Linux Foundation launches an open source fork of Redis | Hacker News Reader

Linux Foundation launches an open source fork of Redis

linuxfoundation.org

103 pointske4qqq15 comments

Copied my comment from dupe thread - but note that "Linux Foundation" is run by a bunch of Big Tech corporate interest[1] and not some sort of altruistic FOSS organization.

[1]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/leadership

Took me a bit to grok the name: Valkey. Value/key. Opposite of key-value, kv, which is what redis is.

Does anyone know of all the Redis forks that were created since the license change? I wonder if any of them will consolidate.

The terraform work has coalesced around OpenTofu, so maybe?

This fork is going to be BSD licensed, so all of the fixes and improvements can upstream to Redis.

redict is LGPL licensed, so that can't happen.

https://codeberg.org/redict/redict

You say that like it's a problem. Isn't the point of open source to be able to share so that others can take advantage of a solution to a given problem?

Yes, the point of open source is to share, so that others can take advantage of a solution to a given problem. Redis does not do that.

I disagree. Surely Redis will take advantage of a solution to a given problem.

You're of the belief that Redis will merge LGPL-licensed commits into their tree?

Hi, co-creator of Valkey here. I'm not that worried about it. There are a lot of people who have tried to maintain Redis folks, my employer AWS has one such fork I know very well, and they quickly become extremely hard to maintain with your own code. These aren't problems Redis wants to solve, they are off in their GenAI space building fancy extensions. For the next year or so it might be a real concern, but we are thinking long term, and I don't think it'll matter for long.

So, we thought the best approach was to stick with the license and get us into a vendor neutral foundation. We haven't ruled out LGPL, we just didn't make the change unilaterally and as a foundational part of the fork. We just want to keep building :)

Any idea why this fork has the support of the linux foundation in favour of any other?

Valkey is run by the companies that control the Linux Foundation.

The only other fork from current redis that I'm aware of is Redict, and I'd imagine drew devault's name alone brings enough baggage and bad memories that a lot of people (users and contributors) will avoid it.

This fork being run by existing contributors to the project helps a lot too.

No matter one's opinions on Drew, I think his work as a maintainer and his commitment to open-source speak for themselves.

Your second point is actually the answer I was looking for, thank you.

With the LLM craze there are some setups abusing redis as a (vector) DB. Please don't! Redis is a cache and wants to keep everything in RAM, eating GBs of RAM with relatively few entries. Keeping that manageable is also non-trivial so please just use a sane option like postgres for anything like that. https://redis.io/docs/management/optimization/memory-optimiz...

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