Redis is No Longer Open Source. Is Valkey the Successor? - OpenObservability Talks S5E01

Jun 27, 2024

Redis was relicensed, leading to Valkey fork under Linux Foundation. Valkey gained momentum with major industry support. Kyle Davis, Senior Dev Advocate at AWS, discussed Valkey's foundation and community building. Valkey's compatibility, roadmap, and Contributor Summit were highlighted. Valkey aims to maintain Redis compatibility and support the open-source community.

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ANECDOTE

Kyle's Redis Journey

Kyle Davis's Redis journey began around 2012 while seeking an in-memory database solution.
This led him to Redis, blogging, and eventually a job at Redis Labs.

INSIGHT

Redis Relicensing

Redis was relicensed from BSD 3-clause to RSAL v2 and SSPL in March 2024.
This move, initiated by Redis Labs (now Redis Inc.), shifted Redis from open-source to source-available.

INSIGHT

Valkey's Strengths

Valkey is a strong contender among Redis forks due to its maintainers' deep Redis knowledge.
The Linux Foundation's governance and industry giants' backing further strengthen its position.

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Redis is no longer open source. Just a few months ago, in March 2024, the project was relicensed, leaving its vast community confused. But the community did not give up, and started work to fork Redis to keep it open.

In this episode, we delve into the Valkey project, a prominent fork of Redis, established under the Linux Foundation, which brought together important figures from the Redis community, as well as leading industry giants including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and others. Valkey has rapidly gained momentum and just reached General Availability (GA).

Join us as we explore the motivations behind Valkey's creation, hear first-hand stories on its foundation and journey to GA, and learn of its Redis compatibility, roadmap and implications for the open-source community.

Valkey's first Contributor Summit is taking place June 5-6 in Seattle and we will bring you announcements and updates hot off the summit. Our guest is Kyle Davis, the Senior Developer Advocate on the Valkey project, and a past contributor for Redis.

Kyle currently works at AWS, a founding member of Valkey, and has a long history with open source and with forks. He was a founding contributor to the OpenSearch project, which started as a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana after the latter's relicensing off OSS. Most recently Kyle worked to build a community around Bottlerocket OSS project.

The episode was live-streamed on 10 June 2024 and the video is available at youtube.com/live/HQ7TAdQpxu4

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Show Notes:

01:12 - Episode intro, Kyle Davis’ Redis background

05:43 - Redis relicensing off open source

10:10 - Valkey vs. other Redis open source forks

16:50 - drop-in replacement of Redis

19:35 - Redis user experience during the relicensing

28:50 - From fork to GA in less than a month

34:00 - Valkey roadmap and Contributor Summit updates

40:00 - Valkey’s Technical Steering Committee and leadership