Drew DeVault, the author of the Sway user environment, the Hare programming language, the Aerc email client, and the collaborative development platform SourceHut, has announced the release of project Redict 7.3.0, a fork of the Redis database. Redict has branched off from Redis 7.2.4, the last version published under the BSD license. The changes developed by the Redict project are distributed under the LGPLv3.0 license, while the code borrowed from Redis remains under the BSD license.
Redict 7.3.0 is positioned as the first standalone release of the project, with changes currently limited to rebranding and minor adjustments, such as the utility redis-cli being renamed to redict-cli, and the configuration file /etc/redis.conf changed to /etc/redict.conf. In terms of capabilities, Redict 7.3.0 is fully compatible with the Redis 7.2.4 release and can be used as a replacement, but it is not related to the under-development branch of Redis 7.3.0 and does not provide compatibility with it.
Unlike the Valkey fork created by Amazon, Google, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap, the Redict project aims for conservative maintenance of the codebase over a long period and ensuring stability, rather than promoting radical changes and innovations in the interests of commercial companies providing resources. In the opinion of the Redict developers, Redis has reached maturity in its current form and contains all necessary functionalities, hence it is important to focus on fixing bugs and vulnerabilities in the future, rather than continuing to expand functionalities.
The choice of the LGPL license instead of BSD for proprietary changes is explained by the need to protect against attempts to create proprietary distributions of Redict and to block the transfer of code to what has become a proprietary Redis project. However, the LGPL license does not prevent developers of commercial products and cloud systems from using Redict in their services and projects. Redict will evolve solely through the efforts of the community and for the benefit of the community, rather than by a small group of companies pushing their own interests. Development decisions will be made based on consensus among the development participants.
Future plans include modernizing the assembly system, creating forks of client libraries (for example, the hiredict library has already been created, which implements a Redis client for the C language), and moving built-in versions of Lua and jemalloc in favor of connecting external dependencies, simplifying package maintenance in distributions. The transfer of non-radical useful changes from the Valkey codebase is not ruled out.
Source: opennet.ru
