Redis Labs tweaks its restrictive licensing

RSAL is designed to clarify the controversial licensing changes brought in last summer

Redis Labs, the company behind the open source Redis database, has altered some of its recently introduced and contraversial licensing terms brought in to prevent cloud firms from monetising its software without contributing back to the product.

The licence, dubbed Common Clause, was introduced in August. An extension to Apache 2, its terms applied to certain modules and were designed to combat an alleged ‘landgrab' by cloud firms, as chief marketing officer Manish Gupta told Computing.

"What the cloud vendors, particularly AWS, have done is take open source projects and contribute almost nothing, but they have monetised the projects to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Redis alone has given them $100m or $200m of revenue but their contribution back to our technology has been insignificant," Gupta said.

Common Clause was designed to prevent third-party companies monetising certain modules, or using them without accrediting Redis Labs. It only applied to these modules - not the core database. However it seems the message did not get through to all developers and the company has tweaked its terms as a result of feedback.

The new license is called the Redis Source Available License (RSAL). Like Common Clause it is not officially open source as it has yet to be recognised by the Open Source Institute.

RSAL drops the reference to Apache 2, which Redis said some developers had found confusing. The word "substantial", used to define what is allowed, was considered too vague and has been removed; and the wording around support has been clarified - Redis said the terms in Common Clause had inadvertently "worked against our intention to help grow the ecosystem around Redis modules".

The modules licensed under RSAL are the same as those covered by Common Clause, namely RediSearch, RedisGraph, RedisJSON, RedisBloom and RedisML. RSAL will apply from 21 February.

Under RSAL developers can use the software, modify the source code, integrate it with an application, and use, distribute or sell their application, so long as that application is not a ‘database product', which the company defines as "a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine".

The core Redis database remains open source and is licensed under BSD. The licensing of Redis Labs' proprietary enterprise products is also unchanged.

Following Redis Lab's decision to apply more restrictive licensing to some of its modules last year, Confluent, the company behind the enterprise distribution of Apache Kafka, and database firm MongoDB also changed the licensing terms on some of their software to prevent it being monetised by competitors.

A Redis Labs spokesperson said, "We are starting to see some changes with cloud providers to be more open to collaborating with companies. At this point we cannot share more than that, but in the coming months we believe there will be some developments on that front."