product · May 18, 2026

Redis and the Cost of Ambition

Redis Inc. dropped the BSD license in 2024 via pull request 13157 and adopted tri-licensing including AGPLv3 as the sole OSI option. In 2026 Redis positioned itself as the Real-Time Context Engine for AI Apps while adding features like a new array type in pull request 15162. Aphyr's analysis of Redis-Raft version 1b3fbf6 found 21 issues including long-lasting unavailability, eight crashes, and five loss of committed updates. Antirez developed Disque in 2015 as a message broker that was later abandoned after 7-8 years.