Stick a fork in me, I'm done: Redis slaps MongoDB’s SSPL licence on its OSS core, blames cloud, complexity

The kiss of death for open-source Redis? A reasonable commercial decision? The end of a community?

Stick a fork in me, I'm done: Redis slaps MongoDB’s SSPL licence on its OSS core, blames cloud, complexity

Redis is ditching the open-source BSD licence in favour of the more restrictive SSPL licence created by MongoDB – a move that will have significant downstream repercussions for developers and likely hugely impact broader community involvement in the open-source Redis project.

(With open source Redis downloaded over one billion times on Docker Hub as long ago as 2018 and widely deployed, the blast radius of the decision, whatever users' views on it, will be significant in future.)

The data store provider announced on March 20 that all future versions of Redis would (“beginning today”)  be “dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License and MongoDB’s Server Side Public License. The SSPL is not considered an open-source licence and has strict restrictions that have a “viral” impact on surrounding software (see Section 13 here.)

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