The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change. Usually you want rebrands to be loud and well known and license changes to be silent and ignored until it's too late and people have adopted the new license. In this case, they loudly announced that they're making an unpopular change and it gave everyone the will to switch.
I’m amazed that they thought that they could do this and get away with it. Redis is almost a foundational tool for modern caching architectures. Every company I’ve ever worked at used redis like candy to cache stuff that wasn’t important enough for the reliable but expensive and slow data stores. Additionally, the main features 99% of people want and need have been in redis for a decade. Even a fork that only fixed security bugs will have done better than Redis Labs after this debacle. It’s like if the author of nano, the text editor, would try this license change. I suspect this will be much like the {open/libre}office changeover. Maybe soon ‘apt get redis’ and others will be aliased to Valkey.
I think that the uproar about license changes are less about actual license impact and more about the impact to the community and social framework that Redis has fostered as a project previously. People are switching because at this point they think they can’t trust Redis Labs not to do more dumb stuff later. Combine that with my previous assertion that redis is very important software at most companies, and the calculus leans in favor of using the fork because any further major license changes might necessitate it anyways, and it’s easier to do now than under the gun. It’s important to not do stuff that loses trust when you’re a company founded on a community.
Yeah, I'm willing to trust the Linux Foundation won't pull a stunt like this but I have zero faith that in 5 years there won't be another announcement that "<other users of Redis we think have money> are no longer allowed to use it without paying."
> The biggest mistake Redis Labs made was doing a rebrand at the exact same time as a license change.
I honestly don't think that was the issue. The issue, unlike Elastic vs Amazon is, this change affects a lot of big players like Google, Amazon, and Oracle.
