The Downfall of Redis

The beloved long-time open-source project Redis recently changed its license to not be Open Source anymore. But this is just the result of a long history of events involving the Redis founder, community, and a lot of VC money. This is the story of Redis's downfall.

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The in-memory database was originally developed as an database alternative to the popular database MySQL by Salvatore Sanfilippo better known as Antirez. The database gained popularity in the programming community and soon attracted startups like Instagram, Github and Twitter who used Redis in their very early years already. To this day Redis is an important part of modern software architecture and loved by web developers all around the world. And although the project gained support from AWS and Alibaba, in the end it was not enough. The company behind Redis, who did not invent Redis, restricted the open source project with its new license terms. The SSPL and Redis Source Available License.

[bufferhead_]

Keep the comments on-topic.

If you do not like any production-related aspects of the video, there are plenty of other videos on this platform that you can watch instead.

[AndersonPEM]

KeyDB: brace yourselves! The developers are about to find out we made a fork with multithreading that is actually faster than Redis itself!

[petersilva]

bring new meaning to: "stick a fork in it, it's done."

[waralo]

Yeah, let's fork it. It's an open source project, not restriced initially.

[Beryesa.]

Dragonfly is also not open source*** 10:03

[AutisticMorty]

I mean, it takes less than 10 minutes to swap redis for another cache.

[PaulSpades]

Be careful. With major forks like this, backdoors can be very easily added. Amazon and Microsoft already made sure to put a few in for their hosted services, but... Getting them implemented in opensource projects is more tricky, unless a great opportunity like this one comes along.

[SilverFolfy]

Time and time again it shows that shareholders of public companies will destroy everything in the name of short-term profits. RIP
I'll look out for a fork or an alternative now.

[telotawa]

another death on the list of "don't sell your stuff or it will be destroyed"
RIP centos

[joehopfield]

In court, words mean what the most expensive law firm wants them to mean. Ambiguous language just makes that a little easier for the high-end sheisters.

[omgnowairly]

Only took a few hours to replace from our stack and we got useful features.

[brickmastertube]

And that's why you should start your projects with the GPL license, which is designed to make this exact situation impossible.

[alvaromoe]

I find the content very interesting but the fact that you read your script with the same melody over and over again is very tiring for me. I would suggest you read it in a more natural way. I was not able to finish the video, the monotone it's taxating for me. I hope you take this in the way I intend it, as constructive criticism. I think you have good content but the artificial way it's delivered may be hindering the growth of your channel. Thank you! :)

[ivolol]

To note there isn't any legal certainty they can even do the relicense without being sued by previous contributors for breach of the BSD license and copyright or having to remove all code contributed by third parties which haven't agreed to the change. Imagine in the abstract: no "license" would even be worth the imaginary paper it's written on, if any user was legally able to just wipe its characters away from the code at any time before overwriting some 'preferred' one on top; and this is what Redis has just done. To whit this is why a lot of other corporate OSS projects require CLAs before committing code, so that they can pull a license change with no legal repercussions.

[yonadavbarilan]

I think this video is missing the point, AWS gave the finger to redis and destroyed their business. They had to change the license... its big companies like amazon that are destroying open source and not small open source companies that rely on donations to get by

[JSiuDev]

Wait, if the redis repo accepted pull requests that were under BSD license, how can they remove them?

[shadytv]

The silver lining in all of this is KeyDB is in fact much better and will be backed by the Valkey project the Linux foundation is spinning up. Redis is legacy now.

[buleini]

9:43 Cash is not cache, but I guess some Trollope thought otherwise

[tomydurazno]

AWS fork of Redis is Memory DB, ElasticSearch fork is OpenSearch

[jplflyer]

Ten years from now. "What's Redis?" No one is going to remember them.