Reconstructed from public reporting; not firsthand, no invented people or dialogue.

On March 20, 2024, Redis changed its license. Starting with Redis 7.4, new releases would ship under RSALv2 and SSPLv1 instead of BSD-3. The company did not hide the reason. Most of its commercial sales, it wrote, ran through the largest cloud providers, and those providers "commoditize Redis' investments and its open source community."

Two days later, on March 22, a new repository appeared on GitHub. It was called Valkey. The license was BSD-3. The code was a fork of the last BSD release.

That is the whole story in three sentences. The interesting part is what happened next, because both sides kept receipts.

The fork did not fade

Most forks of a popular project die in a few months. This one did not.

As of October 27, 2026, the Valkey repository has 27,528 stars and 1,431 forks. Redis has 77,130 stars. The fork is smaller, and it is also still here.

More useful than stars: release activity.…