ValKey is Redis open-sourced
Redis company made itself irrelevant
Valkey replaces Redis due to a licensing conflict and project governance change that caused Redis to no longer be fully open source.
Why the Change Happened
In March 2024, Redis Labs (the company behind Redis) changed the license of Redis from the permissive BSD license to a more restrictive Source Available License (RSALv2 + Server Side Public License or SSPL for some components). This move:
- Restricted commercial use without a paid agreement.
- Violated the Open Source Definition (as per the Open Source Initiative).
- Made Redis unsuitable for many Linux distributions (like Fedora, RHEL, and Debian), which require fully open source licensing.
What Is Valkey?
Valkey is a community-driven fork of Redis 7.2.4 (the last BSD-licensed version), created in response to the license change. The fork is backed by the Linux Foundation and supported by major open-source contributors including:
- Amazon
- Ericsson
- Alibaba Cloud
- Snap Inc.
Valkey is committed to:
- Staying open source (under the BSD 3-Clause License)
- Maintaining Redis compatibility (same protocol, commands, and data structures)
- Long-term community governance
Implications for CentOS and RHEL
Red Hat, like other Linux vendors, cannot include redis under the new non-free license. Hence:
- Redis was dropped from RHEL/CentOS Stream 10 and Fedora
- Valkey was adopted as a drop-in replacement
This ensures that users and developers retain access to a high-performance, open-source, in-memory key-value store without licensing restrictions.
Bottom line: Redis is now semi-commercial; Valkey keeps it free and open.
