I missed this news a couple of days ago: #Redis is officially FOSS again, as it has backtracked from #SSPL and moved to AGPL (which IMHO is what they should have adopted all along).

This closes the cycle of my prediction:

1. That Redis had made a terrible mistake by switching to SSPL
2. That the switch to SSPL would have just resulted in a fork fever that would have critically eroded their user base and reputation
3. That those forks would have been eventually included in standard Linux distros instead of Redis itself because of their OSI-compatible licenses, and adopted as alternatives to Redis by the cloud providers (hence invalidating the whole point of SSPL)
4. That Redis would have eventually backtracked and switched back to AGPL

There’s a 5th point in my prediction that hasn’t materialized yet though: that the damage is already done and it will be hard to revert.

Fedora, Arch and Alpine have all replaced Redis with Valkey in their repos already, and Debian has opted to temporarily provide both.

Many Docker configurations, cloud and on-prem deployments, Terraform templates, home servers etc. have already all migrated to Valkey.

Not only, but the seismic fork allowed Valkey to implement features that have been requested in Redis for a while but not implemented because of the most complex governance of the project (like RDMA). Plus, while Valkey guarantees parity of features as of Redis 7.2.4, the mismatch of features is only supposed to increase as the hard fork diverges. This makes it even more unlikely that an enterprise software that has already migrated to Valkey takes the risk of migrating back to Redis later.

Redis’ decision leaves MongoDB as the only major SSPL-licensed project out there. And that is also coming with its costs. For example, the Linux Foundation has just opened its arms to Microsoft’s DocumentDB rather than MongoDB because the former is released under an OSI-compatible MIT license rather than Mongo’s SSPL.

The other project that still partly uses SSPL is Elastic. And even in that case the decision has backfired. It opened the way to AWS to release OpenSearch under an Apache license, and grab a lot of FOSS developers to power its proprietary cloud efforts for free instead.