The Linux Foundation put Valkey centre stage at the Open Source Summit Europe this week, as the Redis fork hit its first full-digit release.
Redis switched the license for its core in-memory datastore earlier this year from the BSD license to a source available license. That move came a few years after the company adopted a Server Side Public License for some of its technology, accusing cloud giants of profiting off the back of community efforts without contributing themselves.
A succession of cloud giants got behind the Valkey fork, including AWS and Google, followed by a rapid series of releases.
This week’s release of Valkey 8.0 promises intelligent multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O threading, which the project says triples throughput, while memory overhead is reduced by 10%. Cluster scaling has been improved, and users also get faster replication with dual-channel RDB and replica backlog streaming.
Valkey is just one of a succession of quick-fire forks that have moved under the wing of the Linux Foundation. Last year’s OSS saw the LF serve up OpenTofu, the community fork of Terraform, following HashiCorp’s decision to pull a license switch.
Meanwhile, the LF was also trumpeting the launch of its OpenSearch Software Foundation this week, after originator AWS donated the project. AWS created the project after Elastic changed the license for its ElasticSearch project following a fallout with Amazon.
The head of the Linux Foundation Europe Gabriele Columbro told us “It's completely the prerogative of the single vendors, to change their license, like it's the prerogative of the community to have the right to fork.”
But he continued, “It makes as clear as can be what the role of a foundation is, because we have seen so many coming to us, bringing these forked projects to make sure that that doesn't happen again.”
One of Valkey's key backers, Percona, unwrapped its own open-source DBMS, Everest, at the event. Everest will initially support PostgreSQL, MongodDB, and MySQL, but the firm’s head of community, Lori Lorusso, said Valkey support was on the way.
As for the Linux Foundation’s embrace of the project, she said: “Just look at the members of the Linux Foundation, right? That is where all the enterprise companies are. So I think that speaks volumes. And here's the great thing, you still have the freedom to choose.”
Just how many will choose to stick with Redis is the key point. According to research released by Percona last week, more than 70% of respondents with Redis deployments said that the shift in Redis’ licensing has "motivated them to seek alternatives.” And over three-quarters of Redis users surveyed were either “testing, considering, or have already adopted Valkey.”
