The Downfall of Redis

What if I told you that Redis was not actually created by Redis? If you were confused right now, you are in for a ride. A ride that ended in the very recent events of Redis changing their license to actually not be open source anymore, and scamming their community, contributors and even the founder of Redis himself. It all started in 2007, when Salvatore Sanfilippo, better known as AntiRez on the internet, was building a tool called LLOOGG. It was a very early competitor to Google Analytics. The

main selling point of LLOOGG was their real time visitor tracking feature, which Google Analytics did not support until years later. Because of the massive amounts of data written to the database, they ran into performance issues using MySQL. Antirez believed that using memory instead of the hard drive to store the data, like MySQL does, would solve the problem and programmed their first prototype of what we will later know as Redis. In 2009 Antirez published the Redis core on GitHub. To say it

with his own words, at this point the server may not have been perfectly stable, but soon it will be an essential part of many web applications and massively impact how we design modern software architecture to this day. The first Hacker News posting of Redis did not get much attention at all, only 23 upvotes and a few comments. But Antirez continued to work on Redis. And soon, Redis started to spread in the Ruby community and attracted startups who will later turn out to be unicorns. Instagram

was entirely built on Redis in its early years. GitHub used it to build a job queuing system and Twitter improved their timeline page performance using Redis. After gaining more popularity, VMware started to sponsor Redis and hired Antirez to continue his work on the in memory database. In 2013, he got sponsored by the VMware spinoff Pivotal Software. In the same time period around 2011, companies started to offer consulting services for Redis. One of them was guarantee data, which will play an

essential role in this entire story. In 2014, Garantia Data tried to re to where is db, but after the pushback of Antirez. They reverted the rebranding and rebranded to RedisLabs instead, which is still very confusing. Around this time, RedisLabs also transitioned away from offering consulting services and focused on providing hosted Redis services on top of AWS instead. In 2015, a common investor of Pivotal Software and RedisLabs suggested moving AntiRest to RedisLabs. Which employed him short

ly after that and sponsored Redis from this point on. Investors play a crucial role in Redis Labs, because that company is stacked, stacked up with VC money. They raised over 347 million US dollars in 7 rounds from Goldman Sachs, the Silicon Valley bank and more. To set this into perspective, if we wanted to just fund the open source project with, let's say 5 developers, each a salary of 400, 000 a year, this would come to 26m over the span of 13 years. Less than a tenth of the funding of Redis

Labs. After AntiRest transferred over the Redis IP and trademarks to Redis Labs, He left the project in 2020. In a blog post he explained the reasons for stepping back. He never wanted to be a software maintainer and used code to express himself. But one quote inside of his goodbye blog post hits quite a lot harder today. I believe I'm not just leaving Redis in the hands of a community of expert programmers, but also in the hands of people who care about the legacy of the community spirit of Red

is. In their goodbye blog post, Redis Labs stated that the core of the Redis project will remain under the 3Class BSD license, as it has always been, but this will only hold true for a few more years. Redis was now led by a team of 5 people, 3 of them are from Redis Labs, one of them from Alibaba and one from AWS. One year later, Redis Labs officially rebranded to just Redis. which clearly is what they wanted all along. Redis the company was still developing hosted Redis services on top of popul

ar cloud providers, essentially competing with AWS Elastic Cache. And we'll find out soon that they were probably not very successful in doing so, or at least not successful enough. While the Redis core team remained small, Redis the company has grown to over 700 employees today. I could not even make up roles for all of those people if I wanted to but browsing through the Wayback Machine snapshots of the Redis website makes me think quite a few of them were busy updating the web design a concer

ning amount of time. And on March the 20th, 2024, the day arrived where VC Money defeated Open Source in the company. Redis announced in a blog post that they will move away from the 3 class BSD license to a dual licensing model, which basically means that they offer it under two different licenses. you can choose which is the lesser evil. While the 3 Class BSD License is one of the approved ones by the open source initiative the new licenses are not which they acknowledged in the announcement.

Therefore Redis will no longer be called open source. Before I continue, I have to say, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice in any way. The new licenses are called Server Side Public License and Redis Source Available License 2.0. The SSPL was originally created for MongoDB and requires everyone who uses SSPL license software as part of a service to release the source for the entirety of the service. Including without limitations All management software, user interfaces, application p

rogram interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software, and hosting software. All such that a user can run an instance of the service using the service source code you made available. Well, this sounds like a nightmare especially if you have some sort of proprietary licensed software in your stack, that you simply cannot open source for legal reasons. After the SSPL was submitted to the Open Source Initiative as they wanted to become an approved open sourc

e license, the Open Source Initiative made a hit piece calling it a Fox Pen Source License because it restricts who can use it. The other license in question is the Redis Source Available License 2.0. This license does not require you to publish the source code, but it restricts who can use it directly. In the license terms it says, You may not make the functionality of the software or a modified version available to third parties as a service, or distribute the version or a modified version in

a manner that makes the functionality of the software available to third parties. Now, again, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but this sounds like a very vague definition to me. And when we look at the FAQs for Redis modules, which were already relicensed to the same licenses before. They state multiple times that the change should not affect you. But if not even Redis themselves can tell me with certainty, who can? No matter where exactly the limits are, it is very clear that un

der none of the new licenses cloud providers like AWS will be able to provide hosted Redis services without paying a fee. Which was obviously the goal. But it is also important to note something else. If Redis would have had this license from the very beginning, Garantia Data would have never been able to offer their services in the first place without open sourcing their entire infrastructure. They destroyed the very thing that made their company exist in the first place. With the license chang

e, the AWS employee Madeleine Olsen, who worked on the project for four years, announced that she will no longer be able to work on the project and that there was a real price to pay with losing such a beloved open source project. But not only some of the main contributors are unhappy with the change. The pull request with the license change is flooded with unhappy contributors and users of Redis. Again, this is not legal advice, but Redis did just relicense code that was contributed under a com

pletely different license, and they removed all BSD notices which are required by the 3 clause BSD license. I cannot imagine that is what Antirez meant when he was talking about caring about the legacy of the community spirit of Redis. With the legal uncertainty people will look for alternatives and it is safe to say that they will find them. There is already KeyDB, which is a drop in replacement for Redis, and just a few days before Redis announced the license change, Microsoft released Garnet,

a cash store that can be used with existing Redis clients. Both of them are open source. And it would really come as a surprise if AWS won't jump in as well and develop their own Redis Fork as well, as they did with OpenSearch when Elasticsearch changed their license. It is really a no brainer for anyone starting a new project to use any of the alternatives, and for the most part you can probably replace them in your existing project as well, without any problems. So when the license change int

roduces so many more challenges and legal uncertainties, driving away the community from Redis, Why on earth would they do it anyways? They have to have known the consequences of their actions. We've seen those exact scenarios play out before. In the end it is hard to see how this is not a big cash grab by a massively VC funded company, where the investors finally wanted to see a return on investment. And there's even more proof for that. Just one year before the relicensing, the co-founder Ofer

Bengal stepped down as a CEO. and was replaced by Rowan Trollope, who is also the person that published the license change announcement on their blog. Rowan Trollope was not involved with Redis before whatsoever, he was previously the CEO of a call center provider called Five9, and was probably put in this position by investors to finally make the company profitable. Redis the company will probably make a lot of money in the coming months and maybe even years from companies that use Redis deepl

y integrated into their stack or as a hosted service, but This comes at a cost. The cost of losing such a beloved open source project. There is a debate to be had about the funding of open source projects, but this is not about funding. AWS and Alibaba showed that they are willing to contribute to this project, by paying people to work on Redis. While there are way too many of them, this is not a story about failed open source funding. This is a story about a company that failed to outcompete th

e competition, was pressured by investors to deliver, and did so by destroying it for everyone else. As of the moment I'm recording this video, neither Antirez nor the two other main contributors employed by Redis the company have spoken up about the license change. So we do not really know what happened behind the scenes or what their actual opinion about all of this is, but it is hard to see how they are not feeling wronged by all of what happened. If you want to find out more about the histor

y of Antirez and Redis I highly recommend you to check out his blog post which I linked in the description down below. If you want to see what Antirez is up to now and better understand how he views the world, you should take a look at his blog where he regularly posts updates on his projects. Since leaving Redis, he also wrote a science fiction book about Artificial Intelligence. And also, one more special shoutout to this blog post by momento, who I might have stolen some memes from. All the s

ources for this video are linked in the description down below. Redis might slowly disappear over the next few years, but the art of Antirez and its legacy will live on. See you in the next video.