Drew DeVault's LGPL fork. Ideological contrast to the corporate-backed Valkey.
Redis is an in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, message broker, and streaming engine. It supports data structures like strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets. Redis's speed and versatility made it ubiquitous in modern web architecture, running behind virtually every major web application.
When Redis switched from BSD to SSPL/RSALv2 in March 2024, two very different forks emerged with two very different philosophies. Redict, announced almost immediately by Drew DeVault, represents the ideological, copyleft response — a fork driven by principle rather than corporate backing.
Drew DeVault — founder of SourceHut, creator of the Hare programming language, and one of open source's most opinionated voices — wasted no time. He called Redis's license change "a betrayal of the free software community" and announced Redict as an independent, copyleft fork licensed under LGPL-3.0-only. The choice of LGPL over GPL was deliberate: it avoided concerns about "virality" that might scare away users integrating with Redis modules or Lua plugins, while still ensuring the core remained free.
Redict forked from Redis OSS 7.2.4, the last BSD-licensed version, and released version 7.3.0 in April 2024 with mostly renaming and groundwork changes. DeVault was joined by Haelwenn Monnier (creator of the BadWolf browser and the Pleroma platform). The project deliberately chose Codeberg over GitHub as its home, running CI on SourceHut — eating its own dogfood in the most Drew DeVault way possible.
The project takes a consciously conservative approach to development, focusing on stability and long-term reliability rather than feature races. There are no Contributor License Agreements; copyright is held collectively by all contributors, making future license changes effectively impossible without unanimous consent.
Redict exists in deliberate contrast to Valkey, the corporate-backed Linux Foundation fork. While Valkey has AWS and Google money behind it, Redict represents the grassroots, "free software as a political act" tradition. It's smaller and scrappier, but it serves an important role for users who care deeply about software freedom.
Redis announces switch from BSD to SSPL/RSALv2 dual licensing
Drew DeVault announces Redict as an independent LGPL fork
Redict 7.3.0 released — first stable version
Subsequent patch releases for security and stability
Redis backtracks to AGPLv3 with Redis 8, but Redict continues independently
“Redis's license change is a betrayal of the free software community.”
Redict occupies an important niche as the copyleft alternative in the Redis fork landscape. While Valkey captured the corporate market, Redict serves users and organizations that prefer strong copyleft licensing and genuinely independent governance. It's a smaller project, but it upholds the free software tradition in a way that corporate-backed forks cannot.
The project also demonstrated that not every fork needs venture capital and a Linux Foundation umbrella to be viable. Sometimes a few dedicated developers with strong convictions and existing infrastructure (SourceHut, Codeberg) can sustain a meaningful alternative.