Redict 7.3 Released As Fork Of Open-Source Redis

In addition to the Linux Foundation and others starting Valkey as a fork of the open-source Redis following the upstream move to dual source-available licensing, Redict is another new fork getting established.

Redict 7.3 released today as the first stable version of this copyleft fork of the open-source Redis 7.2.4, the last version released under the open-source licensing model.

The release announcement for Redict 7.3 does acknowledge Valkey and its support by some heavyweight vendors/organizations. As for Redict vs. Valkey, the release announcement for Redict 7.3 notes:

"In technical terms, we are focusing on stability and long-term maintenance, and on achieving excellence within our current scope. We believe that Redict is near feature-complete and that it is more valuable to our users if we take a conservative stance to innovation and focus on long-term reliability instead. This is in part a choice we’ve made to distinguish ourselves from Valkey, whose commercial interests are able to invest more resources into developing more radical innovations, but also an acknowledgement of a cultural difference between our projects, in that the folks behind Redict place greater emphasis on software with a finite scope and ambitions towards long-term stability rather than focusing on long-term growth in scope and complexity.

We will happily pull useful changes from software with permissive licenses, such as Valkey, to improve Redict; such is the value of permissive software and the key advantage of free software generally. However, we will do so at a more conservative pace, so that our users can enjoy stability first and shiny new features second. We are also going to focus on establishing and maintaining a good relationship with downstream distributions, prioritizing their needs with respect to tasks such as de-vendoring Lua and jemalloc.

Redict also has social and political aims which differ from other forks. In short, we believe in an approach which is built from an independent, grassroots, and community-focused means of building our software. We are not governed by the consensus of a small group of commercial interests, but rather by an independent and community-driven consensus. Importantly, we have also chosen to protect our software from further exploitation by applying the Lesser GNU General Public License (LGPL) to our work."

Moving forward Redict plans to focus on modernizing its build system possibly by using Muon, forking the ecosystem like Redis client libraries, and de-vendorizing dependencies like Lua and jemalloc.

More details on the inaugural release for Redict 7.3 as this Redis fork via Redict.io.