they don't have to pay. they offer a Redis-compatible service. whatever it is, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares. (sure, in practice they just forked it. but it was not AGPL-like when the fork happened, so ... c'est la vie)
Microsoft announced on the same day as the Redis license change that Azure's managed Redis offering will continue to run against the latest releases: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/redis-license-update-...
Meaning that Microsoft is "paying to play" with Redis Ltd... while I have not seen any announcements from AWS or GCP.
I do wonder if Microsoft kicked this all off by telling Redis Ltd that they were willing to pay beforehand.
Yes, this seems likely since there is almost no way that an announcement from Microsoft would happen so quickly. There were months of back and forth of licensing meetings prior to this with Redis Labs and Microsoft.
Microsoft would never just announce something like this on a whim.
I feel like there’s an argument that these kind of licensing terms are almost beneficial to ‘big cloud’ because the cost/effort of all of these arrangements might dissuade smaller companies from trying to compete in the hosting and managed-services business.