If it's a desktop app, then you probably don't have serious enough load that you need the mainline version as opposed to the unofficial Win32 version. It's not like he's saying "If you run Redis on Windows I'll sue you," he's just saying, "I don't see enough benefit to it to accept it as part of the official Redis project, but I am 100% okay with other people working on it."

> I have difficulty interpreting the difference between running a native process, and spinning up a VM (local or remote), as a trivial difference.

Instead of running "redis.exe" (which you installed), you run "virtualbox redis.vdx". You could even have the inner redis use the outer disk with a little more work, running the internal vm read only. Configuration is slightly more complicated, as you have to both configure the inside redis and the outside virtualbox -- but it's all just a few short text files, and you only need to do that once.

You can produce a version that works offline. You can even bundle it inside your product (virtualbox and redis both being free). And you can do it today without antirez's help. Really!

EDIT: online -> offline; typo.

As I wrote, front-end software is a different matter. But if you want to create a desktop app, you probably just shouldn't use Redis - for sure this isn't what Redis was created for.