Redis, the popular in-memory data store, is moving away from the BSD license with three open source clauses. Instead, in a move clearly aimed at preventing major cloud providers from offering free alternatives to Redis hosting services, Redis will now be dual-licensed under Redis source license available (RSALv2) and server-side public license (SSPLv1). Under this new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis will have to enter into a commercial agreement with Redis. The first company to do this is Microsoft.
Additionally, Redis announced today that it has acquired a storage engine Speedb (pronounced “speedy-bee”) to move it across memory space. More on that in a bit.
Redis license changes
In some ways, the licensing move is no surprise. We’ve seen other open source companies like MongoDB, Elastic, and Confluent make similar moves. Even Redis – when it was still Redis Labs – underwent a series of changes in 2018 and 2019 that changed the way it licensed its Redis Modules. That’s when the company introduced the first version of the Redis Available Source License.
“We’ve changed for the same reasons, I think, that everything that’s come before us has changed, which is protecting our investment that we’re making in open source,” said Redis CEO Rowan Trollope, who joined the company a little while ago from a year ago. my. “Especially with Speedb, this is a great investment for us as a startup. If we put it out there and the cloud service providers are able to take it and send it quickly to their customers — essentially without paying anything — that’s problematic for us, as you can imagine.”
The company is well aware of how this can be perceived by the open source community. Redis Trollope, who joined the company just a year ago, told me he notified several customers about this change and encountered zero controversy. He also knows that these new licenses mean that Redis will not be considered open source, at least according to the definition of the Open Source Institute. But he also emphasized that Redis plans to continue to work openly and allow any company to develop the open source version of Redis.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon sponsored a fork,” he added. “Microsoft has already licensed Redis. Our doors are open for business for both Google and Amazon to license the software. It’s not that they can’t continue to ship Redis, they just have to have a commercial agreement with us.”
With this license change, the company is now also consolidating Redis Stack and Redis Community Edition into a single distribution. The Redis Stack was released in 2022 as a cutting-edge distribution that combines some of the most popular modules, a visualization tool, and a client SDK. Because of the BSD license, Redis couldn’t put its latest innovations into Redis Core, meaning it lacked features like search and query, for example. This move, Trollope argued, will remove complexity for users who previously had to download multiple pieces to get the most out of Redis.
Speedb acquisition
In addition to the licensing change, the company also announced today that it has acquired Speedb.
At its core, Speedb is a RocksDB-compatible key-value storage engine, which might seem like an odd acquisition for the Redis in-memory datastore. For the longest time, after all, Redis was all-in on in-memory storage. Using RAM was the only way to reach the performance levels the team was looking for at the time. Spinning hard drives just weren’t fast enough. But today, with NVMe drives and their high transfer rates, there is a middle ground that combines fast drives with in-memory storage as something akin to a very large cache.
Data volumes are growing, RAM is expensive, and modern SSDs are comparably cheap. Meanwhile, businesses are trying to rein in spending right now, so the new option enables new use cases — including artificial intelligence — that would otherwise be out of reach for many companies.
Another interesting move is that, over the last year or so, Redis has quietly acquired many of its language-specific client libraries open source. These libraries will remain open source, Trollope stressed. He noted that this will also remove some confusion for developers and allow Redis to take a more active hand in guiding the development of these tools.
Trollope noted that we may see additional acquisitions from Redis in the future. “There are a lot of data companies out there that haven’t hit escape velocity,” he said. “Redis and Databricks, I think, are the two biggest ones that are kind of in the pre-IPO space. But there are dozens of smaller one-off companies. I think there will probably be a lot of consolidation in the industry. I won’t comment on our specific plans, but there are many opportunities [acquisitions].”
In the face of the recent recession, Redis was on a clear path to an IPO. Trollope reiterated that the company is still ready to launch once the IPO window reopens (perhaps with Databricks leading the way).
As for Speedb’s immediate future, Trollope told me that Redis won’t be in the business of selling a storage engine for much longer, but for now, the company will continue to support Speedb customers.
