Redis Ltd has announced a change in the license for the Redis DBMS, which belongs to the class of NoSQL systems. Starting with the release of Redis 7.4, the project code will be distributed under two proprietary licenses RSALv2 (Redis Source Available License v2) and SSPLv1 (Server Side Public License v1), instead of the previously used BSD license. Previously, only the code of additional modules that offered advanced capabilities for corporate users (RediSearch, RedisGraph, RedisJSON, RedisML, RedisBloom, etc.) was supplied under a proprietary license. From now on, the proprietary license will also apply to the main DBMS code base.
The change of license will allow the integration of proprietary modules with the implementation of advanced types and data processing engines, previously offered only as part of the Redis Stack product, into the main structure of future versions of the Redis DBMS. Old releases will remain available under the previous BSD license and can be used as the basis for creating an independent fork.
Maintenance of older branches of Redis 7.x released before the license change will continue at least until the release of Redis Community Edition 9.0. All patches that fix vulnerabilities and serious problems will be released for old branches under the BSD license and can be used in forks. After the end of the support period for old branches, patches will be released only under SSPL and RSAL licenses, i.e. From now on, fork authors will need to do their own maintenance.
The SSPL and RSAL licenses are not open and introduce additional restrictions that prohibit the free use of the product to provide cloud services. In terms of their goals, both licenses are similar to each other, and the differences boil down to the fact that the SSPL license is based on the copyleft license AGPLv3, and the RSAL license is based on the permissive BSD license.
The RSAL license allows you to use, modify, distribute and integrate the code into applications, except when these applications are commercial or used to provide managed paid services (free use is allowed for internal services, the restriction applies only to paid services that provide access to Redis). In accordance with the principles of copyleft, the SSPL license contains a requirement to deliver under the same license not only the code of the application itself, but also the source code of all components involved in the provision of the cloud service.
The reason for changing the licensing policy is the desire to prevent cloud service providers from parasitizing on open source software. Redis Inc is unhappy with the fact that cloud providers create commercial derivative products and resell Redis as cloud services, but do not participate in the community or assist in development. A situation is being created where cloud providers who have nothing to do with the project benefit from reselling ready-made open solutions, while the developers themselves are left with nothing.
Both licenses discriminate against certain categories of users, making them unsuitable for open source or free software. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has stated that such licenses are not open source and that products based on them should be considered proprietary. Among other things, products licensed under the SSPL and RSAL cannot be included in free distributions such as Fedora and DebianFedora project developers have already begun discussions about removing Redis packages from the distribution's repositories or replacing them with a free fork, which is expected to be formed by community members dissatisfied with the license change.
Source: opennet.ru
