Battle of the Redis forks?
Redis abandoned open-source licensing for its free core product last week, throwing an established community of contributors into turmoil. (It is swapping the BSD for a more restrictive dual-license under the Redis Source Available License and MongoDB’s Server Side Public License.)
Within a day, the project had multiple new forks. Whether one can rally the troops around it – in the way that a Terraform community has largely gathered around OpenTofu after Hashicorp’s August 10, 2023 “poison pill” decision to impose a more restrictive licence – is an open question.
But the starting gun has been fired and AWS’s Madelyn Olson was one of the first out of the gate. Together with Alibaba Cloud’s Zhou Zhou and several other existing core Redis maintainers, on Friday she started a fork, saying: “We are all unhappy with the license change, and are looking to build a new truly open community to fill the void left by Redis…”
“We had a really exciting community roadmap before Redis changed the license. Clustering improvements, performance improvements, triggers, and so much more. We'll keep driving this forward,” Olson posted on X.
