Redis, a popular in-memory data store, is transitioning from an open source 3-clause BSD license. Instead, in a move clearly aimed at discouraging major cloud providers from offering free alternatives to Redis' own hosted service, Redis is using the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and server-side public You will be dual licensed under the license (SSPLv1). . Under this new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis will be required to enter into commercial agreements with Redis. The first company to do this was Microsoft.
Additionally, Redis today announced that it has acquired storage engine Speedb (pronounced “speed-bee”) to enable its storage engine to go beyond in-memory space. More on that later.
Redis license changes
In some ways, the licensing move is not surprising. We've seen other open source companies make similar moves, including MongoDB, Elastic, and Confluent. Even Redis (back when it was still Redis Labs) made a series of changes in 2018 and 2019 that changed the way Redis modules were licensed. This is when the company introduced the first version of his Redis Source Available License.
“We made the switch for the same reason. I think everything we used to did made the switch. It protects our investment in open source,” said Redis' CEO, who joined the company just a year ago. , said Rowan Trollope. myself. “Especially with Speedb, this is a big investment for us as a startup. If we deploy it and the cloud service provider picks it up right away and ships it to their customers basically without paying anything, it's a big investment for us as a startup. And then, as you can imagine, that's a problem for us.”
The company is fully aware of how this will be perceived by the open source community. Redis CEO Rowan Trollope, who only joined the company about a year ago, said he has explained the change to a significant number of customers and has not encountered any controversy. He is also well aware that these new licenses mean that Redis is no longer considered open source, at least according to the Open Source Institute's definition. But he also emphasized that Redis plans to continue its open source efforts and make an open source version of Redis available to any company.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon sponsored Fork,” he added. Microsoft already licenses Redis. The door is open to both Google and Amazon for software licensing. It's not that they can't continue shipping Redis, it's just that they need to make a commercial arrangement with us. ”
This licensing change led the company to combine Redis Stack and Redis Community Edition into one distribution. Redis Stack was released in 2022 as a cutting-edge distribution that combines the most popular modules, visualization tools, and client SDKs. Due to the BSD license, Redis has not been able to incorporate the latest innovations into Redis Core. This meant that features like search and queries were missing. This move, Trolllope claimed, eliminates complexity for users who previously had to download multiple parts to get the most out of Redis.
Get Speedb
In addition to the licensing changes, the company also announced today that it has acquired Speedb.
At its core, Speedb is a key-value storage engine that is compatible with RocksDB, which may seem like an odd acquisition for the in-memory data store Redis. At first, it may seem like a strange acquisition. After all, Redis has been fully committed to in-memory storage for a long time. Using RAM was the only way to reach the performance level the team was looking for at the time. The hard drive wasn't spinning fast enough. But today, with NVMe drives and their high transfer speeds, there is a middle ground that combines high-speed drives with in-memory storage that resembles a very large cache.
Although data volumes are increasing and RAM is expensive, modern solid state drives are relatively inexpensive. Meanwhile, as businesses are currently trying to rein in spending, this new option enables new use cases (including AI) that would otherwise be out of reach for many businesses.
Another interesting move is that Redis has quietly acquired a number of language-specific open source client libraries over the past year or so. Trollope emphasized that these libraries will remain open source. He said this also eliminates confusion for developers and allows Redis to be more proactive in developing these tools.
Trollope said there may be additional acquisitions from Redis in the future. “There are a lot of data companies that haven't achieved escape velocity,” he says. “I think Redis and Databricks are the two big companies in the pre-IPO trajectory. But there are also dozens of smaller, one-shot companies. I think there will probably be quite a bit of consolidation in the industry. I won't comment on the plans, but there are many opportunities. [acquisitions]”
Prior to the recent economic downturn, Redis was on a clear path to an IPO. Trollope reiterated that the company will still be ready when the IPO window opens again (perhaps he has Databricks leading the way).
As for Speedb's immediate future, Trollope said Redis doesn't intend to be in the business of selling storage engines for long, but will continue to support Speedb's customers for the time being.