After over four years away, Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo recently announced his return to Redis. In what has been a challenging year for the company behind the source-available in-memory NoSQL database, the announcement has sparked enthusiasm and stirred much discussion within the Redis community.
Better known to the open-source community as "antirez," Sanfilippo stepped down as Redis maintainer in 2020. The project he started in 2009 grew into a popular tool for caching and became the go-to real-time database for large-scale back-end transactions and content-serving systems.
As previously reported on InfoQ, earlier this year Redis transitioned from the open-source BSD license to the more restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). This change led to the creation of Valkey, a fork by former maintainers that has garnered significant support in recent months from both the community and hyperscalers, including Google and Amazon.
In the "from where I left" article, Sanfilippo explains:
People will ask questions about why I actually did this (...) if there is some agreement involved, or a big amount of money; something odd or unclear. But sometimes things are very boring: 1. I contacted the company, not the reverse. 2. I’m not getting crazy money to re-enter, it’s not about exploiting some situation — normal salary (but, disclaimer: yes, I have Redis stock options like I had before, no less, no more). 3. I don’t have huge issues with Redis changing its license;
Welcoming Sanfilippo back to the company, Rowan Trollope, Redis CEO, confirms:
We’re thrilled to have him back in his new role as a Redis evangelist, and look forward to him helping us continue to build our community.
In a popular thread on Hacker News, many developers expressed support while focusing on the license change. Some find it hard to trust Redis again, while others - like Wojciech Kaczmarek - write:
It is really hard to believe that no one defends antirez&co as protecting themselves from greedy overpriced SaaS businesses who were parasiting others hard work. What about them saases breaking a social contract of giving reasonable prices adequate to the effort put into a product?
According to a recent paper by Dawn Foster, director of data science at CHAOSS, the number of external contributors with 5 or more commits to Redis dropped to zero in the first 6 months following the relicense. Blaming AWS and other cloud providers for the license change, Sanfilippo writes:
I don’t believe that openness and licensing are only what the OSI tells us they are. I see licensing as a spectrum of things you can and can’t do. At the same time, I’m truly concerned that big cloud providers have changed the incentives in the system software arena. Redis was not the only project to change license, it was actually the last one… of a big pile. And I have the feeling that in recent years many projects didn’t even start because of a lack of a clear potential business model.
With Andi Gutmans, VP and GM of Databases at Google, suggesting that Valkey could become one of the most successful forks in open source history, AWS recently released Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey at a lower price point than the existing Redis version. Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and an open source advocate, comments:
Reading between the lines. Redis is Hurting, Valkey is making a real difference at pulling the customers away. (...) I wonder if they go back on their license change next or do they think Redis founder endorsing license change, despite his previous promises of Redis being Open Source forever is enough? Time will tell.
Sanfilippo concludes by discussing one of the topics he sees as his main area of interest: developing vector capabilities in Redis, showing that he is unlikely to be just an evangelist:
I started to think that sorted sets can inspire a new data type, where the score is actually a vector. And while I was in talks with Rowan, I started to write a design document, then I started to implement a proof of concept of the new data structure, reimplementing HNSWs from scratch (...) Perhaps I may end up contributing code again, if this proposal gets accepted.
Brachiosoft Blog published last year the story of Redis and its creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, a post that went viral on Hacker News.
