Redis Shifts to Dual Licensing: Implications and Community Reactions

Redis, the popular in‑memory database, has announced a shift to a dual‑source licensing model—Redis Source Available License v2 (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License v1 (SSPL)—effective from Redis 7.4, replacing its long‑standing BSD‑3 clause license.

The change has triggered strong criticism from the open‑source community, echoing earlier license revisions by MongoDB in 2018 and Elasticsearch later, both of which also adopted SSPL and faced pushback.

Redis emphasizes that the new terms mainly affect cloud service providers that host Redis as a managed service; end‑users, internal developers, and commercial customers using the open‑source version will see no direct changes according to the FAQ.

Industry observers predict that many Linux distributions may drop Redis from their repositories, while alternatives such as the BSD‑licensed fork KeyDB, Microsoft’s C#‑based Garnet, and the BSL‑licensed Dragonfly are already available.

There are concerns that the licensing shift could lead to a fork of Redis similar to the Terraform/OpenTofu split, with users potentially migrating to community‑maintained versions to retain a permissive license.

Despite Redis’s claim that the move targets cloud providers and aims to protect commercial interests, many developers view the decision as a betrayal of the project’s original open‑source ethos.