Summary
This article is a detailed analysis of the impact of the Redis license change to a non-open-source one on its community. To summarize the findings:
- 37.5% of contributors (9 of 24) stopped contributing to Redis after the fork
- Valkey grew from 18 to 49 contributors in 18 months
- Valkey averages 80 PRs/month in 2025 vs Redis’s 42
Background
In March 2024, the super popular open source in-memory database, Redis, caused some serious upset in the open source community and its many users by changing to a proprietary license from BSD-3. A number of maintainers decided to fork Redis, and the Valkey project was born. Interestingly, Redis added an open source license again in May 2025 in the form of AGPL. Rather than going into the why’s of all these changes, we will analyze the impact on the Redis project and its main alternative, Valkey.
The Redis license change was controversial for several interconnected reasons:
Breaking the Open Source Social Contract: Redis had been open source for 15 years, with a community contributing code, documentation, and bug fixes under the assumption it would remain freely available. The sudden shift to a proprietary license felt like a betrayal of this implicit agreement. Additionally, the founder of Redis, Antirez famously wrote in 2018 on his blog (https://antirez.com/news/120) that Redis is and “must be” BSD licensed.
Impact on Cloud Providers and Users: Many companies had built their infrastructure around Redis, choosing it specifically because it was open source. The license change meant:
- Cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud could no longer offer managed Redis services without paying Redis Inc. licensing fees
- Companies worried about future licensing costs and restrictions
- Organizations with open source-only policies had to reconsider their technology stack
Community Investment: contributors had donated their time and expertise to improve Redis over the years. The license change meant their contributions would now benefit a proprietary product, which many saw as unfair appropriation of community work.
Precedent Concerns: This was part of a troubling trend in the open source world, following similar moves by Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and others.
Trust and Governance: The unilateral decision-making process, without community consultation, raised questions about project governance and whether users could trust Redis’s future direction.
What does the project impact translate to in actual numbers? With the beauty of open source, the stats are readily available on github. For the purpose of this analysis we will look at the core Redis server and Valkey projects for the past two years, with the notion that Valkey has only been around for 18 months since the fork in March 2024.
Client libraries and modules are a big part of the ecosystem, but since the Redis versions of these have been around for years, and Valkey is somewhat playing catch-up in this area, it would not be a sensible exercise to compare stats. For example, the ValkeySearch, ValkeyLDAP and ValkeyJSON modules have all been built from scratch in the last year, where some of the Redis modules have been around for many years.
Contributors
The Redis project
How many contributors moved over from Redis to Valkey? In the 4 months up to the fork, Redis had 24 contributors with one or more commits totalling 221 commits. Out of these, 9 no longer committed anything to Redis the following year and 2 reduced their commits and 13 increased their commits. To determine whether a reduction or increase has taken place, this is adjusted for the time period, i.e. the number of commits for 20240401 to 20250401 are divided by 3 since the 20231118 to 20240401 period is roughly 4 months.
This data gains significance when combined with the Valkey commits. Nevertheless, an immediate impact is noticeable in the increase of commits by Redis employees after the fork.
What about new contributors to Redis after the fork? Most notable is of course the return of Antirez to Redis, working amongst others on vector capabilities in Redis, bringing 146 commits since the fork date. Additionally, we see a number of new contributors working for Redis in kei-nan with 22 commits, skaslev with 17, minchopaskal with 16 and even Redis CEO Rowan Trollope with 16 commits. Among non-Redis contributors since the fork is StavRLevi with 12. This confirms that since the fork, the Redis project is mainly maintained by Redis employees.
Figure 1: commit history for Redis between 2023118 to 20251119
Green: no commits to Redis post fork
Yellow: reduced commits to Redis post fork
Red: increased commits to Redis post fork
The Valkey project
It is clear that the contributors who are Redis employees increased their commits post fork. Arguably, this could be due to the other contributors leaving or because they needed to keep up with the pace of innovation in Valkey.
What have the contributors with either no commits or reduced commits to Redis added to the Valkey project? Zhu Binbin from Tencent, Madelyn Olson from AWS and Victor Soderqvist from Ericsson are the main ones in this category. Between them, they made 289 + 155 +178 commits to Valkey since the fork.
Is the contributor base to Valkey growing? Starting out with 18 contributors in the month after the fork, this has grown steadily to the current 49.
Figure 2: total number of contributors to Valkey by month
Issues
Another metric that can be used to measure project activity is the number of issues raised. The findings show that since its inception, Valkey has a higher average number of issues per month at 40 compared to Redis’s 24.
The Redis project
For Redis, the findings can be divided into notable periods :
- Early Years (2010-2011): Very low activity (1-5 issues/month)
- Growth Phase (2012-2016): Steady activity (20-50 issues/month)
- Peak Activity (2017-2023): Highest engagement (30-76 issues/month)
- Recent Decline (2024-2025): Reduced activity (11-35 issues/month)
Mature projects typically show a reduction in issues over time; therefore, PRs are another metric to analyze. For reference, the issue stats for Redis :
- Total Issues: 6,850 issues spanning from January 2010 to November 2025
- Peak Month: May 2020 with 96 issues
- Recent Trends: Issue volume has decreased significantly in 2024-2025 (averaging 15-27 issues per month) compared to earlier years
- Historical Pattern: Issue volume was consistently higher from 2017 to 2023, typically ranging from 30 to 70 issues per month
The Valkey project
For Valkey the total number of issues is of course a lot smaller, with it being a fork of a mature technology but we can still identify notable periods :
Launch Phase (March-May 2024):
- April 2024: 88 issues (peak activity at launch)
- May 2024: 57 issues
Stabilization (June-December 2024):
- Activity settled to 24-39 issues per month
- Average: ~33 issues/month
Current Phase (2025):
- Consistent activity: 31-48 issues per month
- Average: ~40 issues/month
For reference :
- Total Issues: 800 issues
- Project Start: March 2024 (when Valkey was forked from Redis)
- Peak Month: April 2024 with 88 issues (launch period spike)
- Average Monthly Rate: ~40 issues per month
- Current Trend: 15 issues so far in November 2025
Figure 3: number of issues per month since the fork
Pull Requests
Now that we have looked into the issue stats, what does the actual completed work in terms of pull requests look like? If we ignore the first year and only look at 2025 so that we can consider Valkey to be more stable, Valkey’s PRs at an average of 80/month are almost double of Redis’s 42.
The Redis project
A total of 7,307 PRs were created in the period September 2010 – November 2025. From these we can again see some notable periods :
- Early Growth (2010-2016): 4-42 PRs/month
- Peak Period (2020-2022): Highest activity with 70-126 PRs/month
- Peak month: January 2022 with 126 PRs
- December 2020: 102 PRs
- March 2021: 113 PRs
- April 2021: 111 PRs
- Mature Phase (2017-2019): 18-64 PRs/month
- Recent Decline (2024-2025): 21-78 PRs/month
- 2024-2025 average: ~42 PRs/month
The Valkey project
A total of 1,755 PRs were created in the period March 2024 – November 2025. For Valkey the notable periods are :
- Launch Spike (April 2024): 185 PRs (peak month)
- Stabilization Phase (May-Dec 2024): 77-109 PRs/month
- Current Rate (2025): 46-115 PRs/month
- Average: ~80 PRs/month
- August 2025: 115 PRs (second-highest month)
If we compare the peak periods for both, Redis had between 70 and 120 PRs per month with the current rate for Valkey this year (ignore the launch month) at 46 to 115 PRs per month. For the averages for 2025, Valkey’s is at 80, almost double of Redis’s 42. This is showing a very strong community momentum behind Valkey. In 2025 Valkey created 865 vs Redis 537.
Figure 4: number of issues per month since the fork
Conclusion
The community reacted strongly to the Redis license change in March 2024, with Valkey emerging shortly after and attracting 18 contributors and backing from major tech companies. The return of Antirez to Redis and the adoption of AGPL in May 2025 – whether this was a reaction to the success of Valkey or based on Antirez’s true beliefs – shows that the Redis community was broken. Time will tell if Redis can grow back the community involvement to the pre-fork levels. After all, its open source nature and that involvement that led to its popularity. The analysis in this article demonstrates that Valkey has successfully established itself as a viable alternative with 50 core contributors, 40 issues and 80 PRs per month. This case is an important lesson to open source projects that use license changes to prioritize monetization over community.
Appendix
Methodology
All data was collected from the respective github projects. All issues and PRs were included and numbers are aggregated based on the creation date. The metrics are purely based on quantity and not on size or quality.
Definitions
BSD-3 License (Redis’s original license)
The BSD-3 license is one of the most permissive open source licenses. It allows anyone to:
- Use the software for any purpose, including commercial applications
- Modify the code without sharing changes back
- Incorporate it into proprietary products
- Redistribute it freely with minimal restrictions
For users, this meant complete freedom to use Redis in any project without worrying about licensing obligations.
AGPL (Affero General Public License – Redis’s new additional license in 2024)
The AGPL is a “copyleft” license that requires:
- Any modifications must be shared if the software is used to provide a network service
- If you run a modified version on a server and let others interact with it, you must provide the source code
- Cloud providers offering the software as a service must share their improvements
For users, AGPL means that while the software remains free, there are stricter obligations about sharing modifications, especially for cloud service providers.
Proprietary License (Redis’s March 2024 change)
When Redis switched to a dual proprietary license model (RSALv2 and SSPLv1), it meant:
- source code remains visible but with restrictions on commercial use
- cloud providers cannot offer Redis as a managed service without a commercial agreement
- companies may need to pay for licenses depending on their use case
- the software is no longer “open source” by the official definition
What is a “Fork”?
In software development, a “fork” is when developers take a copy of a project’s source code and start independent development on it, creating a separate project. Think of it like a road that splits into two paths – both started from the same place but now go in different directions.
When Valkey was “forked” from Redis, it meant:
- Developers copied all of Redis’s code up to that point (while it was still BSD-3 licensed)
- They created a new, independent project with its own name and governance
- Both projects can now evolve separately with different features and philosophies
- Users can choose which “path” to follow
