creator of Redis, explains:

Five months ago, I rejoined Redis and quickly started to talk with my colleagues about a possible switch to the AGPL license, only to discover that there was already an ongoing discussion, a very old one, too. (…) Writing open source software is too rooted in me: I rarely wrote anything else in my career. I’m too old to start now.

A year ago, the more restrictive license triggered different forks of Redis, including the very successful and CNCF-backed Valkey that gained immediate support from many providers, including AWS and Google Cloud. AWS has launched ElastiCache for Valkey and MemoryDB for Valkey at significant discounts compared to their ElastiCache for Redis version offering.

While noting that Valkey is currently outperforming Redis 8.0 in real-world benchmarks, Khawaja Shams, CEO and co-founder of Momento, welcomes Sanfilippo’s return to Redis and writes:

I am genuinely excited about his return because it is already impactful. He’s following through on his promise of contributing new features and performance optimizations to Redis. More profoundly, Redis 8.0 has been open-sourced again.

While many predict that developers using Valkey will not switch back to Redis, they also acknowledge that Valkey will face tougher competition. Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and open source advocate, highlights one of the advantages of Redis:

While a lot has been said about Redis going back to opensource with AGPLv3 License, I think it has been lost it is not same Redis which has been available under BSD license couple of years ago – number of extensions, such as RedisJSON which has not been Open Source since 2018 are now included with Redis under same AGPLv3 license. This looks like an important part of the response against Valkey, which does not have all the same features, as only the “core” Redis BSD code was forked

The article “Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license” confirms that, aside from the new data type (vector sets), the open source project now integrates various Redis Stack technologies, including JSON, Time Series, probabilistic data types, and the Redis Query Engine into core Redis 8 under AGPL.

The new major release and licensing change have sparked popular threads on Reddit, with many practitioners suggesting it’s too late and calling it a sign of a previous bad decision. Some developers believe the project’s greatest asset remains its creator, while Philippe Ombredanne, lead maintainer of AboutCode, takes a more pessimistic view of the future:

Users see through these shenanigans. For Redis, the damage to their user base is likely already done, irreparable and the shattered trust never to be regained.

Redis is not the first project to switch back from SSPLv1 to AGPL following a successful fork and a loss of community support and trust. A year ago, Shay Banon, founder and CEO of Elastic, announced a similar change for Elasticsearch and Kibana, as reported on InfoQ.