I liked Andrew Kelleys perspective on this: let's treat Redict as a rename of the Redis project, and the project now called "Redis" a weird commercial fork of Redict.
I am keenly looking on to see if the people involved in Redict see it the same way. As a user of Redis, I would like to switch to one of these open-source forks, and to be honest one which is "done" and focused on maintenance, bug fixes etc. rather than new features sounds more attractive.
This article lists the other contenders for the title of new Redis, and I think Redict is going to be the least successful thanks to its founder, niche hosting site, and the hostile AGPL licence.
The problem is Drew is being really hostile towards the actual maintainers and core contributors of Redis who are looking to move on towards an actual open source fork.
He changed the license, moved the code, chosen the name and the direction all on his own without consulting anyone in the community.
His history had made me like that he forked it, but his actions and behavior towards the maintainers of Redis and absolute unwillingness to meet in the middle to collaborate really puts a hold on Redict being more than a fleeting thought.
Linux Foundation, core contributors to Redis and what seems to be the majority of the community is rallying around Valkey, so I don't see Redict going anywhere except in a niche subset of users.
Hey, this is really not how it went down and I'm kind of upset that it's being read this way.
The premise of Redict is to create a fork which is driven by a grassroots community rather than a commercial interest, and which is safe from this kind of rug-pull in the future and to press back against this broader trend of rug pulls by commercial vendors of free software. I invited collaborators from the start at every level, going out of my way not to instill Redict as a hostile takeover but as a community-led effort to create a future for Redis which is protected by copyleft. I talked with the people behind Valkey from the start of Redict and extended them a role in shaping everything from the direction and governance and infrastructure and tooling from day one, provided that we could find common ground on the license. Hell, @madolson, the primary force behind Valkey, signed up for a Codeberg account so that she could be made an admin on the Redict repository before placeholderkv even existed. She was removed only when it became clear that she was committed to her own fork and it didn't seem prudent to us to give admin rights to someone who wasn't contributing.
Redict was not refusing to collaborate or meet in the middle. The raison d'etre of Redict was to be a copyleft home for the Redis codebase, and if we could have found agreement on that then every other detail was always clearly indicated as subject to consensus and we proactively reached out to build that consensus, but were refused by madolson and the commercial interests that wanted to be in charge of their own fork rather than participate in a grassroots project.
Even the consensus they wanted on the license choice was, in the end, the consensus of the four commercial vendors. We tried to find a way of participating in this consensus-making process, but it wasn't made for us. Calls we made in public to use a copyleft license were met with resounding support on GitHub, to no avail.
Don't mistake four commercial vendors and the Linux Foundation for a community. I wish them the best of luck, and acknowledge that a corporate-led home for Redis is probably what some people are looking for. That said, I'm not okay with this narrative that Redict was not cooperating with the community, because it's just factually wrong and hurtful to boot.
You are correct. The issue is that any [X]GPL license has bad reputation in business environments. They see it as a big legal risk that will require constant legal supervision over the technical usage of GPL-licensed code.
Poor little things that do not want to share anything want to work as little as possible. If only we could collectively diminish our commons to make life easier for companies.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/redis-renamed-to-redict.html