Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) started Redis and developed it by himself from 2009 to 2015, gaining massive popularity and building a large community in the process. It was FOSS the entire time.
A separate VC-backed company called Garantia Data used to make money by offering a hosted version of Redis. That company changed its name to Redis Labs in 2014 (and eventually just Redis), likely themselves violating antirez's Redis trademark at the time.
They then hired antirez in 2015 and started officially sponsoring the project.
From there began a slow transformation of Redis from a community run FOSS project to a proprietary locked down service. The company also managed to acquire full rights of the Redis trademark and project stewardship from antirez after hiring him and then finally kicked him out in 2020.
How did that happen? He must have given/sold it to them, right? I remember him making an announcement that he was done with Redis and stepping away from involvement.
Created a PR to add this into the context.
Feel free to comment on it.
Also, calling other bystanders to add other missing pieces to the history.
So yes, antirez started it. He owned the trademark and gave it off to redis inc. and was compensated for it. I am not seeing why this has to be controversial.
I don't like what redis is doing. But they're within legal rights.
But this is a takeover that is slowly draining the value from the community and directing it to private pockets. E.g. Redis is now source-available.
There are still compatible alternatives: https://valkey.io/ (C, a direct Redis fork) or https://keydb.dev/ (C++, an evolved Redis fork), both BSD-licensed.
I wish RethinkDB was more alive :-\
I think the best option against this action by Redis Inc is to move to valkey and use it to incorporate features that Redis Inc considers "enterprise licensed features". If there are big players in valkey, there should be a move to setup a foundation for it - so that it doesn't get taken in to be source available again.
In theory Redis could have had a foundation. It didn't. Instead the project owner opted to sell it to a corporation. This doesn't happen by accident.
What indeed has a foundation is Valkey[1]. It's backed by the likes of AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.
[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-launc...
I think you're fooling yourself into believing that Redis was ever a community-owned project.
The truth of the matter is that the guy who developed Redis ended up selling Redis to a corporation. Since then he bailed out, and the corporation that owns Redis is now going through great lengths to monetize it.
The faster you forget about Redis and switch to alternatives, the better you'd be.
My rule of thumb now is that I now consider any project that has a pricing page OR requires copyright assignment/CLA to a for-profit company to be effectively proprietary and just using open source as a marketing technique. That doesn't mean I won't touch it, but like with proprietary software, I'll evaluate it against the risk that the price will probably be jacked up in the future.
QT has contracts with KDE around the open source version which gives KDE peace of mind. I use QT in a commercial product - we have some useful contract terms with QT that are not public and I can't talk about them.