What is Open? Why Licensing Literacy Matters More Than Ever Before
While Relicensing Rows, “Open Source-ish” Offerings, and Single-Vendor Incentives Muddy the Waters for Business Decision Makers, Community Driven Projects, Like Valkey, Offer Clarity and Trust
The Long & Short
Open washing, relicensing trends, and an increasingly complex legal landscape have made licensing literacy mission-critical to an organization’s overall stability and success. Business leaders must be well-versed and vigilant when it comes to the licenses behind the software they choose to adopt. Prioritize permissive, community-led open source projects over more restrictive, “open source-ish” licenses and single-vendor-led solutions to ensure flexibility and stability.
There are literally hundreds of “open” software licenses in use today—with their degree of openness and permissiveness ranging all the way from true, free and open software to being virtually indistinguishable from proprietary licensing.
Because of open source’s many benefits, the software ecosystem has become plagued with “open washing” as of late (i.e. the practice of using open source and open source adjacent language disingenuously in marketing and public messaging in order to give the appearance of being more free, open, and developer friendly). In practice, this has led to a litany of “open source-ish” licensing models that, although less restrictive than purely proprietary licenses, do not hold true to the core tenets of the OSS movement.
Redis, Valkey and the Value of Community-Led Open Source Projects
However, this is far more than just an academic or philosophical debate. This is about the long-term viability of increasingly essential technological infrastructure. Perhaps nothing highlights the gravity of licensing instability than the recent move by Redis to abandon their open source licensing in favor of a source-available model.
The backlash that this about-face stoked amongst its customers and community was so intense, in fact, that the company ultimately reversed its decision less than 12 months later. Despite the doubling-back, the whole episode highlights a trend in the database space (and the SaaS space more broadly) that illustrates just how important it is for organizations to be acutely aware of the specific licenses and source behind the “open source” solutions they adopt.
In the case of Redis, the rug-pull spurred the community to immediate action. A coalition of end-users, contributors, corporations, and non-profit open source organizations came together and within a week announced the new Valkey project—an open source Redis fork led by the Linux Foundation. End-user backlash combined with swift community action and support from some noteworthy hyperscalers has allowed Valkey to take off in relatively short order.
The question of licensing is a big one for us. Even on the spectrum of SSPL and other more permissive, but not necessarily open source licenses, there have been occasions where we’ve opted out of using solutions because of the risks they pose. The risk of lock-in, the risk of licensing changes, or the risk of inadvertently violating a licensing agreement. At the end of the day, the certainty, stability, and freedom that comes with community-led open source solutions is invaluable to our organization.
Jeff Nolan
Director, Web Operations
Choice Home Warranty
Quick Openness Scorecard
How to use it: Score each strategic DB 0–5 on each criterion (max 25). Anything <18 demands an explicit risk mitigation plan (forkability, dual‑sourcing, contractual escape clauses, etc.).
Sample Scorecard – Redis v. Valkeyd
Using the above scoring framework, we’ve compared Redis to Valkey and summed up the totals. While there is inevitably some room for interpretation on many of these metrics, the following illustrates how such a scorecard can help business leaders make quick, standardized assessments to help inform decision-making.