The end of vendor-backed open source?

A few weeks ago, Redis changed its license from the Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved BSD 3-Clause license to the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2). This move echoed Elastic’s earlier license change for Elasticsearch, which switched from the Apache License 2.0 to the Elastic License (ELv2). Then, just as OpenSearch was forked from open-source Elasticsearch, Valkey has been forked from open-source Redis.

I’ve spent the last two years at AWS working as a developer advocate for open-source OpenSearch and rebuilding the community trust shattered by Elastic’s 2021 license change for Elasticsearch. I spoke daily with the companies whose livelihood had been put at risk because of the license change. Their fear for the future sticks with me to this day.

How will the move from an open-source license to a source-available license affect the Redis open-source community? I’ll try to answer that question here. I’ll be taking the perspective from OpenSearch as it relates to Elasticsearch. as that’s the perspective I’m most qualified to write about. I’ll leave it up to others to share their own perspectives as everyone has a different viewpoint.

Everyday users of open-source Redis

To be perfectly clear, the everyday users I’m talking about here are the enterprises that use open-source Redis internally. Many of these companies right now are scrambling to have their legal teams review the new license. More established companies have internal policies that allow them to deploy software with the well-understood OSI licenses. New licenses mean they will need to re-evaluate whether or not they can continue using Redis.

If your company doesn’t have a lawyer with the time or confidence to evaluate the RASLv2 license and determine how the terms apply within your company, you may need to re-architect your entire application stack. These are the developers described by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his article, “Software vendors dump open source, go for the cash grab.”

As developer advocate for OpenSearch at AWS, I heard a similar story from several users about why they switched to OpenSearch. Their company’s legal team just did not have the experience needed to evaluate the ELv2 license, or they were unwilling to take the risk by allowing a new license with no prior court cases to show whether their use was deemed acceptable. Despite the claims made by my fellow InfoWorld contributor Matt Asay, that cloud providers would be the only ones effected, many other companies also will be hurt by the change.

Specialized users of open source

One of the hard-to-measure impacts of changing the Redis license will be the loss of specialization. In the case of Elasticsearch, the ecosystem supported entire companies that created specialized distributions to fill different niches that Elastic couldn’t adequately serve on its own.

Bonsai is a perfect example of one of these specialized users. The developers got their start as the first Elasticsearch-as-a-service provider in 2012. At Bonsai they provide tools and customizations that allow search practitioners to focus on delivering great search experiences. In 2021 they became the first company to offer a managed OpenSearch service specializing in search applications.

Another excellent example of a specialized user is Logz.io, which offered a hosted version of Elasticsearch that focused on log collection and analytics. Founded in 2014, the company staked its entire future on open-source Elasticsearch. Over the years Logz.io has contributed many bug fixes and improvements that help users specializing in log collection and analytics.

No one company can adequately cover all of the different niches where the product may be used. This is where the open-source community becomes so vital. The community offers different perspectives, bug fixes, issues, and even features that one company alone could not provide. In this way, so many use cases can be covered by a single open-source project.

Reading between the lines

The narrative that cloud providers were “stealing” from Redis by not contributing to Redis is plainly false. Of the top seven contributors to Redis over the last two years, only three of them are affiliated with Redis.

1. Oranagra – Redis
2. enjoy-binbin – Independent contributor
3. yossigo – Redis
4. Soloestoy – Alibaba Cloud
5. Madolson – AWS
6. Guyube7 – Redis
7. Hwware – Huawei

These seven contributors have contributed the majority of the code written to Redis over the last two years. I also want to stress the word affiliated here. These individuals are hired by their employer because they were passionate about Redis, not the other way around. I interviewed Madelyn, a Redis maintainer employed by AWS, a few years ago about her experience as a maintainer. You can view the interview here on YouTube.

For those who may be confused about why there are so few active contributors to Redis, I will share a surprising secret. Redis wasn’t putting a majority of its engineering hours into the open-source Redis. Most of the company’s 700-plus employees work on its paid offerings such as Redis Enterprise or Redis Cloud, which operate in a manner very different from the open-source product.

Open-source Redis relies heavily on the client to find the appropriate server to read and update the keys and values, whereas the Redis Enterprise offering operates more like a proxy with a single entry point. The interesting thing is that the cloud providers were not recreating the work done with Redis Enterprise. They were providing a convenient way to deploy open-source Redis.

So what’s next?

Considering what’s happened over the last few years, I hope we are witnessing the end of single-vendor-backed open-source projects. Many of these companies see open source as a vehicle to drive the adoption of their software and then switch to a prohibitive license once the software starts to reach massive adoption through a cloud provider. This has happened more times in recent years than I care to count.

There are only a few companies that can reliably provide open-source software without hurting their own bottom line. These are the software giants like AWS, Google, and Microsoft. They can comfortably contribute to open-source software and collaborate with companies who specialize in some of the more niche use cases. They may not have been able to cover these niches on their own, but with the help of the community they can. And at the end of the day, even the smaller companies who provide managed offerings need somewhere to host them, right?

I see a bright future for Valkey, the open-source fork of Redis. It’s starting off right in the Linux Foundation, where companies contribute freely without fear of a single company dictating the direction of a project. So far AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap have announced they will be helping to support Valkey.

I am not saying these companies are benevolent. They are making a long-term investment in driving the adoption of cloud services. Despite this I have a lot of faith in the individuals I know who are leading the open-source initiatives at these companies. People like Matthew Wilson (or msw as he is commonly known) who are fighting to keep their employers doing the right thing for open source.

David Tippett is the former senior developer advocate for OpenSearch at AWS. Now he works as a freelance search data and infrastructure consultant at TippyBits.

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