A host of cloud industry players have pledged their support for an open source alternative to Redis since the company switched to an 'available source' licensing setup last month.
Redis surprised the open source community in late March following its decision to shift to a dual licensing approach that will see the company adopt a more restrictive software distribution model.
According to the proposals, Redis versions will be available under the RSALv2 (Redis Source Available License) and SSPLv1 (Server Side Public License) licenses in the future.
This shift to an “available source” approach marked a move away from the company's traditional setup, which allowed developers to freely use source code for commercial purposes.
Redis' move sparked criticism from open source developers and prompted calls for a new open source 'fork' (or alternative) to be available as soon as possible.
Last week, the Linux Foundation took a step forward on this front, announcing its intention to release 'Valkey', an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory data store.
The Linux Foundation said the decision to create an open source alternative was due to the widespread popularity and use of Redis since its creation in 2009.
Developers have used Redis' in-memory data storage capabilities for caching, data analysis, and as a higher-performance data storage alternative to backend databases for more than a decade, the foundation said.
“Developers ranked Redis as the sixth most used database in Stack Overflow's 2023 developer survey, and it was among the top three most admired,” according to a statement since the foundation..
“To continue improving this important technology and enable unrestricted distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source, high-performance key value store.”
Valkey will support Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSF platforms, the organization said in a blog post.
“In addition, the community will continue to work on its existing roadmap, including new features such as more reliable slot migration, dramatic scalability and stability improvements to the pooling system, multi-threaded performance improvements, triggers, new commands, support vector search and more.”
Cloud giants welcome open source alternative to Redis
Several major industry stakeholders have welcomed the Linux Foundation's move, including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc.
All have confirmed their support for Valkey and intend to make contributions that “support the long-term health and viability” of the project, according to the foundation.
Madelyn Olson, a former Redis maintainer, co-creator of Valkey and principal engineer at AWS, said the creation of Valkey will allow contributors to “pick up where they left off and continue contributing to a vibrant open source community.”
Going forward, Valkey will follow an open governance model, the creators said, and a technical leadership committee has been established to oversee the development of the Redis alternative.
Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), said keeping Valkey in the hands of the community will avoid abrupt licensing changes and potential future outages.
“Valkey is an open source successor created by long-time Redis contributors and maintainers. Fostering open collaboration that benefits everyone and not just a single organization is critical to building long-term sustainable open source communities,” he said.
“In addition, having this project in the hands of a foundation, rather than a single company, means that Valkey will be community-driven without surprise license changes that break trust and disrupt the level playing field in open source.”
Aniszczyk initially warned the community to exercise restraint following the Redis announcement last month. speaking to ITPro On the situation at KubeCon 2024 in Paris, he said that while the move was disappointing, an alternative would inevitably be available.
The Redis move marked the latest shift toward more restrictive licensing schemes in the open source space. In mid-2023, HashiCorp revealed plans to change its source code license to BSL (Business Source License), which prohibits commercial use.
MongoDB previously made its own changes, prompting a reaction similar to that seen during the move to HashiCorp.
