On 20 March 2024, Redis — the company stewarding the enormously popular in-memory data store of the same name — announced that it was moving the project away from its permissive open-source BSD license to a dual source-available model under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and the Server Side Public License (SSPL). Eight days later, on 28 March, a fork named Valkey was launched under the Linux Foundation, backed by major cloud providers and a substantial roster of contributors, and continuing development from the last BSD-licensed Redis release. If that sequence sounds familiar, it should. We watched almost the identical pattern play out with the HashiCorp Terraform relicense and the OpenTofu fork just months earlier. A playbook has emerged, and Redis-to-Valkey is the clearest demonstration of it yet.

What Redis Changed

For its entire history as a widely adopted project, Redis was distributed under the three-clause BSD license — a permissive open-source license that allowed essentially unrestricted use, including the use that motivated the change: cloud providers offering managed Redis services as commercial products.

The new licensing replaces the BSD license with a choice between the RSALv2 and the SSPL. Neither is an open-source license under the Open Source Initiative’s definition. Both are “source-available”: the source code remains visible and most uses remain permitted, but a restriction targets the specific case of offering the software as a managed commercial service in competition with Redis’s own offerings. The SSPL in particular — originally devised by MongoDB for a similar purpose — imposes far-reaching conditions on anyone offering the software as a service.

Redis’s stated rationale was the now-standard one for such moves: large cloud providers were building substantial managed-service businesses on top of Redis without contributing commensurately to its development, and the company argued it needed to capture more of that value to fund continued work on the project. The ordinary user who runs Redis to support their own application is, as with the Terraform change, largely unaffected in practice. The controversy, again, is about precedent, ambiguity, and the loss of the open-source guarantee.

The Fork Playbook

What makes the Redis episode instructive is how precisely it follows the template that the open-infrastructure community has now run more than once. The sequence has become recognizable enough to describe as a playbook:

  1. A commercially stewarded open-source project relicenses to a source-available model, citing cloud-provider free-riding as justification.
  2. The community objects, not primarily because day-to-day use is restricted, but because the open-source guarantee — the assurance that the software cannot be unilaterally relicensed or withdrawn — has been removed.
  3. A fork emerges quickly, starting from the last open-licensed release.
  4. The fork is placed under a neutral foundation, most often the Linux Foundation, rather than under any single company’s control.
  5. Cloud providers and other commercial users back the fork, supplying the engineering resources and adoption that determine whether it survives.

Valkey hit every step, and faster than its predecessors. The fork appeared within days of the relicense, immediately took foundation governance, and arrived with the backing of major cloud providers — the very entities the relicense was aimed at — who have a direct interest in an openly licensed continuation they can build managed services on without the new restrictions.

Why Foundation Governance Is the Crux

The decisive feature of the playbook is the move to neutral foundation governance, and it is worth being explicit about why. The grievance that triggers these forks is not, fundamentally, about any particular license clause. It is about control: a single commercial entity demonstrated that it could change the terms under which a widely depended-on piece of infrastructure is available, and did so unilaterally.

A fork maintained by another single company would not solve that problem — it would merely relocate the same control risk to a different owner. A fork governed by a neutral foundation, with a contributor base spread across competing commercial interests and a governance model that no single party controls, offers a structural guarantee: the project cannot be relicensed, captured, or discontinued by any one actor, because authority is distributed. That structural guarantee is exactly what the community lost in the relicense, and exactly what the foundation model is designed to restore. The repetition of this pattern across Terraform/OpenTofu and now Redis/Valkey is the community converging on foundation governance as the durable answer to relicensing risk.

What This Means for Users

For organizations running Redis, the immediate practical impact is limited — ordinary self-hosted use continues under the new licenses without difficulty — but the strategic implications are worth weighing.

  • Assess your actual exposure. Most users are unaffected by the source-available restrictions, which target commercial managed-service offerings. Organizations that provide Redis-based services to third parties should review the RSALv2 and SSPL terms with counsel.
  • Watch Valkey’s trajectory. A fork’s viability depends on sustained contribution, a credible roadmap, and adoption. Valkey’s Linux Foundation backing and cloud-provider support are strong early signals, and the cloud providers’ direct incentive to maintain an openly licensed continuation makes its prospects look more secure than a community-only fork would. Watch the release cadence and managed-service adoption over the coming months.
  • Treat protocol compatibility as a hedge. For now, Valkey maintains compatibility with the Redis protocol and data model, which means clients and tooling are largely shared. That compatibility is itself a portability hedge worth preserving in architectural choices.
  • Generalize the lesson. The recurrence of this pattern is a signal to weigh the governance of infrastructure dependencies, not just their features and performance. A project under neutral foundation governance carries a different — and lower — relicensing risk than one controlled by a single commercial steward, and that difference is now demonstrably material.

The Redis-to-Valkey episode confirms that the relicense-and-fork dynamic of the past year was not a one-off. It is becoming the standard sequence of events when a commercially stewarded open-source project moves to source-available terms — and the standard outcome is a foundation-governed fork that the community, including the commercial users the relicense targeted, rallies behind. Whether that is healthy for open source overall is a longer debate. What is clear is that the community has learned the playbook, and is now running it with increasing speed and confidence.

Further Reading

  • Open Source Initiative — Licenses — the reference for which licenses qualify as open source, distinguishing them from source-available licenses like the SSPL and RSAL.
  • Linux Foundation — the neutral-governance foundation under which Valkey and other forked infrastructure projects are stewarded.

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