What happened with Redis: a license-change timeline

On March 20, 2024, Redis Inc. announced that all future Redis versions would ship under a dual license — BSL 1.1 and SSPL 1.0 — instead of the BSD 3-Clause license Redis had used for over a decade. The community response was swift, public, and forked.

The timeline

March 20, 2024 — The announcement

Redis Inc. publishes "Redis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing." Going forward, you can use Redis under BSL 1.1 OR SSPL 1.0 — but not the old BSD-3 license. The stated reason: cloud providers (AWS ElastiCache, Google Cloud Memorystore) had been selling Redis-as-a-service for years without contributing meaningfully back upstream.

March 28, 2024 — Linux Foundation forks Valkey

Eight days later, the Linux Foundation announces Valkey — a fork of Redis 7.2.4 (the last BSD-licensed version), backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap. The community-led project promises to stay BSD-licensed and accept contributions under the original Redis governance model.

April–June 2024 — Adoption splits

Major Linux distributions (Fedora, Debian) signal they'll switch from Redis to Valkey for their default "redis-server" package. Major cloud providers commit Valkey contributions. Redis Inc. continues commercial development of Redis 8.x under the new license.

May 2025 — Redis 8 ships under AGPL

After 14 months of community pushback, Redis Inc. announces Redis 8.0 will ship under AGPLv3 — a true OSI-approved open source license. They keep the BSL/SSPL options for enterprise customers but the default is now AGPL.

What this means if you use Redis

• —Already running Redis 7.2.x or older? Nothing changes — that code stays BSD.
• —Running Redis 7.4+ under BSL/SSPL? You're fine for non-competitive use; problematic if you're building a hosted Redis service.
• —Running Redis 8+ under AGPL? You're using OSI-approved open source again, with the AGPL network-service trigger.
• —Want to drop in a community-maintained replacement? Valkey is API-compatible.

The bigger pattern

Redis is the third major database to do this in 5 years (after MongoDB → SSPL in 2018 and Elastic → SSPL/ELv2 in 2021). The pattern is consistent: VC-backed open core company → permissive license → cloud provider eats their lunch → relicense to source-available → community forks the last permissive version. We track all of this on our /alerts feed and post-mortem the interesting ones in this blog.