Last week, Redis, a widely used in-memory distributed key/value store, made headlines when it changed its licensing policy, effectively removing itself from being considered open-source software. This set off a series of events.
In what seemed like a timely response, Microsoft introduced Garnet, its new open-source project. It is a cache store developed by Microsoft that promises better performance and enhancements than Redis and is compatible with Redis clients.
And now, following the pattern often seen in the open-source community, when a project shifts to proprietary licensing, a fork is usually created to keep its distribution free.
This is exactly what happened with Redis. An independent fork named Redict has emerged, licensed under the Lesser GNU General Public License (LGPL-3.0-only). Drew Devault, the founder and CEO of SourceHut, shared a message on the new project’s website.
Like many of you, I was disappointed when I learned that Redis was changing to a non-free licensing model. This is a betrayal of the free software community, but perhaps not an entirely surprising one. Forks are likely to start appearing in the coming days, and today, I would like to offer Redict to you as a possible future home for your needs, and present its trade-offs as compared to the other forks you’re likely to be choosing from soon.
As of its current still-in-development state, Redict’s alterations from Redis version 7.2.4 focus primarily on renaming conventions to maintain backward compatibility while laying the groundwork for an independent development path.
The Redict team is gearing up to release version 7.3.0, promising it as a seamless drop-in replacement for Redis 7.2.4. This upcoming release is anticipated next week and will be accompanied by a comprehensive migration guide for users.
Looking ahead, Redict plans to phase out deprecated features, eliminate vendored dependencies in favor of upstream alternatives, and adopt a more downstream agnostic approach.
For more details, visit the project’s website. Redict’s source code is publicly available on Codeberg.
