Redis, the popular in-memory data store, is moving away from the open source three-clause BSD license. Instead, in a move that clearly aims to prevent large cloud providers from offering free alternatives to Redis's own hosted services, Redis will now be dual-licensed under the Redis Source License Available (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Under this new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis will be required to enter into a commercial agreement with Redis. The first company to do so is Microsoft.
Additionally, Redis announced today that it has acquired the storage engine. Speedb (pronounced 'speedy-bee') to take you beyond memory space. More on that in a moment.
Redis license changes
In some ways, the decision to license is not a surprise. We've seen other open source companies like MongoDB, Elastic, and Confluent make similar moves. Even Redis, when it was still Redis Labs, went through 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 its Redis Source Available license.
“I think we changed for the same reasons, that everything that came before us has changed, which protects our investment that we make in open source,” said Redis CEO Rowan Trollope, who joined the company a little more than one year. me. “Especially with Speedb, this is a great investment for us as a startup. “If we put that out there and cloud service providers have the ability to quickly take it and send it to their customers, essentially without paying anything, that's problematic for us, as you can imagine.”
The company is well aware of how the open source community may perceive this. Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis, who joined the company a little over a year ago, told me that he informed quite a few customers about this change and did not encounter any controversy. He is also well aware 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 working openly and allow any company to deploy 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 both Google and Amazon to license the software. It's not that they can't continue shipping Redis, they just need 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. 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. Due to the BSD license, Redis was unable to include its latest innovations in Redis Core, meaning it was missing features like search and query, for example. This move, Trollope argued, will eliminate complexity for users who previously had to download multiple pieces to get the most out of Redis.
Acquiring Speedb
In addition to the license change, the company also announced today the acquisition of Speedb.
At its core, Speedb is a RocksDB-compatible key-value storage engine, which may seem like an odd acquisition for the Redis in-memory data store. At first, it may seem like a strange acquisition. After all, for a long time, Redis focused exclusively 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 simply weren't fast enough. But today, with NVMe drives and their high transfer rates, a middle ground can be found that combines fast drives with memory storage as something akin to a very large cache.
Data volumes are increasing, RAM is expensive, and modern solid state drives are comparatively cheap. Meanwhile, businesses are looking to control their spending right now, so having this new option enables new use cases (including artificial intelligence) that would otherwise be out of reach for many businesses.
Another interesting move is that over the last year, Redis has quietly acquired many of the language-specific open source client libraries. These libraries will remain open source, Trollope noted. He noted that this will also eliminate some confusion for developers and allow Redis to be more actively involved in directing the development of these tools.
Trollope noted that we may see additional Redis acquisitions in the future. “There are a lot of data companies that haven't reached escape velocity,” he said. “I think Redis and Databricks are the two biggest ones that are on the pre-IPO path. But there are dozens of smaller, more unique 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 a lot of opportunities for (acquisitions).”
Before the recent recession, Redis was on a clear path to an IPO. Trollope reiterated that the company is still ready to go once the IPO window opens again (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 long, but for now, the company will continue to support Speedb customers.
