Abstract
This text is an in depth evaluation of the impression of the Redis license change to a non-open-source one on its neighborhood. To summarize the findings:
- 37.5% of contributors (9 of 24) stopped contributing to Redis after the fork
- Valkey grew from 18 to 49 contributors in 18 months
- Valkey averages 80 PRs/month in 2025 vs Redis’s 42
In March 2024, the tremendous in style open supply in-memory database, Redis, brought on some severe upset within the open supply neighborhood and its many customers by altering to a proprietary license from BSD-3. A variety of maintainers determined to fork Redis, and the Valkey challenge was born. Curiously, Redis added an open supply license once more in Might 2025 within the type of AGPL. Relatively than going into the why’s of all these modifications, we’ll analyze the impression on the Redis challenge and its fundamental various, Valkey.
The Redis license change was controversial for a number of interconnected causes:
Breaking the Open Supply Social Contract: Redis had been open supply for 15 years, with a neighborhood contributing code, documentation, and bug fixes beneath the belief it might stay freely accessible. The sudden shift to a proprietary license felt like a betrayal of this implicit settlement. Moreover, the founding father of Redis, Antirez famously wrote in 2018 on his weblog (https://antirez.com/information/120) that Redis is and “should be” BSD licensed.
Impression on Cloud Suppliers and Customers: Many corporations had constructed their infrastructure round Redis, selecting it particularly as a result of it was open supply. The license change meant:
- Cloud suppliers like AWS and Google Cloud may now not provide managed Redis providers with out paying Redis Inc. licensing charges
- Firms frightened about future licensing prices and restrictions
- Organizations with open source-only insurance policies needed to rethink their expertise stack
Neighborhood Funding: contributors had donated their time and experience to enhance Redis over time. The license change meant their contributions would now profit a proprietary product, which many noticed as unfair appropriation of neighborhood work.
Precedent Issues: This was a part of a troubling pattern within the open supply world, following related strikes by Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and others.
Belief and Governance: The unilateral decision-making course of, with out neighborhood session, raised questions on challenge governance and whether or not customers may belief Redis’s future path.
What does the challenge impression translate to in precise numbers? With the great thing about open supply, the stats are available on github. For the aim of this evaluation we’ll have a look at the core Redis server and Valkey tasks for the previous two years, with the notion that Valkey has solely been round for 18 months because the fork in March 2024.
Consumer libraries and modules are an enormous a part of the ecosystem, however because the Redis variations of those have been round for years, and Valkey is considerably taking part in catch-up on this space, it might not be a wise train to match stats. For instance, the ValkeySearch, ValkeyLDAP and ValkeyJSON modules have all been constructed from scratch within the final yr, the place among the Redis modules have been round for a few years.
The Redis challenge
What number of contributors moved over from Redis to Valkey? Within the 4 months as much as the fork, Redis had 24 contributors with a number of commits totalling 221 commits. Out of those, 9 now not dedicated something to Redis the next yr and a couple of lowered their commits and 13 elevated their commits. To find out whether or not a discount or enhance has taken place, that is adjusted for the time interval, i.e. the variety of commits for 20240401 to 20250401 are divided by 3 because the 20231118 to 20240401 interval is roughly 4 months.
This knowledge positive aspects significance when mixed with the Valkey commits. Nonetheless, a right away impression is noticeable within the enhance of commits by Redis workers after the fork.
What about new contributors to Redis after the fork? Most notable is after all the return of Antirez to Redis, working amongst others on vector capabilities in Redis, bringing 146 commits because the fork date. Moreover, we see quite a lot of new contributors working for Redis in kei-nan with 22 commits, skaslev with 17, minchopaskal with 16 and even Redis CEO Rowan Trollope with 16 commits. Amongst non-Redis contributors because the fork is StavRLevi with 12. This confirms that because the fork, the Redis challenge is principally maintained by Redis workers.
Determine 1: commit historical past for Redis between 2023118 to 20251119
Inexperienced: no commits to Redis submit fork
Yellow: lowered commits to Redis submit fork
Crimson: elevated commits to Redis submit fork
The Valkey challenge
It’s clear that the contributors who’re Redis workers elevated their commits submit fork. Arguably, this might be because of the different contributors leaving or as a result of they wanted to maintain up with the tempo of innovation in Valkey.
What have the contributors with both no commits or lowered commits to Redis added to the Valkey challenge? Zhu Binbin from Tencent, Madelyn Olson from AWS and Victor Soderqvist from Ericsson are the primary ones on this class. Between them, they made 289 + 155 +178 commits to Valkey because the fork.
Is the contributor base to Valkey rising? Beginning out with 18 contributors within the month after the fork, this has grown steadily to the present 49.
Determine 2: complete variety of contributors to Valkey by month
One other metric that can be utilized to measure challenge exercise is the variety of points raised. The findings present that since its inception, Valkey has the next common variety of points per thirty days at 40 in comparison with Redis’s 24.
The Redis challenge
For Redis, the findings will be divided into notable intervals :
- Early Years (2010-2011): Very low exercise (1-5 points/month)
- Progress Part (2012-2016): Regular exercise (20-50 points/month)
- Peak Exercise (2017-2023): Highest engagement (30-76 points/month)
- Current Decline (2024-2025): Diminished exercise (11-35 points/month)
Mature tasks sometimes present a discount in points over time; subsequently, PRs are one other metric to research. For reference, the problem stats for Redis :
- Complete Points: 6,850 points spanning from January 2010 to November 2025
- Peak Month: Might 2020 with 96 points
- Current Traits: Challenge quantity has decreased considerably in 2024-2025 (averaging 15-27 points per thirty days) in comparison with earlier years
- Historic Sample: Challenge quantity was constantly larger from 2017 to 2023, sometimes starting from 30 to 70 points per thirty days
The Valkey challenge
For Valkey the overall variety of points is after all so much smaller, with it being a fork of a mature expertise however we are able to nonetheless establish notable intervals :
Launch Part (March-Might 2024):
- April 2024: 88 points (peak exercise at launch)
- Might 2024: 57 points
Stabilization (June-December 2024):
- Exercise settled to 24-39 points per thirty days
- Common: ~33 points/month
Present Part (2025):
- Constant exercise: 31-48 points per thirty days
- Common: ~40 points/month
For reference :
- Complete Points: 800 points
- Challenge Begin: March 2024 (when Valkey was forked from Redis)
- Peak Month: April 2024 with 88 points (launch interval spike)
- Common Month-to-month Price: ~40 points per thirty days
- Present Development: 15 points to this point in November 2025
Determine 3: variety of points per thirty days because the fork
Now that we’ve appeared into the problem stats, what does the precise accomplished work by way of pull requests appear to be? If we ignore the primary yr and solely have a look at 2025 in order that we are able to take into account Valkey to be extra steady, Valkey’s PRs at a mean of 80/month are nearly double of Redis’s 42.
The Redis challenge
A complete of seven,307 PRs had been created within the interval September 2010 – November 2025. From these we are able to once more see some notable intervals :
- Early Progress (2010-2016): 4-42 PRs/month
- Peak Interval (2020-2022): Highest exercise with 70-126 PRs/month
- Peak month: January 2022 with 126 PRs
- December 2020: 102 PRs
- March 2021: 113 PRs
- April 2021: 111 PRs
- Mature Part (2017-2019): 18-64 PRs/month
- Current Decline (2024-2025): 21-78 PRs/month
- 2024-2025 common: ~42 PRs/month
The Valkey challenge
A complete of 1,755 PRs had been created within the interval March 2024 – November 2025. For Valkey the notable intervals are :
- Launch Spike (April 2024): 185 PRs (peak month)
- Stabilization Part (Might-Dec 2024): 77-109 PRs/month
- Present Price (2025): 46-115 PRs/month
- Common: ~80 PRs/month
- August 2025: 115 PRs (second-highest month)
If we evaluate the height intervals for each, Redis had between 70 and 120 PRs per thirty days with the present price for Valkey this yr (ignore the launch month) at 46 to 115 PRs per thirty days. For the averages for 2025, Valkey’s is at 80, nearly double of Redis’s 42. That is exhibiting a really sturdy neighborhood momentum behind Valkey. In 2025 Valkey created 865 vs Redis 537.
Determine 4: variety of points per thirty days because the fork
The neighborhood reacted strongly to the Redis license change in March 2024, with Valkey rising shortly after and attracting 18 contributors and backing from main tech corporations. The return of Antirez to Redis and the adoption of AGPL in Might 2025 – whether or not this was a response to the success of Valkey or primarily based on Antirez’s true beliefs – exhibits that the Redis neighborhood was damaged. Time will inform if Redis can develop again the neighborhood involvement to the pre-fork ranges. In any case, its open supply nature and that involvement that led to its reputation. The evaluation on this article demonstrates that Valkey has efficiently established itself as a viable various with 50 core contributors, 40 points and 80 PRs per thirty days. This case is a crucial lesson to open supply tasks that use license modifications to prioritize monetization over neighborhood.
Methodology
All knowledge was collected from the respective github tasks. All points and PRs had been included and numbers are aggregated primarily based on the creation date. The metrics are purely primarily based on amount and never on dimension or high quality.
Definitions
BSD-3 License (Redis’s unique license)
The BSD-3 license is likely one of the most permissive open supply licenses. It permits anybody to:
- Use the software program for any objective, together with business functions
- Modify the code with out sharing modifications again
- Incorporate it into proprietary merchandise
- Redistribute it freely with minimal restrictions
For customers, this meant full freedom to make use of Redis in any challenge with out worrying about licensing obligations.
AGPL (Affero Normal Public License – Redis’s new further license in 2024)
The AGPL is a “copyleft” license that requires:
- Any modifications should be shared if the software program is used to offer a community service
- In case you run a modified model on a server and let others work together with it, you have to present the supply code
- Cloud suppliers providing the software program as a service should share their enhancements
For customers, AGPL implies that whereas the software program stays free, there are stricter obligations about sharing modifications, particularly for cloud service suppliers.
Proprietary License (Redis’s March 2024 change)
When Redis switched to a twin proprietary license mannequin (RSALv2 and SSPLv1), it meant:
- supply code stays seen however with restrictions on business use
- cloud suppliers can’t provide Redis as a managed service with out a business settlement
- corporations might have to pay for licenses relying on their use case
- the software program is now not “open supply” by the official definition
What’s a “Fork”?
In software program growth, a “fork” is when builders take a replica of a challenge’s supply code and begin unbiased growth on it, making a separate challenge. Consider it like a highway that splits into two paths – each began from the identical place however now go in several instructions.
When Valkey was “forked” from Redis, it meant:
- Builders copied all of Redis’s code as much as that time (whereas it was nonetheless BSD-3 licensed)
- They created a brand new, unbiased challenge with its personal identify and governance
- Each tasks can now evolve individually with totally different options and philosophies
- Customers can select which “path” to observe
