Things are a bit more complicated. Actually Redis the company (Redis Labs, and previously Garantia Data) offered since the start to hire me, but I was at VMWare, later at Pivotal, and just didn't care, wanted to stay actually "super partes" because of idealism. But actually Pivotal and Redis Labs shared the same VC, It made a lot more sense to move to Redis Labs, and work there under the same level of independence, so this happened. However, once I moved to Redis Labs a lot of good things happened, and made Redis maturing much faster: we had a core team all working at the core, I was no longer alone when there were serious bugs, improvements to make, and so forth. During those years many good things happened, including Streams, ACLs, memory reduction stuff, modules, and in general things that made Redis more solid. In order to be maintained, an open source software needs money, at scale, so we tried hard in the past to avoid going away from BSD. But eventually in the new hyperscalers situation it was impossible to avoid it, I guess. I was no longer with the company, I believe the bad call was going SSPL, it was a license very similar to AGPL but not accepted by the community. Now we are back to AGPL, and I believe that in the current situation, this is a good call. Nobody ever stopped to: 1. Provide the source on Github and continue the development. 2. Release it under a source available license (not OSI approved but practically very similar to AGPL). 3. Find a different way to do it... and indeed Redis returned AGPL after a few months I was back because maybe I helped a bit, but inside the company since the start there was a big slice that didn't accept the change. So Redis is still open source software and maintained. I can't see a parallel here.